I Am the Bread of Life (Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost)

Awet Andemicael and Greg Sterling discuss incarnation, sacrament, and references to the Hebrew Bible in John 6:35, 41-51. The text is appointed for the Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost, in Year B of the Revised Common Lectionary.

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Awet Andemicael is Associate Dean of Marquand Chapel at Yale Divinity School. Gregory Sterling is the Reverend Henry L. Slack Dean and Lillian Claus Professor of New Testament at Yale Divinity School.

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Transcript

Voiceover Voice:

Jesus gave them life by serving them a meal, but Jesus is God’s meal to us.

Helena Martin:

This is Chapter, Verse, and Season: a lectionary podcast from Yale Bible Study. Join us each week as two Yale Divinity School professors look at an upcoming text from the Revised Common Lectionary.

This episode, we have Awet Andemicael, Associate Dean for Marquand Chapel and Assistant Professor (adjunct) of Theology, and Gregory Sterling, the Reverend Henry L. Slack Dean and Lillian Claus Professor of New Testament. They’re discussing John 6:35, 41-51, which is appointed for the Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 14, in Year B. Here’s the text.

[John 6:35, 41-51]

Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.

Then the Jews began to complain about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” They were saying, “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’?” Jesus answered them, “Do not complain among yourselves. No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me, and I will raise that person up on the last day. It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father. Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. 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.”

Awet Andemicael:

 Greg, you were reminding me the other day that this passage in John, or rather the feeding of the 5,000, is one of the only miracle text that occurs in all four of the canonical Gospels and it seems like that would be an important thing. What are some of the reasons why you think that was chosen for then? What's the significance of that for us?  

Greg Sterling:

In the fourth Gospel, this text that we're looking at in the fourth Gospel, is fascinating because unlike the other Gospels, it juxtaposes a discourse with what it calls a sign. So, the feeding of the 5,000 is a sign in the fourth Gospel. And this is a discourse and it's clear that the two are related. And there's another thing that's really unusual about this text in my mind, and that is, I read this as an exposition of Psalm 78. He gave them bread, bread or manna from heaven to eat. Bread from heaven to eat. And when I read this section, I sometimes have students do this, pay attention to the way the vocabulary shifts in the discourse. So, it starts out and it emphasizes bread very heavily, and then it shifts. And in the text that we're looking at today, we’re talking about, it emphasizes from heaven. And then it will go on and it will emphasize eating.  So, I think this is the way that ancients interpreted text. And why sensitize this? Because Philo of Alexandria interprets text like this. We call it lemmatic exegesis, but just take a text and then work through it and comment on it. And there are other examples in the New Testament, but that's how I read this text. 

So, this part of the text emphasizes the fact that Jesus is God's bread from heaven. And that's an absolutely astounding claim. So just to give you a kind of [way to] contextualize this, I was in Copenhagen at a conference with Harry Attridge was there too. And  I gave a paper on the wisdom of Solomon. Harry gave a paper on John. And in the Q and A, there was a classicist, very distinguished classicist there, who asked Harry, “Are you saying that this writer affirms that God became a human being?” And I wondered if he was just playing with Harry, but anyway, Harry said, “Yes, that's what the text is affirming.” And this writer said, “Well, that's just unbelievable. It's incredulous.” Well, it is incredulous. And the crowd reacts that way and says, this can't be. Who does he think he is? We know him. We know his family. But that's the claim. And what makes it so important is that it's how we have life - by eating this bread, who is Christ. So, it stands right at the heart of the Gospel, and it's a way of pointing back to the giving of the manna, or the bread, feeding of the 5,000. Jesus gave them life by serving them a meal, but Jesus is God's meal to us.

So, my question to you, you're the theologian, incarnation and this idea that we have life in Christ is really important. How do you wrestle with that? How do you make sense of that? 

Awet Andemicael:

Yeah, well, the funny thing about bread specifically, and I'm thinking a little bit of our colleague, Andrew McGowan, who's an avid bread baker and has written and spoken about bread and the theme of bread as really important in the life of Christ and in Christ ministry, so I'm just thinking about the fact that bread itself is a really interesting theme. So, it's particularly meaningful that that is the metaphor used to explain Christ's incarnation and Christ coming down, being manna and bread from heaven.  It's interesting in part because bread, like wine as the elements used in Christian communion, are things that represent a combination of something provided by God and human agency, human action. So, it's not just grain, it's bread. This is something that takes human action to make into flour and to bake it. Similarly with wine, you don't, you don't do, I've never, I have so far never been to a communion where you get just whole grain kernels and rinsed off grapes as your communion. Even if it's juice, whatever, it still has taken human agency and human activity.

So, it's a gift we receive from God and that we give up, give to God and in which we have invested ourselves. And in a very broad sense, if we think about Christ as being fully human and fully divine, Christ is the one who's created, not created by God, who is begotten of the Father, but takes on human flesh, creaturely flesh. So, in that sense, these things are, even though it's not quite a clean parallel, but there's a way in which the creaturely and the divine are in some ways intermingled in bread as well as in Christ. But at the same time, if you take the comparison to the manna that the people of Israel were given during their journey from Egypt to the Promised Land, this was what was given to them to sustain them on the journey into salvation, into the fulfillment. And for us as Christians, we take the bread from heaven in terms of what he made possible for the redemption of humanity and the continued sustenance that we receive in the community. At least I read this as a Eucharistic text. Yeah, go ahead. [laughter]

Greg Sterling:

Let me ask you about, I was going to ask, so there is a debate in the fourth Gospel whether John actually recognizes sacraments, as we would call them today. And this text has been debated. I will confess that I think one reason why the feeding of the 5,000 is in all four Gospels and is the only miracle, the question with which you began, is because they probably thought that it was a good Eucharistic story. 

