The people in
John’s Gospel who complain about Jesus remind me a little of how someone
described one of the candidates in this year’s Presidential primaries—“He’s a
stupid person’s idea of what a smart person sounds like.” They see religion as chiefly a matter of
believing certain doctrines, following certain rules, embracing an exclusive
identity and joining a particular group.
And many people who are religious, and many who are not, have that kind
of orientation. But when Jesus says “I
am the bread that comes down from heaven,” he is not placing a building-block on
a new system of religious precepts. He
is offering entrance into a new kind of life.
When the
complainers say, "Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and
mother we know? How can he now say, `I have come down from heaven'?," they
think they are being clever, but really they are just showing how completely they
have misunderstood. They speak from the
vantage point of a consciousness that keeps separate the things that Jesus has
come to unite. For him, being a human
creature of flesh and blood, with a family origin that is common knowledge, is
not incompatible with coming down from heaven.
That is, in fact, precisely the purpose for which he was sent—to reunite
God and human, flesh and spirit, earth and heaven, and to restore the original
nature, the divine image, the life of paradise in which we were all created.
We know very
well the view of human nature that defines and divides people on the basis of sex,
or sexual orientation, or color, or class, or nationality, or religion. But
Jesus invokes the vision of the great Hebrew prophets and says, “`And they
shall all be taught by God.' Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father
comes to me.” The mission of the Spirit
that lives in Jesus is to nourish everyone with the wisdom of God, who created
the whole world, and sustains it in all its diversity, as a single multifarious
feast of love. And love is a way of
being that is characterized by openness.
Love affirms that we flow into and through each other in spite of everything
that we think keeps us separate and closed.
Love gives to the one who is loved the freedom to live and flourish,
trusting that the other is essentially good, essentially worthy, even if he or
she makes mistakes, even if those mistakes injure the lover. It is this gift of wisdom and love that is
communicated to us in the flesh of Christ.
The
openness of Christ’s flesh is revealed on the cross, submitting to the injuries
of fractured human consciousness with compassion and forgiveness. It is manifest in the openness of his resurrection
body, inviting Thomas to place his hands in its wounds. It is tangible in the openness of his
Eucharistic body which is reconstituted day by day in the life of the universal
church, and is never exactly the same twice. What we are and what we are to become is not determined by who our
parents are or anything else we think we know about us—it is a question that
remains open, whose answer is hidden in the life of God. And yet Christ is that answer, embodying the
mysterious and irreducible holiness of life in real, ongoing, ordinary human
relationships.
The letter
to the Ephesians is an instruction to a community that aspires to that live
that new divine human life. It is a
profoundly realistic document. It allows
for the fact that people get angry at each other, sometimes rightfully so. People hurt each other. They even steal from each other. But the letter suggests that such behavior is
not the last word about human nature.
The example of the earthly life of Christ, and the continual spiritual nourishment
of his grace, opens up for them a new possibility. Christ opens a way for them to follow that
breaks out of the endless feedback loop of blame, and shame, resentment and
retaliation and leads toward the openness that is God.
It is a way that begins with speaking the
truth.
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