What’s It All About?

“They shall all be taught by God.” [1]

If you were listening to the gospel at all today, chances are that is one sentence that did not exactly leap out at you. It seems off-topic, ill fitting in the rich discourse about Jesus being the Bread of Life. We are loaded with preconceptions about the eucharist and notions of eternal life as a future heavenly existence. About the last thing we are primed to pay any attention to is this rather obscure quotation from Isaiah. And yet here in the midst of a critical discourse is a thought that might possibly change the way we think. It might rearrange the way we hear the whole story. It might even change our lives.

Many years ago when I was a young curate in my first parish we invited Sister Ellen Stephen of the Order of St. Helena to come as a weekend guest. My wife and I had the honor of hosting her. At the time, I was doing my best to start a practice of daily prayer and meditation. In fact, since high school I had in some ways been preoccupied with prayer, trying to understand the logic of it (as if prayer were a thing to be understood logically!). I took the opportunity of opening a conversation with Sister about prayer. Her first words to me were, “Prayer is a love relationship with God.” I had little idea in 1971 that I had just heard words that I would not only remember as long as I had a mind, but words that would come to take on greater and greater significance as years rolled on.

What I’ve come to see in the intervening half century is that prayer is everything, that God is everywhere in every thing, and that the entire experience of being in this universe is about nothing else but being swept up in a continuing love affair with the Essence of Life itself, one name for which is God and another name for which is Love.

To jump to the chase: that, I do believe deeply, is what all the words about “Bread of Life” are about. In all these discourses in the Fourth Gospel, Jesus is quite insistent that what is at stake in his life and message is nothing less than the meaning—one might say the secret—of life itself. It is about how to live. It is positively not about how to succeed. It is not about how to adapt or necessarily about how to be happy the way we normally understand happiness. Jesus’ life and message are about the core reality of the universe. Indeed he identifies himself in the Fourth Gospel with the Creator of the Universe whom he consistently calls his father. He is equally clear that the relationship he has is by no means something he wishes to hoard. He clearly wants to impart whatever he has to a community which itself is to be the prototype of a new humanity. His is life lived in right relationship with his Abba, the origin of all.

Unlike some of his contemporaries, Jesus does not require us to go through elaborate rituals of initiation into secret cults in order to understand the truth. At one point he says, “My sheep hear my voice and they follow me.”[2]

"My sheep hear my voice.  I know them and they follow me." (John 10:27)

In other words, when we are on Jesus’ wavelength, we get it.  We get him.  We know what he is talking about even though we have sense enough to know that we don’t understand it fully nor ever will. 

So when he quotes (freely according to the evangelist writing these words) Isaiah with perhaps an illusion to Joel, “They shall all be taught by God,” he is both saying that his message accords with ultimate reality, the core of the universe, namely God and therefore Truth, and he is also saying that being taught by God is the condition that makes anyone receptive to “hearing his voice.”

Now if you read the entirety of Chapter 6, for that matter the entire sweep of John’s gospel, you’ll quickly see how it is that people, including oftimes his disciples, don’t get it or don’t get it fully, and it is pretty obvious why. Their own preconceptions get in the way. That is exactly what happens to people today, including you and me. We want to be religious, sure. We want to be spiritual. And we think that the way to do it is to figure out how to squeeze it into categories that we already believe to be satisfactory, indeed true. So, for example, take the average American. He or she is schooled to think that our capitalistic economy is the sine qua non, the apex of modern life. We’ll defend it tooth and nail. We’re generally speaking not about to give that up for Jesus. No, we take Jesus and make out as if he himself is a capitalist or at least approves of those who are. He talked more about money than any other single subject and most of what he said flies in the face of capitalist economic theory. We take his radical sayings such as “Go, sell what you have and give to the poor and come follow me,” and let all the air out of them telling ourselves that he is not to be taken literally. We read with great solemnity passages from the gospels, sometimes even reverencing them in clouds of incense and intoning them as if they were our most deeply held opinions, such as “Love your enemies,” without thinking that those words call into question the billions of dollars that we collectively put into what is in effect a war machine, ready to spring into action at the drop of a hat. We have whole myths about national security that we imagine Jesus approves of. There is not a shred of evidence that Jesus ever bedded down with any political regime. It seems to have escaped our notice that Jesus took on both the political establishment and their religious toadies in behalf of the poor, the oppressed, the marginalized, the outcasts. We even imagine that those who shouted “Crucify him” were a fickle crowd that had so recently hailed him as Messiah with palm branches and hosannas rather than a religious establishment sick of and frightened by his habit of undercutting their prestige and influence.

