St. John’s Lutheran Church
4 August 2024 + Lectionary 18b
John 6:24-35
Rev. Josh Evans
“Sometimes bread is just bread,”
as the brilliant New Testament scholar Dr. Barbara Rossing once suggested,
following a decisively eucharistic sermon I had just delivered on John chapter 6 one afternoon during a preaching class at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago.
Sometimes, bread … is just bread.
It’s so simple –
with as few as three, maybe four, ingredients
that most of us probably have at home right now:
flour, water, salt, and maybe yeast (depending on the recipe).
Its simplicity has made it a culinary staple,
across cultures and around the globe:
from Native American fry bread to a Parisian baguette …
Indian naan, Salvadoran tortillas, Swedish lefse,
the sweet challah of a Jewish sabbath …
even the classic white sandwich bread.
Are you hungry yet? Can you smell it, taste it?
It’s so simple, so ubiquitous, so ordinary.
It’s so simple … and yet infinitely complex,
baker and writer Kendall Vanderslice reminds us:
“Bread is a difficult skill to master,” she writes.
“Variances in flour type, in water temperature, and in the humidity outside can all affect the outcome of a loaf. Bakers can commit their entire lives to the craft of breadmaking and still forever have more to learn.”
(Working Preacher)
It’s why, at every “Bake & Pray” workshop she teaches,
she reminds participants:
“[They’ll] need to make the same recipe over and over again in order to really get to know it. Take notes, I encourage them. It might feel repetitive, maybe even boring, but that repetition is the key.”
So it is, apparently, with John 6:
the “bread of life discourse,” as scholars call it,
owing to its key phrase at the end of today’s selection,
and repeated next week:
“I am the bread of life.”
We hear almost the entirety of John chapter 6,
spread across five consecutive Sundays,
every three years –
enough to make preachers dread its arrival,
maybe even – oh, I don’t know –
plan dramatic readings of the entire chapter,
or transfer a midweek feast day to its adjacent Sunday …
just to get out of two fewer sermons … on bread.
Repetition is key –
as each of our subsequent readings for the next three weeks
(minus the week we divert to Mary, Mother of Our Lord)
begin with a key verse from the prior week:
“I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” (35)
“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.” (51)
“Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them … the one who eats this bread will live forever.” (56-58)
Goodness, that’s a lot.
There are so many deep one-liners,
so many theological nuggets,
so much to unpack …
maybe five weeks isn’t enough!
Maybe we need the repetition.
After a deceptively simple sign,
this “miracle” story in only the first fourteen verses
that sets the next fifty-seven verses of dialogue into motion –
of searching out and questioning,
of attempts at understanding and stumbling –
“Sir, give us this bread always!” –
of enigmatic declarations of identity –
“I am the bread of life.”
And, as we’ll see in the weeks to come,
or as you might remember from last week’s dramatic reading,
complaints and disputes –
“Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’? … How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” –
and even more questions and doubts –
“This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” –
even betrayal (even though those last verses don’t make the cut into the lectionary, but that’s another sermon).
If it seems like Jesus is repeating himself … he is.
If it seems like this teaching is difficult … it is.
If it seems like we, like the crowds and the disciples,
have more questions than answers … we do.
It’s so simple and yet infinitely complex,
this bread of life.
It’s why Kendall Vanderslice finds the process of baking
to be such a helpful metaphor for the practice of spirituality:
“Like the words and movements we repeat week after week in our Sunday morning liturgies,” she writes, “the repetition of baking burrows the process down into our hands, our noses, and our ears, so that in time we know the bread intimately with all of our senses.”
We don’t have to “get” it all in one Sunday.
We probably won’t even understand it all after five Sundays,
or after the next five, three years from now …
perhaps not even after a lifetime of Sundays.
Thanks be to God for this repetitive invitation.
Sometimes, bread is just bread –
and – sometimes, it’s something more.
Every Sunday:
an invitation to an ordinary meal.
Every Sunday:
abiding in an extra-ordinary relationship.
Every Sunday:
the body of Christ,
the bread of life,
given for you.
Every Sunday:
the body of Christ
sent forth,
for the life of the world.