As we consider our contemplation of John’s Bread of Life discourse, to sum up what we have covered so far, in the synoptic gospels, Jesus is opposed by the powerful, propertied, and privileged within the Jewish Temple State and loved and embraced by the poor, marginalized, and disenfranchised Jewish populace. In John, the story becomes flattened and Jesus is opposed by the Jewish community as a whole. In the synoptics, Jesus debates with other Jewish voices within Judaism, a Jewish voice arguing with Jewish voices. In John, his debates move outside of Judaism, a debate of Christians versus Jews. And once we add the later backing of the Roman Empire and later European countries, John’s gospel sows the seeds that would grow into full blown anti-semitism and eventually the Holocaust of six million European Jews and eleven million others in the 20th century. Supremacism never stays where it starts. The myth of Jewish rejection and Roman innocence must be rejected by responsible Jesus followers today.
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(Read this series from its beginning here.)
What can we glean from this week’s reading in John?
This week’s reading is a reminder of how John’s gospel tends to spiritualize the material, minimize the material, and lift up Jesus—not as an agent of change in our material world but as the means whereby we can escape or transcend our material world including death:
“Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, yet they died. But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which anyone may eat and not die.”
What this week’s reading draws our focus to once again is how important it is that our Jesus following is more than a way to manage the end of our lives or reconcile us to the fact that we will die. Jesus following that has become mere death management is, ironically, death-dealing. Jesus following should call us to consider how we live while we are alive! Jesus following focused only on navigating our dying intrinsically and negatively affects by omission how we live our lives, shape our communities, create societies, and the larger world each of us lives in. When our Jesus following is only about saving souls in an effort to manage our fear of dying, too often we become oblivious to the marginalization and material injustice, oppression, and violence many are suffering today. We become disengaged from the work of shaping our world into a safe, compassionate, just home for everyone and our insipid focus becomes only about getting to heaven. This way of following Jesus is almost wholly unrecognizable from the Jesus story we read about in Mark, Matthew, and Luke where Jesus is much more engaged with people’s lives. Yes, John’s gospel is all about how Jesus transforms death into a portal to life. But the synoptics’ Jesus is all about saving people from the hell they are enduring right now!
We’ll unpack why this matters so much in Part 3.
(Read Part 3)
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