Photo credit: Carla J Roth
John 6:51-58; Psalm 34:9-14; Proverbs 9:1-6; Ephesians 5:15-20
“I am the living bread that comes from God. Whoever eats this bread will live eternally” (John 6:51).
SOME YEARS AGO, the ecumenical development agency Christian Aid (with whom, I am delighted to say, Ekklesia has enjoyed a long and fruitful partnership) adopted a striking – and, for some pious souls, a rather shocking – slogan: “We believe in life before death.”
This was controversial because, in directing our attention towards the urgent need to address want, poverty, inequality and injustice in the immediate world of broken and wounded flesh, it was implicitly challenging those who would reduce Christianity to ‘pie in the sky when you die’; or life after death as the real or sole essence of faith, in such a way that “our eternal hope” (to use the Swiss theologian Emil Brunner’s striking phrase) is seen as marginalising, trivialising or dismissing life in the here-and-now.
In fact, as today’s strange and challenging gospel reading makes clear, “life in all its fulness” (to quote Jesus four chapters later, in John 10:10) is not about today or tomorrow, the present or the future. Rather it is about an extra-ordinary, unfathomable quality, vividness and intensity of life which can only come from God; a life-beyond-life which saturates and transforms our existence precisely and crucially in the here-and-now. This is a taste of the inexhaustibility and incorruptibility of the divine life by which we have been formed and to which we are irresistibly destined.
Now that is a lot to absorb conceptually, so the Jesus of St John’s Gospel puts it in terms which are, at one-and the-same-time, both brutally material and bafflingly mystical. He is, he says, “the living bread” which must be consumed by us so that we might fully taste the love of God and be changed into the full likeness of the divine nature once and for all.
Eastern Orthodox theologians have a disarmingly straightforward way of putting this. God became human so that humanity might be taken into God, they say, with full biblical warrant. “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life… for my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink,” declares Jesus. “So whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them”– in the same way that he, the Christ, the anointed one, lives in God and God lives in him.
It is this indissoluble relationship (ourselves in God, and God in us) that we enact and anticipate every week in the Eucharist. As we eat bread and drink wine together, we remember Christ – who both truly died and is truly alive, until Christ is fully manifest (“until he comes again”, as we say in the liturgy). It is through the Eucharistic ritual that we are re-membered, re-joined, to one another and to God, whose very life we feed on… so that nothing can ever be or look the same again.
In God’s transforming presence, the bread we touch and taste is not mere flour and water, and the wine we savour and swallow is not mere fermented fruit. Rather, the bread we eat and the wine we drink, while remaining what they are, are experienced as an authentic foretaste of something imperishable and unimaginably real that sustains life beyond the limitations, losses and disappointments that we experience in our mortal flesh and blood. What we receive at the common table, a symbol and embodiment of the common life to which we are called, is therefore “the living bread”, as Jesus puts it.
For we are not, as humanly constructed religion says, immortal. We are mortal; fleeting like grass, as the Psalmist notes, unsentimentally. Yet the essence of who we are – persons in relation (not isolation), and persons made in the image of God (that is, born from and destined towards God), can and will be “reclothed in immortality”, to use the language of Paul in 2 Corinthians 5.
In other words, mortal life – life bounded by birth and death, and subsumed in decay and suffering – can give way, starting in the here-and-now, to the power and possibility of what is otherwise known as “eternal life”. This word eternal is frequently misconstrued. In essence it doesn’t mean “going on forever” (we are all going to die). Rather, it means life re-clothed, re-imagined and re-understood in ever-increasing union with the love of God, which alone is unlimitable (and in that sense everlasting), and which changes everything.
What this means in practical terms is that, when we truly live in the presence of God, these things happen: hate gives way to love, war gives way to peace, injustice gives way to justice, enemies become friends, the hungry are fed, the guilty are forgiven, the naked are clothed, the bereaved are consoled, the lost are found, the least are most important, the last come first, and death gives way to life.
Whenever we work for these things (love, peace, justice, forgiveness and more), we join ourselves to, and participate in, the divine reversal of all that imprisons, shrinks and diminishes us and our world. “For my flesh is real food (not the perishing kind) and my blood is real drink (not the evaporating kind).” This is the gospel: an invitation to what our late and much missed friend and New Testament scholar Professor Larry Hurtado called “life beyond life-and-death”. In other words, in the flesh and blood of Christ, in his unjust execution and in the vindication of his risen life, we witness and begin to access God’s love vanquishing death and suffering.
We experience this not by running away from everyday earthly existence, with all its joys and sorrows, or by retreating into a (supposedly spiritual) ghetto, but by seeing life afresh in the light of Christ – such that we can re-experience and re-live it. As the ancient writer of Proverbs puts it: “Come, eat my food and drink the wine I have mixed. Leave your foolish ways and you will live; walk in the way of insight.”
How much do we and our world need to hear this message right now. For as the author of Ephesians bluntly says, “the days are evil”. Greed, neglect, environmental destruction, genocide. You name it. “Therefore, do not be foolish, but discern what God’s will is… be filled with the Spirit.” See the world differently, live differently. Turn around and head in a different direction – the literal meaning of the gospel word metanoia, or repentance. As the Psalmist challenges us: “Turn from evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it.”
Why is this so hard? Partly because, if you are a certain kind of religious person, it is tempting or even preferable to give up on the sheer difficulty of life before death (that Christian Aid provocation), and instead to seek consolation in a stunted form of life after death which is largely disconnected from our present challenges. But that is not the gospel. It is not receiving the gift of true life, which enables us to confront our current limitations and fears through an enduring hope in the unrestricted life and love of God.
Life re-experienced in and through Christ, in other words, is undividable and indissoluble. It is flesh and blood, but much more than flesh and blood. It is bread and wine, but much more than bread and wine. Equally, it is not less than flesh and blood, not less than bread and wine. The spiritual is not separated from the material, it is what changes it into something beyond itself. It is the beyond in the midst, “what shall be” visiting and transforming “what is”. Risen life displacing life lived in the shadow of death, or life greedily consumed at the expense of others.
So as we visit the table of communion shortly, think of it this way. We are being fed on the very life of God – not on our own, but together. We are being bound together in one body, despite all our oddities and differences. We are being invited to feed one another, and the world. We are being rendered equal in our need and desire for nourishment. We are being empowered to go out into the wider community, nourished again, in order to be able to nourish others and, yes, to be nourished by them. All this and much, much more happens in the name, presence and possibility of the one who says to us, yesterday today, and always: “I am the living bread that comes from God. Whoever eats this bread will live eternally.”
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© Simon Barrow is director of Ekklesia. This is the text of an address given at St James the Less Episcopal Church, Leith, Edinburgh, on 18 August 2024. His book Against the Religion of Power: Telling a Different Christian Story will be published in the near future, and his Ekklesia columns can be found here.