"Crucify him," was the cry of the establishment. 
The common people heard him gladly. (Mark 12:37 KJV)

Little wonder that the crowd hearing him murmured and complained about his words. He didn’t fit their paradigms. His message ran counter to what they held dear. Unless and until we can tune in to what it is that God—the Truth—is teaching us, we will never hear the voice of the Shepherd. We will never be able to eat the bread of life, because our mouths and bellies will already be full of the bread that perishes.

I hasten to say that our obstinacy and in some cases dull mindedness don’t cause God to stop loving us. Or to put it another way, we can go right along doing quite fine without paying any attention to the Wisdom, the Bread, that Jesus both is and is offering. As Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz puts it, “When God says, ‘I yearn for you,’ I may think, ‘Leave me alone. Mind your own business.’ Some people will answer like this. And for others it’s a very compelling power.’”[3] You may curse the sun, but it keeps on shining. Or the wind and it blows wherever it will. Or your Creator whose very presence is stamped on your every cell and in every crevice of your body, and the Love force that enlivens you will still beat with every thump of your heart. And, just for the record, it doesn’t matter a whit whether you believe any of this or not. It just is.

The issue, however, is how do we open ourselves to this secret, this dazzling Kingdom into which we’re invited, this great banquet prepared for us, this priceless pearl of wisdom? For most of us it starts with clearing away some of the clutter that we’ve collected over the years. Clutter such as the notion that God is somehow distant—up there or back in history or remote. Clutter like the unhelpful notion that eternal life is somehow in the future and amounts to infinite time rather than a different dimension that is present here and now and therefore a life to be lived, not awaited. Clutter like the point of Jesus is to get the good boys and girls into heaven and make sure that the bad boys and girls go to hell. Clutter like the singularly inadequate notion that the entire project of religion is being nice. Those things get in the way of the truth, because none of that clutter is worth a cent, no matter how much we might prize it.

This process of what we might call spiritual housecleaning is not a once-and-for-all operation. It goes on continually, just as growth does. It’s best to realize at the start that the Bread of Life is related to hunger. When we are hungry, really hungry, we generally settle for the nearest food available, not necessarily the healthiest. So we will continue to collect clutter and thus we’ll continue to need to downsize.

What all this is about, of course, harks back three chapters to Jesus’ famous encounter with Nicodemus. In that nocturnal interview Jesus tells Nicodemus, who held all the credentials of a wise person and teacher, that he, like everyone had to start over. Be born anew, be “begotten from above,” Jesus tells him. You simply can’t shake a little religious seasoning over whatever it is you already have on your plate and call it a day. Nothing will do but learning how to live differently. The analogue to this idea appears in the other three gospels in the most radical statement that Jesus ever made: “Except you become as children, you will never enter the kingdom.” He is not talking about some romantic fluff about children being innocent; he is talking about children because they are newly minted, and, at least in the beginning, uncontaminated by the clutter that society crams into us largely to get us to conform to the existing norms. That is what socialization is fundamentally for.

This of course is only the beginning. Start dancing with Jesus and you’re in for a spin that will take you into places you really can’t imagine. And if you’re already engaged in this dance you will doubtless bear me witness that, yes, about the time you think you’ve arrived at enlightenment, you will see some old shadow drifting in from who knows where that will need to be welcomed, affirmed, included in your nice new interior castle that you were sure was finally in order. Surprises abound.

Remember that when you stretch out your hands today to receive the Bread of Life. Remember that the Bread of Life appears as one thing but is often something far beyond appearances. Remember that you have no wisdom, only smarts and maybe an admirably high IQ. Remember how you were when you were little—open, believing, and generally pushing limits and getting into trouble.

The Bread of Life appears as one thing
but is often something far beyond appearances.

Life is a love relationship with God. At the end of the day love alone suffices and satisfies. The Bread of Life personified in Jesus promises that it is true: they, including you and me, will all be taught by God.

A sermon for The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 14B, on the text of John 6:1, 41-51.

©  Frank Gasque Dunn, 2018.

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[1] John 6:45; a reference to Isaiah 54:13; cf. Joel 2:28-29.

[2] John 10:27

[3] Adin Steinsaltz, “Educating Desire,” Parabola, vol. 31, no. 2 Summer 2006 (New York: Society for the Study of Myth and Tradition, 2006), 62.

