The Gospel With No Eucharist

"The Gospel With No Eucharist"

John 6:1-15
July 26, 2009

After this Jesus went to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, also called the Sea of
Tiberias. A large crowd kept following him, because they saw the signs that he was
doing for the sick. Jesus went up the mountain and sat down there with his disciples.
Now the Passover, the festival of the Jews, was near. When he looked up and saw a
large crowd coming toward him, Jesus said to Philip, “Where are we to buy bread for
these people to eat?” He said this to test him, for he himself knew what he was going to
do. Philip answered him, “Six months’ wages would not buy enough bread for each of
them to get a little.” One of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, said to him,
“There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish. But what are they among
so many people?” Jesus said, “Make the people sit down.” Now there was a great deal
of grass in the place; so they sat down, about five thousand in all. Then Jesus took the
loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated;
so also the fish, as much as they wanted. When they were satisfied, he told his
disciples, “Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost.” So they
gathered them up, and from the fragments of the five barley loaves, left by those who
had eaten, they filled twelve baskets. When the people saw the sign that he had done,
they began to say, “This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world.”
When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him
king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself.

This morning I want to direct you to page 9 of your bulletin, rather than the cover which
has been my custom the last few weeks or so, and I want you to look at one of the
grandest pieces of art ever crafted, Michelangelo’s La Pieta, the enormous statute that
resides in the Vatican. Jonathan Kirsch, the author of the recent book called The
Grand Inquisitor’s Manual invites his readers to contemplate the following:

Let us imagine a traveler arriving in the city of Rome when the Renaissance was in full
flower, a pilgrim or a merchant or a diplomat. He seeks out the chapel near St. Peter’s
Basilica where the Pieta of Michelangelo is now on display and he spends a few
moments admiring the sublime depiction of the body of the slain Jesus in the lap of his
grieving mother. Pieta mean “pity,” and the scene is rendered with exquisite
tenderness and profound compassion. Like Michelangelo’s frescoes on the ceiling of
the nearby Sistine Chapel—the finger of a very fleshy God touching the finger of an
equally fleshy Adam—the Pieta celebrates the beauty, dignity, and grace of the human
body and the most exalted emotions of the human heart.

At the very same moment, however, and not far away, hooded men in dungeons lit only
by torches—henchman of what would come to be called the Roman and Universal
Inquisition—are applying instruments of torture to the naked bodies of men and women
whose only crime is to have entertained some thought that the Church regarded as
heretical. The victims’ cries, faint and distant, reach the ears of the traveler who gazes
in prayerful silence at the Pieta, or so we might permit ourselves to imagine. Yet the
torturers are wholly without pity, and they work in the sure conviction that the odor of
the charred flesh of heretics is “delectable to the Holy Trinity and the Virgin.”   (Kirsch,
The Grand Inquisitor’s Manual 1-2)

It is a frightening and bewildering moment, this moment of imagination that Kirsch
invites us to contemplate, certainly because of those cries in that dungeon, but
because he wants to see the awful contradiction between these two images:
Michelangelo’s celebration of the human body even as seen in this tragic scene, of
Mary holding her oldest son, and then the contrasting scene of hooded men using their
instruments of torture on the same human body, the same human beauty, trying to
wrench out of these people confessions for believing in ways that were in conflict with
some particular church doctrine. I have been struck of late by our capacity for human
evil in the name of goodness or some sort of higher cause, and especially our
willingness to do it in the name of Jesus. There is something about religion that
sometimes drive people to do all sorts of dastardly things in God’s name—9/11 or the
Inquisition, or for those of us who trace our roots to the earliest Pilgrims and Puritans,
the witch hunts of our forbearers, or even their willingness to exclude other Christians
from their colonies, even as they themselves fled England for religious freedom. Now,
the other side of that coin is La Pieta, Michelangelo’s beautiful masterpiece, created for
the glory of God, and that alone is in many ways an answer to those who lay all of
human evil at the feet of the religious impulse—like most things, there is shadow and
there is light, and people of faith are at their best when they tend to that light within
them, that God-given light, rather thanwhen they fall prey to the shadow within them,
within us.

