When the world is falling apart, which is pretty much every day, I go out to find my trees. There are these two trees I pass by every day when I walk my dog. They’re nestled in one of my neighbor’s beautiful backyard gardens. They’re not trees, though, exactly. First of all, according to my neighbor-gardener, it’s just one tree, even as they have two “trunks” that come out of the ground to look like it’s two. They have the same root system. Also, they’re not exactly trees, at least not yet, because they’re pretty small. They’re seedlings, really, not any taller than I am, but you get the sense that they’ll be kids for a long time yet. Their line on the growth chart is a barely discernible incline, as if their x and y axis belong to the unbound set of eternity, or, at least they measure time dramatically differently from the rest of us. They’re slow. They take their time. After briefly stalking my neighbor-gardener, I finally got the chance to ask him what kind of trees they are, and that was when he told me that it was actually one tree, a brush-cone pine, or “bristlecone pine,” one of the longest living species in the world. I don’t know why I like these particular trees so much, but it’s one of those first impression things, like when you see someone from across the room for the very first time and you just know you’re going to get along.
Anyway, I love these trees. I have this strange attachment to these trees. And every day as I walk down the sidewalk and I pass those trees I take a moment to whisper, “Hi trees.” I’ve even trained my dog to pause by them, for just a moment, so the trees and I can exchange a glance, check in on each other, exchange some oxygen for some CO2. I make my kids do it, too, “Hi trees” when we’ve actually succeeded in dragging them along for a walk.
But our passage today is not about trees. It’s about bread. But, somehow, I hope to draw the faintest, thinnest of lines between these trees and that bread. This passage isn’t about trees. It’s about bread. Sort of. And it’s also about…trees.
This passage today is absolutely and totally about bread. And it’s absolutely and totally not about bread.
That’s what metaphors do, isn’t it?
They point to and away from both the object and the idea behind that object. They give us a new perspective on an ordinary thing by comparing it to something surprising, maybe even a little baffling.
And here we have a metaphor of bread that is as complicated to me as actually trying to make the stuff. It’s this complex, intricate mystery that I can’t seem to get in on. Wading into these waters of metaphor require balance, artistry, trial and error.
First, some context.
Like I said, this whole chapter is about bread. And it’s also not about bread. So maybe we can try to hold each of these things at the same time.
Jesus has just fed five thousand people out of five barley loaves and two fish.
And people see this as a sign and begin to believe in him. So they plot to figure out how they can get more.
Jesus leaves, fearing for his life and freedom, and goes across the lake.
And the crowd follows him.
And Jesus calls them out - he says, “you just want to find me because you want more bread.”
They’ve become adherents of the prosperity gospel - follow Jesus and you’ll get stuff. I mean, who can resist FREE BREAD!
But Jesus redefines “bread.” - He tells them that real bread is that which gives life.
Jesus tells them that He’s the bread.
And this gets the crowds reeling.
They say, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat? What are we, zombies or something?”
And like when we’re trying to communicate with someone who doesn’t speak English, Jesus seems to repeat himself even louder, using more words. “For real, guys. No kidding. Amen. Amen. Very Truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink.”
“Oh great. Zombies, and now vampires, too?”
Even on a purely metaphorical level, this is difficult and haunting. But Jesus wants more than metaphor. And. He wants more than actual bread. He wants something more real than metaphor, and more real than bread. He wants the real, living, alive, bread.
The crowd has come to him, saying, “bread bread bread! Give us the bread!”
And the Jewish leadership has come to him, saying, “spirit spirit spirit! Give us the spirit!”
The crowd has come to him wanting physical comfort and tangible signs. And Jesus says, it’s not about eating! It’s not about bread!
The leadership has come to him wanting spiritual and ethereal guarantees. And Jesus says, it’s about eating! It’s about bread!
And they’re both completely on the wrong track. They’ve both got it all wrong.
And yet. They’re both…right.
Bread. Spirit. BreadSpirit. SpiritBread. “Brerit.” “Spread.”
But since it’s clear that no one is getting it STILL, Jesus keeps going!
He says, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever.”
Now. Let’s take a pause. Stop where your brain is going right now. ‘Cause if it’s going where my brain was going, we’re on the wrong track. This isn’t about who gets into heaven. And this isn’t about the end times. This isn’t about some far off other worldly realm of everlasting peace and happiness. Which yes, sounds amazing, and might actually be real, and who knows, maybe we’ll even get to experience it someday. But when Jesus talks about eternal life, yes, even in the Gospel of John, he’s not really talking about immortality or heaven, but as O’Day and Hylen tell us in their commentary, it’s more about “living now in the unending presence of God;” it’s about “nourishment in the ongoing presence of God.” Throughout the scriptures, bread has meant presence. God being here, with the people. God abiding with. Presence. It’s about Presence. Which is this messy combination of all that we are and all that we were and all we will be. And it’s that messy combination of all that God is, and all that God was, and will be.
