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Bread and Boundaries by Prof. William T. Cavanaugh

5th August 2012

Psalm 51:1–12 John 6:24–35

In the 1980s I lived for a couple of years in a slum area of Santiago, Chile, under the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. There was a woman in my neighborhood and church named Rosalinda, who lived with her mother in a small wooden shanty. Their main source of income, which sufficed to put little more than bread and tea on the table, was the potholders that Rosalinda made and sold at the local open air market. One of the first times I visited Rosalinda and la abuela, Rosalinda gave me one of her potholders, a little crocheted blue-green bird for taking the tea kettle off the stove without burning one’s hand. (Chileans picked up the tea drinking habit from the British, and now drink tea all day long.) I still have the bird in my kitchen at home in the States; it is one of my prized possessions. When she gave it to me, my first impulse was to reach into my pocket and give her some money for it. Selling them was, after all, how she put food on the table. But I sensed that that would have been the wrong thing to do. It was only much later that I think I figured out why. I will come back to this story later. I want to use it as a backdrop for exploring the Gospel reading for today. I want to start by looking at the contrast Jesus makes between the food that perishes and the food that endures for eternal life. What is the food that perishes? On one level, it is obvious that ordinary food that we buy at the grocery store can be contrasted with Jesus, the bread of life that does not perish. If we leave the milk out of the fridge, it spoils quickly. If we leave it in the fridge, it spoils a bit more slowly. But it perishes all the same. The same goes for bread and virtually anything else that can be eaten (except perhaps for some of those nasty phosphorescent breakfast cereals that are so filled with preservatives they will survive us all). So on one level we can take the reading as meaning that, although food and other material things are necessary, we should see them as merely transitory, and pay more attention to the spiritual things that do not perish. But I don’t think that there really is such a sharp divide between the material and the spiritual. If the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, then the material world is deeply implicated in how God’s work on earth is carried out. Rather than a contrast between spiritual and material, Jesus offers us a contrast between two kinds of food, the food that perishes and the food that endures. Jesus knows that people need real, material bread; he has in fact just fed the multitudes with real, material barley loaves and fish. The contrast, I think, is not between material and spiritual, but between two different ways of dealing with the material world. So what is the food that perishes? The crowds refer to the story of God giving manna in the wilderness. They, like their ancestors, want God to give bread from heaven, and in both cases—both that of the Israelites in Exodus and of the crowds in the Gospels—God obliges, in the first case with manna, in the second with the miracle of the loaves and fishes. But in the case of the Israelites in Exodus, some of the manna perishes. If you recall the story from Exodus 16, Moses commands the Israelites to only gather what they need for each day, not to take more than they need and try to save it. Only on the day before the Sabbath are they to gather enough for two days, because neither they nor the Lord are to work on the Sabbath. (The Lord has been up before dawn every day of the week baking manna, and wants to sleep in.) So those are Moses’ instructions. Do the people listen? Do they ever listen? Some try to 2 gather more than they need and save it overnight, but the text says “it bred worms and became foul,” and Moses was angry at them. So why did the manna perish? What is God trying to tell them by only having them take enough for one day? The message of the text seems to be that the people are to rely on God for their sustenance. They are not sustained by their own efforts; they are sustained by the sheer grace of God. They neither reap nor sow, just like the birds of the air from the Sermon on the Mount, but God provides bread for them, and only asks that they have faith in God’s ability and willingness to provide. But that kind of faith is difficult. When you are hungry, wandering in the desert where there are no dependable sources of food, and, in your haste to leave Egypt, you left your credit cards behind, it is very difficult to take just enough to sustain yourself for one day. Is it not unreasonable of God to expect the people not to try to secure at least one more day of sustenance against the gnawing insecurity and fear of scarcity that they have had to live with? God’s message is, nevertheless, “trust me; I will provide.” The idea that people provide for themselves is, after all, an illusion. All the world is God’s, as Psalm 24 makes clear. We are just sojourners who owe our very lives to the sheer grace of God. The food that perishes is the illusion that the world is ours, that we deserve what we have, that we have earned it, that it belongs to us and we can save it. Our society is based on this illusion. We tend to make a sharp distinction between justice and charity. Justice is classically defined as reddere suum cuique, giving to each person his or her due, what they deserve. According to Adam Smith, nature has made our indignation at a lack of justice greater than our indignation at a lack of charity or benevolence. We might think it is regrettable that some people with a lot allow other people with less to go hungry. But we don’t think that people can be compelled to give charity to others. Our real strong indignation is therefore reserved, according to Smith, to a failure of justice, of giving people what they deserve and have earned. Society can exist—albeit in an