And yet, so often we allow the dark to overwhelm us, and we confuse the two, the light
and the dark, thinking that the light needs our shadowy deeds in order for that light to
continue to flicker, as if the way to tend to the light was to squash all competitors, to
destroy the darkness, to extinguish all other lights. It is a disease that has eaten into
the heart of the faith Christ left behind, and I have no easy explanations about why a
religion of love and grace can somehow be twisted in someone’s mind as to include
acts of torture or intolerance or exclusion. Is there something to what Jesus said that
caused so many of his followers to start the process of squashing dissent of any sort? I
don’t think so, but because Christianity was never a monolithic religion, never had
simply one spokesperson, aside from Jesus, and never had only one written version of
his life, never had only one interpreter of the Jesus story, as found in the many voices
in the letters of the New Testament, perhaps the Church has struggled with those
different voices. Maybe we humans crave clarity so much that we are willing to destroy
all the other voices in order to get to that one voice that we are finally sure is God’s
voice, as if we could every completely know for sure that the voice we are hearing is
God’s voice—a bit of humility is something we followers of Jesus sorely lack, I think. All
through the letters of the New Testament, you found multiple voices being heard, and
disagreed with, and you find people calling each other the equivalent of heretics, even
that early on. Already, the process of exclusion has begun—“those people are not real
followers of Jesus, not like we are!” seems to be mantra of some in the New Testament.

Even today’s text from the Gospel of John hints at some undercurrent of disagreement
about who to include and exclude that’s going on in the community in which the Gospel
of John is written. Most of us know already that John is unique for a lot of reasons,
different from the other three Gospels—for instance, John doesn’t have Jesus teach
through the use of parables; John has Jesus doing his ministry for three years rather
than one, as in the other Gospels; there is no birth story for Jesus—he has a cosmic
beginning, as if he simply just walked out of desert, out of the heart of God; the writer of
John has Jesus use the words “eternal life” rather than “kingdom of God”; and only
John has recorded some of our favorite stories about Jesus, like his raising of Lazarus
and his conversation with the woman at the well. Even more interesting is the fact that
the Gospel of John contains no moment where, at the end of his life, in an upper room,
Jesus lifts up the bread, breaks it, and offers it to his twelve disciples as a symbol of his
body, and likewise with the wine. In John, the story is not there, and instead you have
Jesus telling them to serve one another, something he demonstrates himself as he
washes and wipes their feet.

Now, why in the world did this community, this early Christian community, not include at
least a version of the Lord’s Supper that was similar to the one found in the other three
Gospels? Well, we don’t know for sure, but scholars are pretty sure that this Gospel
was the last one written, and written by a community that had a different experience of
Jesus than those communities that gave us Matthew, Mark and Luke. We also know
that it was written during a time when some Christians were being told by their Jewish
brethren that they were no longer Jews, no longer faithful Jews, because they believed
in this Jesus of Nazareth—that is why you find language in the Gospel that seems so
hostile to “the Jews” rather than the more nuanced portrait you find in the other three
Gospels. You can imagine how traumatic this must have been for that early Christian
community, who saw themselves as Jews who were simply following a Jewish Messiah—
and how it might have shown up negatively in the portrayal of Jews that is evident in
John, a portrayal that has often been used to justify the sin of anti-Semitism.
Nonetheless, this portrait of Jesus in the Gospel of John is different, very different, and
I think it can offer us a word of hope, especially to those of us who wonder whether or
not religion just naturally always leads to places like the dungeons found near St. Peter’
s Basilica, just within hearing distance of Michelangelo’s ode to the beauty of Christ and
the human body.

What we may find here in our text today is something that one of my professors from
seminary shared with me many years ago, and that is simply the Gospel of John’s
version of the Last Supper, of the Eucharist. You see, the story of the Jesus’ feeding
of the 5000 is one of those few stories you find in all four Gospels, so important was it
to the earliest Christian church, but John does something different with it—John
perhaps offers it to us as a widening up, an expansion of who is believed to be
welcomed to the table of life. There is nothing really different about John’s telling of
this story—minor differences here and there that one finds in the handiwork of a
storyteller that wants to enunciate this or that aspect of the story. We all know this
story, it comes up every year in our lectionary, in that cycle of readings we listen to
every year—and yet, here in John, this feeding of the 5000 perhaps matters a bit more,
especially because there is no other meal, no other moment when Jesus explicitly
breaks bread and offers himself to his disciples.