Awet Andemicael:

Yeah.

Greg Sterling:

And that's why they thought of it, but people have debated this here. You do read this then as a Eucharistic text? 

Awet Andemicael:

I think so. I mean, if I read the last verse of the passage we have, “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.” I mean, I think of it in some ways parallel to earlier in the Gospel of John where, or connected to when Jesus talks about the living water, right? That Christ will make, Jesus, when he speaks to the woman at the well. And there's this idea of living water and living bread that he's using. The physical, material thing as a jumping off point to express a story of salvation. That this is not just salvation being rescued or saved from sin, but an abundant new life that's made possible. It's an abundant living water that doesn't end. And this living bread allows us to live forever. So I absolutely think that this is connected to at least a Eucharistic dynamic, if not necessarily specifically the Eucharistic meal. 

Greg Sterling:

Yeah. No, I agree with that. One of the things I find interesting is, in John you have these “I am” statements and this is clearly one of them. 

Awet Andemicael:

Yeah.

Greg Sterling:

And in the “I am” statements, they're oftentimes connected with something that is a very important trope or metaphor, gets at the very heart of the message. And in this case, the idea of bread, eating bread, we can't exist, we don't have life without eating, without the food. So, there is a connection and water is the same thing. Or one could think of, “I am the light of the world”, which is again, a very important symbol. But have you found any other ways or thought of any other ways as a theologian in which bread plays a metaphoric role for us? The Eucharist is certainly one.

Awet Andemicael:

The Eucharist is one, and again, that kind of human divine agency. Someone like Sergei Bulgakov, the early 20th century Russian Orthodox theologian, had this idea of God manhood, which he developed from other places. So, he really thought that this notion of the combined agency of the divine and human created a very unique and powerful dynamic that God worked  through in many different ways. So this is another representation of that. But as you say, the bread as the basic sustenance that in this particular culture, obviously in other cultures people use rice, people use potatoes, other kinds of things, but if we think of this as more generally, it's an everyday item that everyone has access to, well everyone should have access to, we should say. There are people who don't have access to food. But it's so basic to life. And this is echoing what you were saying before that life cannot be sustained without the presence of that basic nutrition.  

This is sort of the foundation. You can live without a lot of things, but the very basic sustenance that you need, that is nothing fancy, nothing special, just for survival, bread represents that. And yet bread can also be something that is a communal experience, right? So, when you break bread, we're not just talking about individual nourishment, but it's a communal activity often. Breaking bread is a sort of a metaphor for gathering for a meal, right? And the hands that went into it, the grain, again, I keep falling back to Eucharistic ideas, but the grain coming from different places coming to the one loaf. 

The reason why the meal is so significant is because it has a social dimension as well. So, it's a kind of societal transformation and a transformation within the context of a family or of a body. And we can talk about the church or more generally the Christian communities. So, I think the idea of it being necessary for individual life and also a center of communal life really opens up this possibility for bread being a powerful metaphor. The one thing that strikes me, another thing that strikes me as interesting connected with figuring out the bread piece is, when we talk about when John quotes Jesus to say that the comparing the manna in the Hebrew Bible to the bread that is, of course, there are conversations we have around Christian supersessionism and concerns about that, but he is in some way saying that Jesus is a new version of that manna that was given, right? So that's given from God, but there's something, this is a new paradigm, I guess, a new testament, a new covenant that's creating this. But what do you make of the contrast? I mean the comparison, yes, but what's the contrast between the manna in the wilderness and the bread that Christ represents in this testament?

Greg Sterling:

Well, in the text, I think the point is that they ate manna, but they had to keep eating manna and it wouldn't give them life forever. And the point of eating this bread is that you eat this bread, and you'll live forever. So, it has an impact on us that the manna didn't. In that sense, there is a pretty stark contrast. It's interesting. I have a good friend, Peder Borgen, who wrote a book called Bread from Heaven on this passage, but he shows that there were Jewish homilies that functioned to tell this story and interpret Psalm 78. So, it was something that was discussed by Jews in different ways and this is the fourth evangelist's way of handling it. 

Awet Andemicael:

Mm. Yeah, no, that makes sense. I think the last thing I would say on this is that we were speaking about the necessity of it first, physical bodies, but because it's something that we can eat once and not have to continue eating because it gives us eternal life, this shows that it's both a physical and a spiritual reality.

Now, on the one hand, we can say, well, we can spiritualize the meal, but we can also think that it shows that Christ is concerned about, and his transformative work relates to not just our spiritual, but our daily needs. So when we think about different theologians who are worried about our tendency to really focus on the spiritual aspects of salvation, our life hereafter, and have a tendency to ignore the basic needs that we have for daily life and the needs for social transformation to have a more just society, the idea of Christ as the bread of heaven having a physical and a spiritual impact seems to imply that the Christian understanding of salvation is open to multiple dimensions of importance. Both the physical and the social as well as the spiritual.

Helena Martin:

Thanks for listening. For a transcript of today’s episode and lots more, check out YaleBibleStudy.org.

Chapter, Verse, and Season is a production of the Center for Continuing Education at Yale Divinity School. It’s produced by: Creator and Managing Editor, Joel Baden; Production Manager, Kelly Morrissey; Associate Producer, Aidan Stoddart; and I’m your Host and Executive Producer, Helena Martin. And our theme music is by Calvin Linderman.

We’ll be back with another conversation from Chapter, Verse, and Season.