Preached on the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 16B), August 25, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Phillip Lienau.
1 Kings 8:1, 6, 10-11, 22-30, 41-43
Psalm 84
Ephesians 6:10-20
John 6:56-69
Psalm 84, by Christa Rosier
“…the one who eats this bread will live forever.”
When Jesus says this he is referring to himself. But biblical scholarly consensus is that in the context of the Gospel of John, Jesus is also referring to the Eucharist. The one who eats this bread, the bread here at this table, that we will consecrate in a few minutes, the one who eats the Eucharistic bread will live forever.
This is good news. It seems to me this is big news. I would imagine that if we were to head out to the street right now, and start calling out to people we see declaring that inside this building we are serving bread that will allow the one who eats it to live forever, we would get some attention.
I can picture it: “We have the bread of eternal life! Get your bread of eternal life here! Free eternal life, step right up, come on in!”
What is odd is that this is not new news. This has been the big, good news for two millennia. You’d think this church, and every eucharistic church, would be packed every Sunday, and plenty of other days each week too.
Unless people don’t quite believe that these words mean what they sound like they mean. I am guessing that when most people hear the phrase “eternal life,” they think of getting more of the life they have. More time. More years, many more years of life. Maybe it’s a kind of afterlife, maybe it’s an extension of this life, but one way or another “eternal life” usually means more time, lots more time.
Well, I think the evidence of two thousand years is that participating in the Eucharist has not resulted in very many people living longer lives, much less eternally longer lives.
This gets to the heart of the matter for us, and for the disciples in today’s Gospel who were complaining about Jesus’ teaching. His teaching can sound, on the surface, to people today as it did to people then, like he means that believing in him and eating the Eucharistic bread will give us something we think we want, which is more time to live. When it doesn’t turn out to be what he means, people then, and I think people now, can become very unhappy.
There are a couple reasons for this.
First, it’s good to remember that Jesus was not the first divine human on the scene. There are plenty of stories in world cultures of Gods becoming human, or humans being the children of Gods, and everything in between. But Jesus was a new kind of divine human, in a way that electrified and inspired some, but also in a way that disappointed very many, and I think that this is still true.
Other divine humans tend to be super-heroic in some way. They are the sorts of characters that participate in epic battles that change the course of world history, overturn empires, punish evil and provide riches and power to the righteous. Compared to those characters, Jesus decidedly falls short.
He doesn’t overthrow the Herodian dynasty. He doesn’t smite the temple hierarchy, take power and riches away from the wealthy and give it all to the poor. He doesn’t march to Rome and slay Caesar in an epic showdown, Gladiator-style, of two men whose followers believe they are the Son of God.
Yet Jesus does some remarkable things. He says a few words and saves a woman from being stoned. He washes the feet of his disciples and overturns conventional wisdom about honor and rank. He demonstrates humility, kindness, compassion, honesty.
All these things point to the second way that Jesus was, and is, a new kind of divine human in the world. He doesn’t fix the world for us. He shows us what we can do to fix the world ourselves. He shows us what we can do to fix the world ourselves.
Imagine for a moment that you are following Jesus two thousand years ago and you are hoping he is going to fix the world for you, you might be disappointed when he doesn’t fix everything for you.
This is connected to the second reason that people found Jesus’ teaching difficult then, and can find it difficult now. The phrase “eternal life” is an English translation of the that loses some of the nuances of the original Greek that are important to understand if we want to fully appreciate what the Eucharist is about.
In this Gospel passage when we hear the words “eternal,” or “forever,” these are somewhat reductive translations of forms of the Greek word aion which also means “age.” So when Jesus says that the one who eats this bread will live forever, the Greek literally reads “the one eating this bread will live to the age.” And when Peter says to Jesus that he has the words of eternal life, the Greek literally reads “you have the words of the life of the age.”
In both cases, the word “age” is important because it means something more than time. When the Greek word aion and its forms are used in the Gospel of John, it means not just a period of time, but a way of being.
The life of the age doesn’t just mean life that extends beyond what we think of as expected human lifespans. In fact it may not mean that at all. The life of the age means life in the Age of God, and the Age of God is outside of time. The Age of God has existed from before time, is now, and always shall be.
This means that when Jesus says that the one who eats this bread will live forever, what he means is that eating this bread helps us access the Age of God, to access another way of being, that is, somehow, outside of time.
Eating the Eucharistic bread is not about getting more time in our lives, whether in this life or in some kind of afterlife. It’s not about getting more of this. It’s not about quantity. It’s about a fundamentally different kind of life.
This is because the life of the Age of God is not measured by time, but by love. As time is to our life, love is to the life of Jesus. Love is the measurement of life in Jesus, life in God.
So when Peter confesses that Jesus has the words of eternal life, Peter is confessing that Jesus reveals the truth about God, and our life in God, that that life is measured by love. And since love requires work on our part, work to overcome our pride and our fear, this can be a difficult teaching.
God gives us what we need for the work of overcoming pride and fear. God gives us the bread of life, which means that when we eat this bread, we participate in the life of the Age of God. When we eat this bread, we proclaim to ourselves and each other the Good News that our God is a God of love, and that as long as we are loving, we are tapping into an infinite source of life, immeasurable, and therefore unconquerable, by time, suffering, pride, or fear.