“Insufficient evidence?”
By Rev. Michael Stonhouse
Meditation – Thursday, March 23, 2023
John 6:41-51 (Forward, p. 53) CEV p. 1108
One of the most pressing issues of our times, especially in the public discourse, is the problem of insufficient or skewed or frankly erroneous information. The evidence that we are given is simply not complete enough to allow us to make proper decisions.
That was the problem that faced Jesus’ questioners in today’s passage. Jesus has repeatedly said that He was ‘the bread that came down from heaven’. This has left His questioners puzzled, perplexed, because they are quite sure that they know where He came from. “Isn’t he the son of Joseph?’ they said. “Don’t we know his father and mother? So, how can he say that he has come down from heaven?”
They are basing their conclusions on what they think they know, but unfortunately, they are basing them on insufficient evidence. They do not know about the virgin birth, and to be honest, they probably would not have believed it, even if they had—for surely that was outside the realm of their thinking, outside the realm of their ‘possibilities’.
Jesus then tells them, and us, how they can know, can know for sure, but again, unfortunately, the present crowd misses it. Jesus puts it in several ways:
-firstly, He suggests that people have to come to Him and listen to what the Father says;
-He then goes on to say that they must have faith in Him, put their trust in Him;
-Finally, He uses an image that completely baffles them, simply because they chose to interpret it literally. He says that people need to ‘eat’, to partake, of the heavenly bread that is Himself. What He is saying is that they need to take Him into themselves, invite Him and allow Him to live there and to nourish them. But they do not ‘get it.’
Coming, trusting, inviting: those are the three steps of discipleship—and, to be honest, the three steps to knowing. Unfortunately for us mortals, the evidence for Christ that is out there is never ‘enough’. It is never categorically complete enough, to prove something without a doubt, to fully convince anyone. So, what one must do is to examine what evidence there is, and then on that basis to choose to take that one step further, that one step in the dark. One must choose to come and trust and invite, to come to Jesus, entrust Him with our lives and invite Him into our hearts and lives to live there forever. Amen.
Forward notes: “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” (verse 51).
“Jesus is speaking metaphorically, and John records Jesus’s words in such a way as to give them layered meaning. Obviously, these verses speak to the sacramental rite of the eucharist, but Jesus is also claiming to be the manna that God sent the hungry Hebrew children wandering through the wilderness. Can you see the connection? You and I are children wandering through wilderness, sustained and cared for by God.
“Taking these verses too literally can prove dangerous. For example, does it matter whether communion bread is wheat instead of, say rice? Some people have posited that it does, but it seems absurd to think that wheat alone serves as the vehicle for grace. It is the grace and not the element that counts.
“Jesus asks us to lean into faith and not into religious strata. We are to rely upon God rather than law and to look to grace, that amazing and beautiful grace!”
Moving Forward: “Attend a mid-week Holy Eucharist and think of these words from the Gospel of John.”
Some concluding remarks: sadly, our author falls into a trap, an error, that almost everyone from a sacramental background falls into, namely into interpreting Jesus’ words as referring to the Eucharist. To give him credit, that is almost certainly the way that John the gospel writer intended them, for he was writing to the already established church, a church that already knew and practiced the Eucharist. But that could not have been what Jesus was getting at, for no one in His present audience knew anything about that sacrament. One of the ‘established’ premises of Biblical scholarship is that the words spoken always had a meaning, an application, to the present audience—even if they also had another layer of meaning that a future audience would understand and ‘get.’ Thus, Isaiah’s words about a ‘virgin giving birth to a son’ must have had a relevance, a meaning to King Ahaz, to whom the words were spoken at the time (see Isaiah 7:14). So, what was Jesus getting at here? Clearly, as our author suggests, it was not bread nor was it His flesh, seen in a literal sense. No, it was Jesus Himself. He was asking them—and us—to accept Him into our lives and thereby allow Him to nourish us with His own self. And that, thankfully, is something that all of us can do, whether with the sacrament or without.