The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost The
Rev. Carl M. Saxton
Proper 14B August
9, 2015
1 Kings 19.4-8; Psalm 34.1-8; John 6.35, 41-51
Today’s readings are, I think, intimately connected to
a scriptural passage that is not a part of these readings. It is found in the
midst of Moses’
exhortations to the Israelites at the end of
their time in the wilderness. He
says,
Remember
the long way that the Lord your God
has led you these forty years in the wilderness, in order to humble you,
testing you to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his
commandments. He humbled
you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna, with which neither
you nor your ancestors were acquainted, in order to make you understand that
one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth
of the Lord[1] .
We know this verse, especially its literal and figurative bottom line,
very well. But the more we consider the heart of these words, the more
meaningful they become.
How would you do it? How would you prove to someone that we do not
live by bread alone? What would you give someone to make them understand this?
Someone seminary trained in the fine arts of pedagogy, of making people
understand, might insist on a sermon, or a lecture, or to try to arrange a
spiritual experience. Or if your focus is modern application of adult Christian
formation, you might offer a really spiffy adult education class, with
professional videos and worksheets and breaking into small groups to go over
some discussion questions –
maybe that would do it. How about it? What would
you give someone so they could understand that we do not live by bread
alone? Well, our ways are not God’s ways, and God’s way is a bit surprising.
1 Kings tells us that when Elijah was at the point of literally
begging God to take away [his] life[2] , God gave him bread. When the Israelites complained that they would
rather have died by the hand of the Lord in Egypt rather than have been brought
out into the wilderness to kill [the] whole assembly with hunger[3] , God responded by giving them manna. Manna was literally bread, or bread-like
stuff, from heaven. Elijah got ordinary bread. They ate it and it kept them
alive. They couldn’t live without it. But isn’t that strange? Why give bread to make people understand that they do
not live by bread alone? Of all the things to give, why give the one thing that
seems to prove that you can live by bread alone?
This may have been the most important part of Israel’s sojourn in the wilderness, the most important part of their
formation into the people of God. Jesus recognizes that they, and we, need to
be taught the same lesson again – that the
same formation is necessary.
Because if the people couldn’t get this – if they couldn’t figure out what was
going on with the manna, or with the miraculous feeding of the five thousand
that had just happened, if they couldn’t understand about the
loaves – well, then, how could He make them see?
The key to all of this is that God gave Israel and Elijah – and Jesus gave that crowd – bread in such a way that it was obvious that the
bread was pure gift – complete
grace. They didn’t make it, they didn’t work for it, they couldn’t pay for it – it was just given. So they had the chance to
look at bread, at what Fr. Raja told us last week is considered the essential
stuff of life and symbolic of food in general, to see bread with clarity. They
had a chance to see beyond the thing itself and to see that this vital stuff
was also, and most importantly a gift from God. As a completely free gift, no
strings attached, it is a sign of God’s love and of God’s call to relationship. Since it was so clearly a gift, they were able
to see that the thing, the bread, meant more than what it was all by itself.
All real gifts do.
Don’t we always say “It’s the thought that counts?” Though, to be honest, we often say that today
when we are unimpressed with the gift, there is so much truth at the heart of
that statement. Think about it – when we give roses to our sweethearts, they
wither and die, but it is the love behind the gift that matters. Even when you open that package of socks on
Christmas morning it proves that someone thought of you, that someone cares
about you.
But if the manna, if the five loaves broken to feed 5000, if the stuff
that God give us so that we can live is given to us not just to keep us alive,
but also to draw us to God and to life with God; then we do not, and we cannot,
live by bread alone.
So, oddly, the only gift that can really show us that we do not live
by bread alone is free bread. Anything less vital, anything less
essential, would allow us to cling to life for its own sake and to make all
questions of meaning secondary and avoidable. This is still going on, and even
now God gives us life, and the stuff of life, not because life is the most
important thing in the world for us, but just exactly because it is not. We are
given these as gifts, to help us realize that God, and life with God, are most
important.
We see this with special clarity at the altar, where the bread we
receive is clearly not about itself alone; but is mystically joined to
something much greater. So we can look with awe and reverence upon something as
simple as this thin, tasteless wafer, because we know it to be sign, a symbol
and the real presence of something much greater than flour and water.
But the sign, symbol and presence of this bread is itself the sign and
symbol of everything that we have – of our families, our wealth, our very life.
Part of the point of this bread, the bread of the Eucharist, is to
teach us that we do not live by bread alone. This bread is special so that we
can understand that all bread, all that we have, all that is necessary for
life, that this, too, is special. It’s all given to us by
grace as a sign, symbol and occasion of God’s love. Christ comes
to us in bread in the Eucharist to draw us past the bread itself and past ourselves,
so that we, seeing both the gift and the giver, will respond to the giver in
love and in service. Creation, all of creation, is sacramental, an outward
and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace[4] , in this sense.
So it’s all interconnected,
interwoven, and inseparable. The bread we eat every day, and Israel’s manna in the wilderness, and Jesus being the bread of life, and our
weekly Eucharist –
they all intersect and interrelate.
Here is one way into wrapping our minds around this. There’s an old rabbinic admonition that insists, about anything and
everything, “If you don’t give thanks for it,
it’s bad for you.”
The food you eat, the clothes you wear, the air
you breathe, the people and things in your life, if you don’t give thanks for it, it’s bad for you.
So, if you have enough to eat, and the strength to go on for another
day, and people who care about you – if you
have all of that and you don’t give thanks for it, then it’s bad for you –
all of it.
It’s poisoning your soul, and shrinking your life.
Really.
That’s because giving thanks for something puts it in
its proper place, it places the thing as part of our relationship with God and
God’s relationship with us. That’s where things, all
things, properly belong. Anything, especially bread, is understood properly
only when it is understood in relationship to God.
On the other hand, if we do give thanks for it, then it can be good
for us. If we give thanks for it, then every part of our lives can draw us
toward the only source of meaning and hope that makes any sense. In fact, that’s what the Greek verb εὐχαριστέω
(eucharisteo),
from which we get the word Eucharist, means: to give thanks. It’s central to our Christian lives and
as the Prayer Book says, our principal act of Christian worship[5] .
It’s very easy to forget this. It’s very easy to value the things of creation and of our lives for
themselves, to take them outside the context of our relationship with God. When
we do this, when we see only what is right in front of us and no more, then we
are made poorer for it, we are barely living on the surface of our lives and of
our world.
That’s what it means to live by bread alone. To live
by bread alone means to see no farther than the things themselves, and to miss
the presence, the love, and the call of God that are really a part of every
piece of bread we have. It’s to miss the gift, and the love behind the
gift.
All that we have, all that we are, all that we think makes us who we
are is like the bread God gave to Elijah and to Israel, like the loaves Christ
broke for the multitude. They are grace,
the free gifts of God’s love, and they exist to call our attention
beyond them, beyond ourselves; and call us to understand that we do not live by
bread alone.
