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The last
two weeks we have been working with the Bread of Life Discourse in John’s
Gospel. The teaching session takes place
the day after Jesus fed over 15,000 people with five loaves of bread and two
fish. In John’s Gospel Jesus more or
less makes the analogy that just as he fed all those people with bread in the
wilderness – like what God did for the Israelites with the manna – so Jesus is
the manna of true life come down from heaven.
Those who “feed on him”, who singularly devote themselves to him, will
have a Holy Spirit-filled relationship with God which is “eternal life”. That teaching got him in trouble with the
religious authorities and a heated argument developed in which Jesus lost his
cool and after which most of the people who followed Jesus turned away.
This
morning we get what I think is Mark’s account of that day, but it’s many, many
days later. There’s roughly the same
course of events. Jesus performs the
feeding, then he walks on water, then he gets into a dispute with religious
authorities over eating bread. There’s
something interesting here. Most translations don’t follow what the Greek text
of the New Testament actually says. Most
translations just say that Jesus’ disciples were eating with defiled hands
meaning unwashed hands. But, the Greek
says they were eating the bread with
defiled hands not just simply eating with defiled hands. That they are eating the bread is significant and I don’t know why most translators omit
it.
What
bread are we talking about? If you
remember, after the miraculous feeding the disciples collected twelve basketsful
of crumbs. Have you ever wondered what
happened to that bread? Well, in the
next couple of chapters of Mark’s Gospel Jesus seems to take his disciples on a
Kingdom of God Share-the-Bread tour.
References to bread and breadcrumbs keep showing up.
To get
to my point, I don’t think the Pharisees and Scribes are upset because Jesus’
disciples are eating without first ritually washing their hands. I think it’s that Jesus’ disciples are eating this
miraculously provided bread with dirty hands.
I think the Pharisees recognized that God had miraculously provided this
bread as a sign of God’s Kingdom in their midst and that Jesus did in fact do
this miracle. Therefore, as the bread
was manna-like they believed it should be handled as such – according to proper
ritual as spelled out by the traditions of the elders – so as not to offend God. They thought that the disciples were taking
this very wonderful act of Almighty Gawd and treating it as if it were common.
The
hypocrisy of the Pharisees and Scribes is that the Kingdom of God and its King
were right smack dab there in their midst yet they weren’t impressed with
that. Rather, they, in good Pharisaic
fashion, wanted to make the evidence of it, the bread, “sacred” and build a
fence of ritual around it so as not to offend God rather than deal with the
full implications of what it meant that the Kingdom of God was truly and
powerfully in their midst and Jesus was their Messiah.
The
Pharisees and Scribes did this very same thing with the Law of Moses. God gave the Law to his people so that if
they lived according to it, their quality of community would distinguish them
as the people of the one, true God. God
had given them a powerful way of life and they in turn made a religion out of
it. They began to regard the Law as a
sacred list of do’s and don’ts that if you transgressed them you were unclean,
which meant you were not allowed into the presence of God and you needed to be cut
off from God’s people to keep you from touching them and make them unclean
too. If you became unclean, the only way
to get cleaned up was to see the priest and offer the appropriate sacrifice.
To help
one keep from breaking the Law of Moses, over the years the religious leaders
developed little rules and traditions that you had to obey and by obeying them
you kept from breaking the Law. Keep the
Sabbath holy didn’t mean rest, enjoy God and the company of his people, and be
renewed. Rather, to the Pharisees and
Scribes it meant not doing the long list of things the Elders said you couldn’t
do on the Sabbath.
The Church
has done the same sort of thing over the centuries. Rather than understanding ourselves to be
humanity in which God is restoring his image by filling us with his Spirit and
empowering us to love God, ourselves, and our neighbours as Jesus has loved us,
we’ve simply been the group that sets the standards of morality for our culture
and then we judge others accordingly. We’ve
done this with worship. Coming to
worship together is time for us to be in the presence of Christ so that by the
power and presence of the Holy Spirit, he can heal our broken selves, lift our
burdens, set us free from guilt and shame, and give us peace. Worship is time for being in the presence of
God in the midst of God’s people and opening up our hearts to Jesus, the Great
Physician, and saying “Heal me. Make me
new.” Yet, there have been more
church-splitting wars fought over robes, the placement of “sacred” furniture,
plastic flowers, when to stand, hemlines, organs, hymnals, slide projectors,
recognition plaques – have you ever sat down and wondered what the Hell when
seeing the name of the donator engraved on the communion set. That one truly baffles me.
Being a
follower of Jesus and a citizen of his Kingdom is not about the externals of
sacred things and lists of do’s and don’ts. It’s that our hearts are diseased
with sin and Jesus is here in the power of his Spirit to heal us and make us
new. Whether we stand for hymns or whether
church music is played on an organ or an accordion has nothing to do with his healing
our sin-diseased hearts.
The
Scribes and Pharisees said the miracle bread could only be touched with clean
hands that had been washed according to the proper rituals and traditions. Jesus, on the other, metaphorically he’s the
bread the disciples are eating, the bread ironically missing from our
translations, the Bread of Life, and Jesus says it doesn’t matter how dirty our
hands are. Dirt on our hands won’t defile him or us. What is defiling is the stuff we do to
ourselves and to each other because our hearts are diseased with sin. Jesus wants us to eat the bread of his life
in us. He welcomes us as we are into his
relationship with God the Father and they will pour the Holy Spirit into us so
that we know ourselves to be beloved children of God and the Triune God of
grace heals us of our shame and guilt and the selfish desires that when we act
upon them we hurt others and ourselves.
We do
not need to clean ourselves up to be in a relationship with God. We don’t have to wash our hands to eat the
bread. We just need to start eating the
bread. We just need to partake of this
relationship with God in Christ and start praying, learn Jesus and his ways…that’s
it…and he will make us new. Amen.
