John 6:51-58
51 I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever, and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
52 The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” 53 So Jesus said to them, “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. 54 Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day, 55 for my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. 56 Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them. 57 Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. 58 This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which the ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever.”
Once upon a time there was a cat. A normal everyday house cat. Let’s call him…Schrödinger. One day, Schrödinger happened upon a box. And like most cats, this box enthralled Schrödinger. So after sniffing around the box for a moment, Schrödinger decided to jump inside the box. But, alas, poor Schrödinger didn’t know that this was a very special kind of box. Immediately, when Schrödinger jumped in the box, it closed upon itself. The box was sealed shut, and poor Schrödinger was in complete darkness. He couldn’t see out of the box, and, much to his owner’s frustration, she couldn’t see in.
Now here’s where you get to choose your own adventure. If you are a bit of a physicist at heart, then inside this extraordinary box was a flask of poison, a radioactive atom, and a Geiger counter, which is a monitor that detects radiation.
If you have no heart for physics, quantum or otherwise, then, let’s just say that the box has a bomb in it, with an exactly 50% chance of exploding, and a 50% chance of remaining intact. Now, for you physicists, If the Geiger counter detects any radioactivity from a decaying atom, it breaks the flask of poison, and poor Schrödinger meets his maker. The atom is, for the moment, for all we know, in a state of both going to decay and not going to decay.
For those of you who just want to simplify the story as much as possible, all you need to know is that there’s a chance that the bomb has gone off, and an exactly equal chance that the bomb has not. If the bomb has gone off, then, poof, Schrödinger is off to the happy mouse-hunting grounds. If the bomb hasn’t gone off, then Schrödinger lives to tell the tale. So. Is Schrödinger alive, or, is he, alas, dead?
Of course we would want to lift the box top open, unseal the box, and find out sweet Schrödinger’s fate. But, we’re told, if we do, then the Geiger counter will most definitely go off, and the flask of poison is broken, and/or the bomb will detonate. So to peek in to see for ourselves would seal the cat’s fate.
So.
The cat’s in the box. We’re outside of the box. Any attempt to measure or observe what is in the box will lead to the cat’s ultimate demise, that is, if he’s alive in the box anyway.
So what is he?
Is Schrödinger alive? Or is Schrödinger dead?
In a certain sense, the answer is…yes.
The cat, before we can determine his fate with empirical evidence, is both dead and alive. Until we open the box, the bomb may have gone off, thus killing the cat, or the bomb may not have gone off, and thus Schrödinger is still enjoying is narcissistic, disgruntled, cat life. Until we open the box, the cat is both alive and dead. Two opposing things are true at the same time.
This is a scenario that the founder of the study of quantum physics named Schrödinger (What a coincidence!) came up with to describe a paradox. It was the 1930s, and a whole bunch of yahoo physicists were coming up with these strange suggestions that a particle’s position and its speed cannot be determined with perfect accuracy, because once you measure the position, you’ve compromised the particle’s speed, and once you’ve measured the speed, you’ve compromised its position. This is called Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. It’s basically a hypothesis that says that we can’t really observe anything without fundamentally changing that thing. Absurd, right? Schrödinger thought so. And to express how absurd this paradox is, he came up with this hypothetical scenario with the cat and the box and the radioactive material and the poison and the Geiger counter.
It is important that you know that no actual cats were harmed in the exercise of this thought process. Schrödinger made up this thought exercise to illustrate how this isn’t how real life works. This isn’t how we experience things. The cat is either alive or dead. It cannot be both. But the thing is, no one has solved Schrödinger’s problem, either. How can we know if that cat is alive or dead without first corrupting the experiment in the first place? How can we know anything without first experiencing the thing? How can we experience anything without fundamentally changing the thing?
And yet, we do.
We know that electrons can be both waves and particles, but as soon as we observe them as waves, they disappear as particles. And as soon as we observe electrons as particles, then they lose their “waviness”. In their truest state, they’re sort of like a coin that you’ve spun on a flat surface. While it’s spinning, it’s neither heads or tails, or, conversely, it’s both heads and tails. This both/and state is called superposition. And we know that superposition is real - that an object can exist in multiple possible states at the same time. This is through the study of quantum physics.
Quantum physics is used to explain how atoms work — how electrons move through computer chips, how solar panels work, how the sun keeps burning, and has led to the invention of lasers, fiber optics, LED lights, and a better understanding of how photosynthesis happens.