Both the crowd and the Jewish leadership are there to get something from Jesus. They want the stuff. They want the exchange. The crowd has come for actual bread. The leadership has come for spiritual answers, or, at the very least, a nice juicy theological scandal.
They’re coming to “get something out of Jesus.” Not to be present with Jesus.
Jesus is trying to get us all to understand the both/and here. It’s about the metaphor, and the food. It’s about the spiritual realm and the physical realm. And it’s about how, in God’s presence, because of the incarnation, these two realms aren’t really separate at all.
There’s this concept that the contemplatives really like called “unitive consciousness.” Richard Rohr describes this as moving from a dualism of either/or - either spirit or bread - to overcoming all the limitations of space and time and physics and separation from each other so that bread can become a spiritual reality, and so that this unknown, hard to grasp spiritual reality comes to us in the the bread. It’s a mutuality. It’s presence. I am with you. You are with me. God is with us. We are with God. We abide in Christ and Christ abides in us. This is the material and the spiritual coming together. It’s all sacred. It’s all good. Because the one is present in the other. The subject and the object conflate. The bread is in me. And I am in the bread. Christ is in me. And I am in Christ.
When we are truly present to someone or some thing, we sort of lose ourselves and gain ourselves at the same time. We are completely and fully ourselves, and yet we are completely and fully engaged with something other than ourselves.
God offers us this presence.
And it’s in the form of bread and spirit. “Berit.” “Spread.”
God offers to be present with us and satisfy our hunger: with bread - the “real” concrete, stuff made of yeast and sugars and flour, and the “spiritual” eternal now - the moment when time stops and there’s only presence. You and me and God. God and me and you. Here. Now.
The desert fathers and mothers had two concepts of time. One was chronos, that everyday, mundane, trying to get stuff done and survive and make it to the next day kind of time. And the other is kairos, which is a different sort of time altogether. When we are in kairos we sort of lose track of chronos time, we enter a kind of flow, we are completely in and present to ourselves and yet we are also sort of outside of ourselves, beyond ourselves. It’s when I’m absolutely, totally present with myself, but I’m not thinking about myself at all. It’s when time falls away and we are just swept up in presence. The bread has never tasted more like bread in your whole life because you are fully present to it, fully engaged in it. It becomes a spiritual experience. And Jesus is telling us that he wants that kind of presence with us. Jesus is asking for us to enter in to this sort of “eternal now” that happens when we are exactly who we are, exactly how God made us to be, and we’ve so lost track of ourselves that we can’t tell the difference between spirit and bread, between us and Christ.
This is the fullness of the bread metaphor.
If we focus on just the bread or just the spirit, we miss it.
But it’s not a 50/50 combination of bread and spirit. It’s 100% bread. 100% spirit. 100% life.
If you’ve followed me this far, I commend you, because maybe I don’t even exactly know what I’m saying. But it feels really really right.
Jesus is telling the crowds that you can’t have the bread without the spirit.
Jesus is telling the Jewish leadership that you can’t have the spirit without the bread.
Somehow the bread becomes more than bread. And the spirit becomes more than spirit. They become present to each other. The one in the other. The other in the one.
We get glimpses of this. We “get in the zone” and we are doing what we love and we just lose ourselves in it. Or we’re praying and we feel a sense that maybe we’re not alone. You’re talking to someone and you meet each other’s eyes and suddenly you feel completely and purely known, for just a second. Or you walk past a couple of baby trees in some random person’s backyard, and you just say, “hi.”
Richard Rohr says that for most of us, these moments are fleeting. We can’t really live in these spaces of pure presence. But, he says, after you’ve had the experience of this kind of unitive consciousness, this kind of mutual presence that is “spiritbread,” “now…you know there is something more, and you will always long to return there.” And that longing and that returning is everything.
Maybe you’ll say “Hi trees” as you walk by in the hopes that somehow they can be in you and you can be in them. You can stop and receive their oxygen and offer them your CO2. Somehow you can participate in their wellbeing, just like they’ve participated in yours. Simply by the seeing. Simply by the noticing. Simply by the presence. Simply because Jesus is the living bread that came down from heaven. Simply because when we cross these lines of spirituality and materiality, we abide in Christ, and Christ abides in me.
What do we do when the world is falling apart?
We go in, so we can go out.
We see mutuality.
We connect.
We find the I in the You and in the You in the I.
“Hi trees.”
Thanks be to God.
No comments:
Post a Comment