inferior state--without charity, but it cannot exist at all without justice. The inability of a person to feed herself is not in and of itself a failure of justice, but a call for charity. Indignation in a strong sense is reserved for failures of justice, that is, attacks on life and property rights. Charity is a free transfer of property from one person to another, but it cannot be expected or even encouraged on the public level of trade, where justice rules, and the pursuit of self-interest works for the benefit of all through the invisible hand of the market. The difference between a market exchange and a gift must be maintained. On the private level, charitable giving can be encouraged, but it must occur against the backdrop of a prior justice that establishes the boundaries between mine and yours. There can be no charity, the free giving of some of mine to you, if there are first no established boundaries between mine and yours. Again, this is the food that perishes, because it is not received as a gift from God. Before a gift can be given, we must try to claim it as our own, as what we deserve. Only then, once it has been claimed as mine, can it be given, if one wishes, to another. What, then, is the food that endures for eternal life? This is the bread of life, that Jesus identifies with himself. It is this bread that God gives in a constant flow of giving, the “always” in the people’s request “Sir, give us this bread always.” This is the daily bread that we ask for in the Lord’s Prayer, “Give us this day our daily bread.” The Greek word translated “daily” is an odd one, epiousion, or literally “above substance.” It is not just lying there as thing to be grasped; it is only to be received, again and again, on a daily basis, from the hand of God. The echoes of the story of the manna are unmistakable; that which sustains life is not our possession, not something we earn or deserve, but is pleaded for and received daily from the hand of God as a gift. This bread is real bread; God knows that we need real, material sustenance in order to live. But only if it is received as a gift from God is it bread that does not perish. “Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be 3 thirsty.” We can only be satisfied by material bread if we come to God again and again and receive it as a gift from God’s hand. Jesus says we should “work for” the food that endures for eternal life, but he goes on to say “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” This is not, therefore, something we earn or deserve; our “work” is simply that we believe what God is doing in our midst through grace, whose name is Jesus. The Eucharistic overtones, the import for the Lord’s Supper, are unmistakable. The Greek word for giving thanks in John 6:23, “where they had eaten the bread after the Lord had given thanks,” is eucharistein. (Even in modern Greek the word for “thank you” is eucharisto). In John’s Gospel, Jesus’ discourse on himself as the bread of life takes the place of the institution narratives in the other Gospels, where Jesus says of the bread and wine “This is my body” and “This is my blood,” and he commands them to share it in remembrance of him. The Lord’s Supper is not an object. It is not something we confect or control. It is not even something that is, strictly speaking, guaranteed to the church. The Lord’s Supper is something that we can only plead in prayer that God will give us again, that the bread of life will once again come down from heaven for us to share in. Despite the sometimes misleading language of presence, the Lord’s Supper is not even something that belongs wholly to the present. It is, as the Letter to the Hebrews makes plain, an anticipation of the heavenly banquet, a participation in the consummated Kingdom now. The Eucharist is, as John Zizioulas puts it, the “memory of the future.” It is not something we deserve, and it is not something that we can grasp. We can only receive it, and give thanks. The bread of the Lord’s Supper and the bread with which we make sandwiches are not simply the same, but nor are they completely different or unrelated. They are related as the barley loaves Jesus gives the multitudes in John 6 are related to the bread of life that Jesus talks about later in the same chapter. The Lord’s Supper teaches us that every feeding is miraculous. It is not just the Lord’s Supper, but every loaf of bread we consume that is provided to us by the sheer grace of God. The bread that perishes is the bread that we try to hoard, that we regard as our rightful due, that we believe is ours or mine, not yours. The reason that the Lord’s Supper undoes this division between what is mine and what is yours is that it incorporates both me and you into a larger body, the Body of Christ. As Paul tells the Corinthians, “Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (10:17). Because we are all one body, “When one members suffers, all suffer together, and when one rejoices, all rejoice together.” In the Body of Christ, the difference between what is mine and what is yours is therefore radically called into question. I want to conclude by returning to the story of Rosalinda and the bird. Why would it have been the wrong thing to give her money for the bird? Because it would have turned the gift into an exchange, and therefore reestablished the boundaries between me and her, mine and hers, that the gift had breached. Something profound was happening in the gift; in receiving the gift instead of making a purchase, I could not live with neat boundaries between us. Rosalinda would indeed approach me for money, mostly for medicine, many times during my two years in Santiago. I would give her money that I had received from the U.S., but it made me uncomfortable. I wanted to pretend that our friendship transcended material want. But being part of the same body meant that I could not ignore the boundaries between mine and hers, and I could not help but see that our membership in the body of Christ called those boundaries into question.