We modern people like to think that back hundreds or even thousands of years ago, it was a lot easier for people to believe in God. You know, we tend to think they were a little primitive, they didn’t know very much about science, they thought the world was flat. You can name a wide variety of things they believed that we now know are wrong. They attributed to God all sorts of things that happen that we now don’t see God as particularly involved with at all. So they must have been more open than we are to various ideas about the way God is and what God does.
But I think today’s gospel points out that this isn’t true. Because there were things that even then, in an age where faith was easier, we think, even then there were things people couldn’t accept or believe about God. Especially, there are things that Jesus said about God, that even in a time and a place where it was not that unusual to believe in God, what Jesus said was just too overwhelming, or maybe, too far from people’s experience, too crazy sounding, for them to be willing to listen to it.
And in general, what they couldn’t accept, what drove people away, even, was what Jesus said about God’s incredible closeness and presence. I have come down from heaven, he says, I’m right here, and now you can all be taught by God. You can hear my words, he says, and eat this bread, and never die. This was not, apparently, what people were expecting to hear about God.
Last week, in the gospel just before this scene today, we heard the people questioning Jesus in the gospel ask for a sign, something that would prove that what he was saying was true. What they probably wanted was a magic trick, or a spectacular demonstration of power from above, or maybe just huge quantities of regular bread for free. Instead, people hear the most moving message that God could possibly tell us, that the bread of life is within our grasp, that God, back then and still now, is present on this earth in a close human relationship with the people around him, available for people to relate to and speak to and ask questions of. And that was hard to accept, as it is for us. Surely, God was somewhere up above, not right here?
It’s hard to accept, and maybe it always will be for most of us. It’s hard to look at ordinary life and ordinary people and see God present, truly present, as a person with you who knows you. It’s hard to turn to prayer and over time become aware that God is there, eager to hear us and communicate with us if we can allow that. We have a lot of human barriers in place to those things. A lot of them. We have to overcome our human resistance to see what is beneath the surface of things. We have to take the time and the energy to clear space around ourselves and put the rest of our lives aside, so that God can get to us, and get our attention that we are so unwilling to give. But mostly maybe what we most have to change is what we believe about ourselves, we have to believe that all our failings, all our humanness, our mistakes, it’s all redeemed, and God is on our side. We have to believe that God sees us exhausted by the side of the road, like Elijah in that first reading, and wants to feed us so we can keep going.
At moments, we see hints that all this is real, we realize that the love we see and feel around us every day is the love of God for us. We want to hang onto it, have it with us always. We want our ordinary lives to be lit up by that sense that God is here. That’s why Jesus keeps talking about bread, living bread, bread reminds us that the ordinary things and people of our lives can be transformed by God, every day, can be transformed and are. Our life is already eternal life, Jesus says in the gospel, because the bread of life is ours, something we can see and feel and touch, here in this place in the eucharist, but not just here, God’s presence surrounds us. It seems to be a lot easier to believe in a God who is a lot more remote, or who isn’t around at all, than it is to have one who wants this constant closeness. But that’s the God we have, a very demanding one.
One of the saddest passages in the gospel of John comes right after the one we heard today – you’ll hear it read in two weeks. Because it says that after the disciples heard all this talk about the living bread, about embracing it and living forever, it says many of them went home and back to their former way of life, this was the moment when they couldn’t follow Jesus any further. That’s an option we always have — we can lower our expectations, we can say that whatever Jesus was talking about here it’s clearly not about us, or we can tell the God who wants to offer us everything that God’s presence is the only thing worth asking for.