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Moses, Jesus, and the Magic Snake

During the summer between first and second grades, I went to the Horry County Memorial Library in my hometown.  Little church mouse that I was, I perused the room with the Dewey Decimal .220 collection in it, full of Bibles and storybooks, located next to the children’s section.  I checked out a great big fat brown illustrated book of Bible stories for children, probably printed in the 1920’s. I brought it home and began reading.  I could hardly put it down.  That is where I first learned much of what is in the Bible.

I don’t recall, of course, exactly what I thought when I came upon a story such as the one in Numbers today, where Moses fashions a serpent of bronze and sets it up on a pole so that all the snakebite victims among the Children of Israel could look upon it and be healed.  But I am sure of one thing.  I did not approach the story critically.  I did not wonder how the serpent worked healing powers, nor why Moses did not get blasted for such a thing when a few chapters away his brother Aaron gets roundly trounced for fashioning a calf out of gold.  I don’t think I took the Bible stories as if they were just some other interesting stories, such as Uncle Wiggly and Nurse Jane.  I think you could say without stretching a point that I read the stories naïvely.   They conveyed to me a sense of the Presence of the Holy One of Israel, with whom I had a complete fascination.  To my boyish mind, nothing seemed beyond God.  And yet I don’t recall ever being afraid of God—don’t ask me why. 

"So Moses made a serpent of bronze."  —Numbers 21:9

Not until I hit adolescence did I begin to sense some dissonance between some of the Bible stories and the world around me.  But even then the dissonance did not pose a crisis for me.  In high school I had the good fortune of having a teacher who taught the Bible as literature.  She taught me how to ask critical questions in a way that led me more deeply into the meaning of the texts.  The process continued in college.  I learned to plumb the scriptures and the layers behind the scriptures to understand things like the culture that produced them, the language that expressed them, the meaning they probably conveyed to the first generation of readers or hearers.  At such a place in my development, I would have appropriated the story from Numbers about the bronze serpent as perhaps a piece of pious folklore, or perhaps the signature story of sympathetic magic, a spin-off of some Egyptian serpent-magic captured in the famous headgear of the Pharaohs with its protecting cobra.  I might have made the connection between the bronze serpent Moses fashioned and the story about how that very artifact was destroyed by the reforming King Hezekiah, centuries later, who smashed it in the Temple of Jerusalem where people had developed the custom of making offerings to it. 

Then one morning, a few years after I had become a priest, from the Old Testament (which is the name we Christians give to the Hebrew Scriptures for theological reasons, not because “old” means inferior), —I was reading a story about how the prophet Elijah was fed by ravens, and I realized some minutes after finishing it that I had made it through the entire story without having once questioned its veracity.  Instead, I had pondered the many unlikely ways in which God providentially fed me.  Elijah’s ravens had become signifiers to me of experiences—maybe physical, maybe spiritual—in my own life.  That was an incredibly important day in my life, because on that day I was aware for the first time that I entered what I later learned the philosopher Paul Ricoeur called “the second naïveté.”  My “first naïveté” belonged to my boyhood in which I took bronze serpents and food-bearing ravens at face value and the stories about them quite literally.  The second naïveté, however, was made possible because by then I had learned to question, to probe, to think analytically, in fact to doubt.  Although I never had gone through an atheistic phase, I can readily appreciate those who do, for it clears away tons of baggage, liberating people from taboos and superstitions that have nothing to do with God but everything to do with social control.  Freed from literalism, I could engage the symbols and the stories on another level.  In that way, the serpent became to me a life-bearing symbol, which I could experience as (let me put it this way) a messenger of something divine.  I say “divine” because I have come to believe, and take responsibility for believing, that God is in fact True, and reaches out to me—to us—using the very data of our everyday lives (including what we see, read, and meditate upon) as ways of opening us to layers of Reality that sustain and nourish our souls, help us to grow, enable us to evolve into the persons we have the potential of becoming. 

Now this is where the bronze serpent story gets really interesting.  In this “second naïveté” I could, as I did with those ravens feeding Elijah decades ago, simply imagine the poisonous reptiles to represent the darts and arrows and venomous stings that arrest me in the middle of my self-absorbed ranting and griping, just as apparently snakes did to those Israelites in the desert.  That would be a fairly good discipline for me, I’ll warrant.  But the story is more than that.  On what, please tell me, may I look and find healing?  Ah!  Before you jump the gun and point me to Jesus on his cross, an obvious reference in the gospel story wherein he talks to Nicodemus using this very image of the bronze serpent, hold on.  Stick with the old story about Moses and the pole for a moment.

