Lectionary for Aug. 18, 2024
13th Sunday after Pentecost
1 Kings 2:10-12; 3:3-14; Psalm 111;
Ephesians 5:15-20; John 6:51-58
Teaching is a profoundly humbling process. I can prepare my notes, slide deck and examples. I can also research my students’ contexts to try to understand where they are coming from and what they might be bringing to the texts. But ultimately I have little control over what they hear or what they do with the things they think they’ve heard from me. Preachers all experience the same thing: someone comes up to them after a sermon and says, “Wow, you really blew my mind when you said [insert comment]!” But we didn’t say anything like that. Was it the Spirit? Or did that person just hear what they were equipped to hear, whether or not it was what the preacher said? Sometimes people “get it” when a teacher is talking; sometimes they don’t. This week’s lectionary texts have examples of “getting it” or not.
Solomon was and wasn’t very wise. Did he ask for wisdom and have the ability to solve complicated issues? Absolutely. But was he truly wise? I don’t think so. God granted him wisdom and favor, promising to bless Solomon if he walked in God’s ways and kept God’s statutes and commandments, as his father David had (1 Kings 3:14). In the introduction to this passage we do read that Solomon loved the Lord and walked in the statutes of his father David—except he also offered sacrifices and burned incense on the high places (1 Kings 3:3).
Indeed, Solomon’s idolatry and building up of high places in Jerusalem was his undoing, as he wasn’t wise enough to keep God’s statutes and commandments (1 Kings 11:9-11). Solomon “got it” in that he knew he needed wisdom to govern God’s people. But his unwise idolatry caused the kingdom’s disintegration.
Hundreds of years later some people did, and some didn’t, “get” what Jesus was trying to teach.
First, we need to put the Bread of Life teaching into context. In this Gospel passage, the Last Supper had not been established or mentioned yet (that comes quite a bit later). John locates this dialogue close to Passover (John 6:4), but Jesus is here in Capernaum, not Jerusalem. Christians may read the text as Jesus talking about his body and blood sacramentally, and that’s all well and good. But I don’t think that was Jesus’ meaning for his hearers that day. We must have the humility to remember that the Scriptures are written “for us, but not to us,” as Old Testament scholar John H. Walton reminds us. What did the people to whom Jesus was speaking need to understand?
For starters, folks in first-century Galilee were much more adept in metaphor and poetic, figurative language than most of us reading this are today. It’s important to look at the objections that the crowd actually raises in the dialogue. If we make this passage about not wanting to drink actual blood, as if Jesus is just talking about cannibalism or transubstantiation/consubstantiation, we miss what he is claiming and what the people are having difficulty understanding!
Sometimes people “get it” when a teacher is talking; sometimes they don’t. This week’s lectionary texts have examples of “getting it” or not.
Objectors asked how Jesus could be the bread from heaven because he was from Nazareth (41-42). The objection is not over the metaphor of bread, but that Jesus is making a directional, and therefore Christological, claim that he came from heaven. When Jesus made a deliberately raunchy claim that those who wanted to live forever must eat his flesh, the objection was not “We cannot eat flesh or drink blood!” Instead, the question was “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”
Next week we will see that Jesus’ response to the disciples’ difficulty with his teaching was to insist that they will see him ascending to where he came from (6:62). The whole point was that Jesus was claiming to have come from heaven! The flesh isn’t important, after all—the words that give life are (6:63). The Bread of Life dialogue has been about Jesus’ identity and work all along!
- Jesus frames the discussion by saying that the work God requires is for humans to believe in the one God sent (29, 40).
- Jesus wants people to understand and believe that he has been sent from heaven as the one who will bring eternal life (33, 38, 40, 50, 54, 57-58).
- Just as Jesus has come from heaven to the people, the people need to come to Jesus and abide in him and his way (35, 37, 44-45, 65).
To really “get” what Jesus is saying, we must remember that he began this discussion of himself as the Bread of Life as a way to move away from talking about physical bread to talking instead about who Jesus is and where he is from (26-27).
No one that day thought Jesus was advising cannibalism. That was an insult from Gentiles much later. Instead, Jesus challenged his hearers to “get” what he was saying: he is better news than even manna from heaven, because those who believe in him on his own terms will have eternal life!
