Progressive reflections on the lectionary #29
Monday 5th August 2024
John 6:35, 41-51: The bread of life - theme and variations
“Who are the Christians that really like the gospel of John?” My youngest asked me one day, after coming home from a trip away during which there had been an encounter with some street evangelists. “They kept saying, ‘the gospel of John, the gospel of John…’” I was told, as the whole conversation was played back in detail.
The seven ‘I am’ statements that I mentioned previously are good fuel for this particular fire - and so is the passage set out as the gospel reading for this week. I do have some difficulties with this approach though, just as I have some difficulties with pulling a chapter apart in this way and relying on short passages or individual verses to make sense in and of themselves.
This particular passage is part of the much larger ‘bread of life discourse’ - in which John chooses to focus, with unusual clarity, on the dialogue between Jesus and the crowd. That this is unlike John’s usual writing pattern should alert us that he’s doing something different here. There are some of his normal ways in evidence, though, John is keen on ‘misunderstandings’ - points where Jesus says something cryptic or cheeky, and people think he’s saying something else.
If you read the whole of the discourse you can see evidence of such misunderstandings happening here too - another thing John likes to do is have a question which isn’t answered, or at least not directly. You get an example of this in this passage, when ‘the Jews’ complain about Jesus, pointing out that they know his family and asking how he can now say that he comes from heaven. That’s a fair question. Jesus doesn’t give it the time of day and tells them, effectively, to ‘shut up and listen to me’. It’s notable, by the way, that John identifies the people who had previously been known as ‘the crowd’, now, as ‘the Jews’ - who have been Jesus’ antagonists previously, and with whom the early Jesus community found themselves in conflict. Yet again they don’t understand what Jesus is saying, try to put him in his place and ask him to justify himself.
Instead of doing so, John has Jesus launch out on to a new statement of his own identity, returning again to the bread of life theme.
The importance of bread to the early Christian community cannot be overstated. The earliest church, in which the writer of ‘John’ was likely a leader, was composed of many marginalised and enslaved people - people for whom the need for bread would have been a daily concern. Not for nothing do both Matthew and Luke include a prayer for this most basic level of sustenance in their versions of the Lord’s prayer. Not for nothing do early Christian art works depict the sharing of bread - not for nothing does the key Christian ritual centre upon the sharing of bread.
For Jesus to make the claim that he is the bread of life, or ‘the living bread’ acknowledges, and then leapfrogs, this fundamental concern and has him minister to concerns of an altogether higher level. This fits with John’s theological project, to present Jesus as embodying of the God of the old testament, but also recognises the reality of the difficult lives that the early Christians were living. It supports the cause of a people who are being further marginalised and decried as heretics by the Jews of their time who were not part of the Jesus sect. Writing for his audience John sees their concerns, and then offers them a raise.
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Image: Steve Knutson on Unsplash
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