What I think might be most useful for us to consider is why the Gospel of John wishes to
exclude a story where the twelve disciples are given the Eucharistic meal, and instead
offers us a story where 5000 are included, where five thousand are given a gift of the
table rather than simply the twelve. You see, some scholars, including my professor
from seminary, think that John’s understanding of discipleship is wider, more inclusive
than the other three Gospels—and that instead of twelve disciples, there are more
disciples—more stories about women are included in John, more hints that there were
others who were understood to be disciples of Jesus. Now, that doesn’t mean that the
twelve are not important in John’s Gospel—just not as important as the other three
Gospels portray them to be, that indeed there were more disciples to be included in the
Jesus story than had previously been understood. And coming from a Johannine
community, a community that gave us the Gospel of John, that had just been told that
they were not included amongst God’s people, this means something, this means
something big, I think. For the Gospel of John, it mattered that all could be included,
that those who were counted as “insiders” was wider and deeper, more plentiful, than
had been previously understood—the members of John’s early community knew
exclusion, they knew what it meant to be “other,” and they didn’t think that limiting that
gift to just twelve was right—no, the welcome feast, the welcome table, the movable
feast, as it has been called, included far more than those 12 disciples who gathered in
that upper room, some fifty years earlier.

And yet, it is not a lesson we have ever quite learned, have we, we disciples of Jesus,
this one who challenges the powers that be, that challenges religious and social powers
that seek to exclude the poor, the defenseless, the prostitutes, the tax collectors, the
nobodies, from the table of life. Just last week the Episcopal Church in America lifted
its temporary moratorium on ordaining gay and lesbian clergy after the election of
Bishop Gene Robinson and has begun a discussion about including special marriage
rites for those seeking same sex marriage. Immediately, some Anglicans decried the
decision, the same ones who decried the inclusion of women into the priesthood in the
mid-seventies and they seemed to make statements that implied that “authentic”
Christianity was best seen in who it excluded from its welcome. For them, the true test
of a real, faithful Christianity was its exclusion of gay and lesbian people from its
embrace. Interesting, isn’t it, that in the minds of some, maybe most Christians, that the
measure of orthodoxy, the measure of authentic discipleship, is determined by the
decision about who to exclude from the table of life—the disease, the sin, that has
haunted us since the beginning of the church, that gave birth to the Inquisition, with its
obsessions with thought crimes, with crimes around belief, and its readiness to
determine who is a “real” Christian, this disease still haunts us, as it haunted the
earliest disciples, and sometimes even Paul and others in the New Testament.

But the disease is not the Gospel, it is not the Good News of Jesus Christ—it wasn’t
then, when Paul and others were trying to exclude others from the table, even as they
shared the Good News—it is, once again, the tension of the La Pieta and the dungeons
near St. Peter’s Basilica being only yards away from each other being lived out in an
earlier age. What the writer of John’s Gospel tries to do, in his own awkward, imperfect
way, a way scarred by the ugliness of his rhetoric around the Jews, what this writer tries
to do is to point us to the heart of what Christ has done on that cross, in that empty
grave, and that is to show us the heart of God, a heart that does not hate, that does
not exclude, that does not mark others as outsiders, but includes, includes more than
twelve, more than a hundred, but instead includes thousands, millions, more than we
ever expected, more than we had ever hoped for. What God does in Jesus is a
miracle, a miracle of love, of inclusion, of hope, in a world that seeks to divide us all up,
in a world that even tries to do that within the church, through the designation of
someone else as heretic, because “they” do not believe as we do, through the
designation of someone else as immoral, because they do not love the same way we
do. What Christ does, what God does in Christ is to welcome us to that other side of
the Sea of Galilee, sometimes called Tiberius, to that place where people are
welcomed, where all are welcomed to the table of life, to the table that includes all of
us. And even more miraculously, with all of our differences of beliefs, with all of our sin
and shortcomings, this table of life feeds each and every one of us, a sign surely that
we are home, finally, home in the deep embrace of the God who could not wait to
welcome us all in. Amen.