I don’t have to commute into New York every single day, but I do it often enough that my heart goes out to those of you who do. I take an early train in several days a week, and maybe you’re among those who have encountered what I did recently. Usually people waiting for these early trains around 6:20 are extremely quiet. Maybe it’s because they enjoy listening to the morning birdsong. No, I doubt that’s it. Maybe they’re just in deep mental preparation for the ruthless grab for territory that starts once the train decides it’s going to stop and open the doors. But recently this scene of quiet concentration was disrupted.
Across the tracks, on the platform across from the side with all the people, on some days over the past few weeks there have been two men, shouting out things about Jesus and salvation and repentance. They yelled at the top of their voices, one at one end of the platform and one on the other end, so that you’re going to hear one or the other of them whether you want to or not. “10 out of 10 people will die,” the one kept saying, which I must admit I had never thought about as a sermon opener. (Don’t worry. I won’t be using it.) The reaction on the platform was uniformly negative, and I have to admit I wasn’t exactly in the mood for this either. I did what most people did, which was turn up the volume on my iPod, and stare down the tracks hoping for a train.
I don’t know exactly why, but those preachers on the platform came to mind when I read this week’s gospel. Jesus tells his listeners that he is the bread that came down from heaven, tells them, in effect, that their eternal life with God has already begun, that day. And what happens? Many of his neighbors dismiss it, saying basically. Who do you think you are? We know you, you’re from here, we know your parents, how could you be someone or something that has come down from heaven? You’re just some local person, how can you be the presence of God incarnate?
Now I am not going to tell you to listen to any guy preaching on a train platform, and I’m certainly not endorsing the idea that everyone you hear who thinks they’re speaking for God or doing God’s work necessarily is. In fact we have overwhelming evidence to the contrary, people delude themselves and one another all the time on this subject especially. But here’s the question. Last week, we heard the people questioning Jesus in the gospel ask for a sign, something that would prove he was not ordinary. This week, people hear the most moving message that God could possibly tell us, that the bread of life is within our grasp, and we hear the same thing from people: This ordinary and everyday person isn’t enough for us. This person right here, who might be a little deluded for all we know, isn’t where we’re expecting to find out about salvation.
And yet over the past weeks, think about all these gospels we have heard about bread, bread as the image of God we should have in our minds, those gospels are trying to tell us something. 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. We all seem to find it hard to believe.
That’s because it is hard. It’s hard to look at ordinary life and see God present, we have to overcome our natural resistance to see what is beneath the surface of things. It takes desire to see God, and that old spiritual discipline of reflecting back each night on the significance of what we have seen and heard each day. But on some days we do realize it. We suddenly see that the suffering we see in hospital rooms and Alzheimer’s residences is the suffering of the cross, we see and remember hat the love we see and feel around us every day is the love of God for us. It is hard to believe that the ordinary is more than ordinary, and maybe the reason it’s hard is that it’s especially hard to believe it about ourselves, to believe that all our failings, all our humanness, are redeemed, and that we are filled up with the love of God for us. We have trouble believing something so transcendent about ourselves, and so how can we ever see it around us?
And yet our faith is just that—faith. Faith that there is more than surface reality. If somehow we have become locked in a state of mind in which the real “real presence” is impossible to accept, in the eucharist, or in ourselves. we will see nothing.
So. If you are out on the train platform with someone yelling at you about Jesus, it’s OK with me if you turn up your iPod and ignore the guy. But we can’t live our entire lives that way. We can’t be certain that the world we live in every day has no messages for us. Our job as Christians is to see the world with our hearts open, ready to see eternal life when we take something that looks like bread in our hands.