Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost, Year B, 2015 – 2 Samuel 18:4-31; Psalm 130; Ephesians 4:25-5:2; John 6:35, 41-51
And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.
My flesh for the life of the world: here is the heart of our hope, and of all evangelism. My flesh for the life of the world. Come and eat.
If there is a challenge for us in this city, this country, this time, it is to know that we need life. It is to know, as we feast this weekend on the Danforth on souvlaki without end, as we walk any day down the Danforth past restaurants without end, that we do not have the bread we need. Like the crowd in John 6, we think we know bread. Jesus feeds 5000 people; Jesus promises people the bread that gives life, and the people flock to him: give us this bread always!, they say. You seek me, Jesus says, not because you saw the sign I did, but because you ate your fill of the bread.
We think we have life, we who have bread in abundance. But look again. Look at the ads that also line the streets of the city. Let Calvin Klein serve as an example. Earlier this summer I saw on Facebook this Calvin Klein ad: 3 almost naked teen-agers half-way to an orgy, with beautiful bodies…and lost/feral eyes.
It was not life that I saw looking out of their eyes. In the midst of all this having, this bread without limit, we are lost. In the midst of life, the BCP says, we are in death.
Nor are we the only ones. It is an old problem. Consider David, King of the Jews. David who had it all, the kingdom, the power and the glory; certainly all the bread he could wish for. Having it all, he took Bathsheba, and had Uriah killed, and thought he knew how to live. And the prophet Nathan came to him and said, “Why have you despised the Lord? You have struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword, and have taken his wife to be your wife, and have killed him with the sword of the Ammonites. Now therefore the sword shall never depart from your house.”
Fast forward to today’s reading, 2 Sam 18: Absalom, King David’s beloved son. Absalom, most handsome man in the kingdom; Absalom of the beautiful hair and the rebellious heart. Absalom who also thinks he will have it all, who takes his father’s concubines and seeks his father’s throne. And David’s shining kingdom is rent from within and tragedy follows. “The men of Israel were defeated there by the servants of David, and the slaughter there was very great on that day, 20,000 men” (2 Sam 18:7). In the midst of life we are in death.
And Absalom fleeing is caught in a tree, his long hair tangled in the branches and, the narrative continues, “Joab took 3 spears in his hand and thrust them into the heart of Absalom, while he was still alive in the oak. And 10 young men, Joab’s armour bearers, surrounded Absalom and struck him and killed him.”
Bloodshed haunts the reign of David as he himself shed innocent Uriah’s blood: therefore the sword shall never depart from your house. In the midst of life we are in death.
And David mourns: “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would I had died instead of you, O Absalom my son, my son.”
Is there any grief like his, grief of the father for his beloved son; grief of the king for the rending of his house; grief for the death that haunts our days—even and especially when we have it all. Grief for the death that follows from our own sin—“you have struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword…therefore the sword shall never depart from your house.” O my son Absalom: David’s words trace a whole history of loss, all the way back to Cain and Abel; all the way forward to our own day and not just the horror of Syria and ISIS and the Middle East, but the young men and women with the beautiful bodies and the lost eyes.
O my sons and daughters, Jesus might well say, looking out over the city. Jesus, son of David, the beloved son. Would that I had died instead of you, David says. David’s lament, in the providence of God, points also forward, to another son. Into the violent circle of death and sin he comes. He comes, John tells us, as the lamb of the Passover, this blood shed finally no longer for death but for life. He comes as manna in the wilderness, bread of heaven. To a people in the wilderness he comes as the bread of life.
I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven so that one may eat of it and not die.”
In the wilderness the Father God sustained his people with bread. This bread did really save their lives. But it was also a sign, the beginning and intimation of God’s saving purpose: that we might eat and live; that we might not die forever. In the manna that purpose was begun. But there was more, the height and breadth and depth of the love of God still unfolding as God walked with Israel through covenant and kingdom and the kingdom’s loss, in their faithfulness and in their devastating sin; David and Uriah and Absalom all the way finally to David’s other son.
In the wilderness the manna saved the people’s lives. But there was another salvation needed, as the narrative of grumbling and bloodshed and destruction makes clear. Bread is not enough, not even all the bread you can eat, as our own narrative of dissatisfaction and loss of meaning, of bloodshed and destruction makes clear. We need another bread. In the midst of death, we need life. I am the bread that comes down from heaven so that one may eat of it and not die.
O my son, my son Absalom, would that I had died instead of you.
And the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.
Into our wilderness Jesus comes, in the wilderness God with his people, his body the bread of our life. Shall we surely die? Then, God says in Jesus the Christ, I will die with you. I will die for you, O my people, so that you may no longer die but live. And the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.
The Bible/ John’s Gospel, like 2 Samuel speaks true. It does not deny the real problem of death that hems us in even in the midst of the abundance of our life; this grumbling against the life God would give, the death that looks out of the eyes of the half-naked 20 year olds in the desert of our God-abandonment. It does not deny the loss: of David’s son, of David’s kingdom, of Israel’s exile and ours, the church in disarray, this loss of the presence of God.
O Absalom my son. The loss is real.
But the promise is also real. This is my body given for you. Come and eat.
Our hope is as real as the flesh of the Christ, as real as the wood of the cross.
At this Eucharist, we hold hope in our hands.
Take and eat, and come back to me. Now I come to you. Take and eat, O my people; come back to me with all your heart.
The Lord…with heavenly bread makes those who hunger whole;
Gives living waters to the thirsting soul.
Before your presence, Lord, all people bow,
In this your feast of love be with us now.