So the question is, how can Schrödinger -- the physicist, not the cat -- be both right and wrong about this? Well, after this, Schrödinger hung up his Geiger counter and became a biologist instead. But still, today, almost 100 years later, folks are still wondering about Schrödinger’s cat and the paradox he put him in.
So if, as Marilyn says often, “your brain hurts” now, this is exactly where I want you. If you’re in that space of a knowing unknown, of thinking maybe you’ve almost grasped something that makes sense and then, poof, it vanishes, then you’re in the right place. You’re in the space of faith. Because, if I’ve lost you, I’ve not really lost you. And if you’re still with me, you’re probably not still with me. As Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman said, “If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.” And, not to put myself in the same company as Mr. Feynman, but, I think that if we think we understand faith, we don’t understand faith. Or, as Hebrews 11:1 tells us, “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Or, as Jesus tells us, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
And like most rational people, the folks hanging around Jesus are completely flummoxed. They begin arguing, basically, over the physics of superposition -- how can something be in two states at once? This is absolutely absurd. How can Jesus, a walking, talking, human, be bread? And how can physical, real, actual bread come from this ethereal, spiritual realm called heaven and then give us the ethereal, eternal benefits of life forever in the spiritual realm? And, weirdest of all, how can bread be both bread and flesh. Another translation of that word, “flesh,” sarx in the Greek, is meat. I mean, this is literally, as many of my atheist and agnostic friends have pointed out, one of the weirdest vampire/zombie passages in the Bible. This is super weird. But there’s no evidence that Jesus’s followers took these words and started filing their teeth into fangs and turning themselves into bats and began to drink blood. And there’s a lot of evidence that Jesus’s followers actually, truly, really did believe that the bread of the Eucharist was, somehow, Jesus’s presence for them. In fact, this strange superposition of bread and body became the focus of the Christian worship experience, the center around which community, and faith, and belief, and the fundamentals of Christianity revolved. This absurd, mysterious, paradox of both/and is the foundation of our faith. It is everything.
Jesus is talking about a quantum both/and superposition state where if we stop to measure Jesus’s bready-ness, he loses his spirit, and once we try to measure his spirit-ness, we lose his bread. Like a spinning coin that is neither and both heads and tails, like Schrödinger’s cat that is both alive and dead, Jesus is bread that is alive.
Now many of you might just want to say, yeah, Jenn, you just spent the last twelve minutes and forty-two seconds telling us that faith is a mystery. Gee. Thanks. I can’t ever get that time back. I could have been eating a donut or perfecting my putt or doing the New York Times crossword. And that is totally fine. Yes. Absolutely. This is a mystery. This isn’t anything that we can figure out. And if you want to stop there, great.
But for those of you for whom the “mystery” explanation feels like a cop-out, for those of you who feel like they don’t have “enough” of whatever this mysterious thing called faith is, I invite you to enter in to a state of superposition, a state of quantum indeterminacy, into the observer’s paradox. See, faith isn’t irrational. At least, not to the quantum physicists. Faith is merely, simply, absurd - which feels sorta different.
Faith is an electron that can be in two states at the same time - a state of belief, and a state of disbelief. Both. Together. A wave and a particle. And, like an electron, faith can be in two (or more) places at once. Absolute certainty in one corner, and complete incredulity in the other corner. And at every single point in between. It doesn’t defy logic to say that the cat is both dead and alive at the same time, that the spinning coin is both heads and tails at the same time, that belief and unbelief belong together and can exist together, and in fact, need each other, in order for it to be faith at all. Jesus is the bread. The bread is Jesus. Jesus, in ways even more mind-blowing than the cat, is both alive and dead. Is both bread and flesh. Is both blood and spirit. If you focus too much on the one, you’ll lose the other, and then it won’t be what it really is. Like a bubble or a snowflake, once you grasp it in your hand, it pops, it melts, and it is no longer a bubble, no longer a snowflake. Faith is like that. For half a second you think, “Aha! I’ve got it!” And then poof, it’s gone, it’s no longer the thing you think you know. As soon as you’ve wrestled your faith into a box, it’s not faith anymore - neither living nor dead. Call it faith. Call it mystery. Call it superposition or quantum mechanics. Call it the forever search for the unattainable. Call it whatever you want. It’s Jesus. It’s bread. It’s everlasting life.
Thanks be to God.
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