Mere Bread, Living Bread, What's the Difference

12 Pentecost Cycle b Proper 14 August 11, 2024
1 Kings 19:4-8 Psalm 34:1-8
Ephesians 4:25-5:2 John 6:35, 41-51

Lectionary Link 

We live long past the Age of Enlightenment and into the modern Age of Science.  Science with its successful method and with the practical applications of science into industry has come to make such an impact upon our material world, that we have subtly come to believe that to be truly human in a meaningfully true way we must comply our lifestyle with the scientific method particularly of the natural sciences kind since empirical verification is much easier to attain and gain community consensus on.

The inferior step-sisters of the natural sciences have clamored for equal standing hoping to bring precise objectivity to the human sciences.  The inferiority complex comes from failing to come to the same kind of objectivity in the fields such as psychology, sociology, political science, law, ethics, anthropology, and others, because the subjective observer and the observations have not been able to achieve the same kind of consensus as seemingly attained within the natural sciences.

In the attempt of linguistic philosophers to comport philosophy and logic to the methods of the natural scientists, they proclaimed that a statement is meaningfully true, if and only if, it can be empirically verified.  But what an incredible limitation upon truth and how the truth of beauty can be known in language.  Why not just confess the truth of poetry and the truth of science while encouraging them to stay within their own lane of discursive practice.  We can live knowing the overlapping truths of science and poetry without implying a notion of a superior truth criteria. 

And if the human sciences have had to bear the inferiority complex in comparison with the natural science, where does that leave poetry, spirituality, theology, ethics, art, music and all other which goes under the classification of the aesthetically sublime?

What we can easily forget is that it is empirically true that human beings are aesthetic beings.  It is rationally true that human beings know supra-rational experiences of beauty which do not comport themselves to the same kind of test tube methodology as the natural sciences.

Humans are involved in social interaction and understanding how to live together well; we try to understand personal motivations; we find endless ways of the imagination to entertain ourselves and while we think we know so much because of science, we still deal with what forever mystifies us in myriads of ways.

My wordy digression is but a prologue to deal with the metaphor of John's Gospel, Jesus as the living bread which comes down from heaven.

Let us appreciate the aesthetic spiritual discourse of the Gospel of John.  The writer is not writing about laboratory scientific experiments.  The writer is not writing like a reporter who has witnessed a live event.

The writer is writing from the perspective of a life practice which came to a significant community of people, and it derived from Jesus of Nazareth, and it derived in continuity with many who had inherited the writings of the Hebrew Scriptures.

The mode of discourse is not scientific writing; it is mystagogy.  It is trying within a community of people to inculcate the mysterious experience of knowing the presence of the Risen Christ.

Therefore for John's Gospel, the physical is but a place to be humble about what one does not yet fully know.  The physical world is a place to be mystified.  The writer of John and his community have been mystified by the witness of Jesus Christ.  This mystery is a life within life, another kind of life within apparent natural living.

In the writing of John's Gospel, natural language is problematized.  What is living bread?  What is living waters?  What is the seeing which is blind and the blindness which is seeing?  What is the dead who can live and the living who are dead?  Who are the lame who can walk?  Who are the walkers who don't know their way?  

With language such as "living bread" and the like, the writer of John's Gospel is expressing a way to accept living with both common sense reality, and the sense of life being imbued with another quality, even the quality of the Sublime.  And if one is missing the sublime, then one is only living in denial about a completing and complimenting dimension of life which pertains to the very image of God as great Mystery indwelling human life.

The Gospel of John is a program, a presentation for a community of people to know the mystification of life, the sublime life.  We need to know that life is not just about getting enough bread as fuel for our physical lives; we need to partake of the kind of sustenance which fills out the dimensions which we know are beyond our bodies working as machines which consume bread as the fuel of existence.

The Gospel of John program is the program about Jesus Christ, in his life and afterlife bringing to us expediting insights in being open to our fuller selves as brothers and sisters with Jesus and children of God.

Let us compliment our natural lives with the grace of being mystified by the Risen Christ.  Amen.