Seraph

The story says that Yahweh God said to Moses to “make a poisonous serpent” and “set it on a pole,” so that “everyone who is bitten” might “look at the serpent of bronze and live.”  Remember that this is the same Yahweh who, the story says, sent the poisonous serpents among the people in the first place, snakes whose bites killed numbers of the people.  It happens that the word for “poisonous or fiery” [serpent] comes from the same root as the word seraph, and the seraphim, of course, are first-class angels in Hebrew vocabulary.  They burn.  So these fiery serpents stinging the fire out of Israel mean something more than ordinary desert reptiles.  They are divine messengers (that is what angels are) that ironically wound and heal. 

Deep in the consciousness—really the unconscious—of humanity is this ironic marriage between wound and healing.  All over the world there are stories about how the hero who delivers and saves must first taste the bitter pain of being wounded.  If this is beginning to sound familiar, that is because it is.  You know that truth on two levels.  One is your own personal life.  You know the irony that the wounds you bear, from the gashes carved into your soul by rejections, to the stigma and shame you carry in your body or your mind about your body or your mind, is exactly where you meet the ultimate questions of self-worth.  Your wounds are the battleground itself where you either have found or will find grace and strength, a widening of your compassion, and a deepening of your capacity to love.  The struggle for your destiny is won or lost there.  The other level on which you know this truth, or will know it, is that the life-giving story of Jesus is precisely the thing that opens us up with decisive intensity, deflating our puffed up egos, bidding us take us off our defensive armor piece by piece.  At the same time, Jesus is the one whose wounds and indeed whose death is the balm that heals us, the salve that soothes us, the medicine that ultimately makes us whole and sane. 

Having been bitten by a copperhead at age ten, I have a short list of things I don’t particularly like to think about and looking on a replica of that fiery serpent is on the list.  I don’t particularly relish the idea that Jesus is in any sense a snake.  But there is a deep connection between what we most fear and what gives us life. This strange story from the desert wanderings of the Israelites tells us that the divine is somehow at work in even the most hideous of circumstances, working to bring about a realignment of our purposes and God’s own.  I can see, not just in a snakebite but in the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, a God whose saving purposes are running through my life, my words, my fears, my self-doubts, ultimately bringing me together with all humanity into a land flowing with milk and honey at the other side of whatever desert it is that we happen to be passing through.

So it is not with a simple naïveté, but rather with a second naïveté that, encountering Truth on a whole new level, we can look upon the Son of Man, lifted up on the cross, and have eternal life.  We can see in his story the outlines of the old incident told in the tales of our forebears’ wandering.  He rattles our cages, overturning the tables we depend upon in our economies and in our temples; he is toxic to our systems of denial; he strikes out relentlessly against our penchant for oppressing others; he recoils at our hypocrisies; he calls into question our own retreat into self-loathing and exaggerated notions of worthlessness.  Human beings, as a rule, even the self-proclaimed religious among us, cannot stand him, and join with the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov telling him to go the hell back where he came from and leave us alone.  Over and over again the Christ in flesh and spirit is tacked up on a pole, crucified, a horrifying sight to any with the guts to look at him. 

Graham Sutherland, "Crucifixion," 1946

But look at him we do, our eyes unable to avert a sight so compelling.  Look at him we do, and see our paltry efforts at being like him nearly laughable.  Look at him we must, and see in his wounds, his hands, his feet, our own wounds.  How does it happen, we wonder.  How can it be that this broken body seems to strengthen us, seems to say to us, “You are forgiven, though you know not what you do”?  How can it be that we feel ourselves taking courage from him precisely at the moment we are ready to call it quits?  How can it be that we can look on him and know ourselves to be healed in the only way that matters?

Never mind how.  The answer to how is yes.  We don’t have to figure it out because we can’t.  All we can do is look:  look at his young naked body posted on the hard wood of his cross. 

Behold him, all ye that pass by,

The bleeding prince of life and peace.[1]

Edward Knippers, "Road to Golgotha," 1992

See him with your mind’s eye.  Feel him at the bottom of your heart.  Let your soul wander through the deserts until it finds rest beneath that cross.  And allow the Healer on the pole to make you whole.

                         

A sermon for the Fourth Sunday in Lent, March 11, 2018, previously published in an earlier form on this blog under the title, "Second Story."

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2012; revised 2018

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[1] Charles Wesley, "O Love Divine, What Hast Thou Done?" First published in Hymns & Sacred Poems, 1742. 

Matthias Grünewald, Isenheim Altar Piece, 1512-16