Our gospel reading this morning is taken from the Fourth Gospel, the Gospel according to John, which I’m sure you know is the sort of odd-man-out of the gospels. The other three gospels, the so-called Synoptic Gospels (a Greek word meaning that they see the Jesus story in the same way), pretty much agree and present the events of Jesus’ ministry in the same order over a one-year time-line. John tells the story in a completely different way, with a three-year time span and a different order of events.

This sort of makes sense because Matthew, Mark, and Luke are all believed to have been written at about the same time, probably around the years 50-60 AD, and Matthew and Luke even seem to use Mark’s gospel as source material for their own versions. John, on the other hand, was probably written 40 to 50 years later and seems to use different source material. Furthermore, John seems to have a very distinct purpose in mind for his writing. Bill Countryman, who taught New Testament at Church Divinity School of the Pacific, argued in a book entitled The Mystical Way in the Fourth Gospel[1] that John’s gospel “parallels the structure of the ideal Christian life. Just as the Christian life ideally begins with conversion and goes on to baptism, first communion, and more advanced stages of spiritual growth, so the Gospel of John has a section on conversion, then one on baptism, then one on eucharist, and so forth.”[2]

So we have to read John’s gospel, much more so than the other three, as a literary creation rather than as a history of any sort. When John’s Jesus says something, we have to ask not only, “What did Jesus mean by that?” but also “What did John mean by having Jesus say this in this setting?” This is especially so with stories like today’s where Jesus says something very similar in the Synoptic Gospels but in a very different setting or context. When we hear Jesus say today that we must eat his flesh and drink his blood, being good Eucharistically-oriented Episcopalians, our minds immediately flash to Holy Communion, to the Lord’s Supper, and to the Passover meal in an upper room in Jerusalem. This is where the Synoptics have Jesus say these sorts of things, but that is not the setting or context of these statements as we just heard them from John’s gospel.

When Jesus says here “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you,”[3] he is not breaking the unleavened bread of the Passover nor sharing the cup of blessing at the end of that meal. There isn’t any sort of meal or food of any kind anywhere in sight! This is happening on the day after the feeding of the 5,000 on a hill over looking the Sea of Galilee. Those who had been at that miraculous multiplication of the loaves and fishes have come looking for more, but that’s not what they get. They seem to have found Jesus at worship on a Saturday morning, at sabbath service, because John tells us (immediately after the ending of our reading), “He said these things while he was teaching in the synagogue at Capernaum.”[4]

So a sabbath morning service attended by people looking for nourishment…. We don’t know what the Torah reading for that day was (John doesn’t tell us) nor do we know what other parts of the Hebrew Scriptures may have been read, but this is Jesus’ sermon on whatever those scriptures were. Our current lectionary gives us two choices of what to read from the Old Testament with this Gospel story. One is from the book of Proverbs and describes wisdom, personified as a woman, inviting passersby to come feast with her. She says:

Come, eat of my bread
and drink of the wine I have mixed.
Lay aside immaturity, and live.[5]

The other choice is the one we heard, Solomon’s prayer for wisdom.

The youthful King Solomon describes himself in today’s passage as “only a little child,”[6] but scholars believe he was about 20 to 24 years of age when he took the throne following David’s death. Not too terribly old to have already developed the insight to realize that he doesn’t yet know everything. One cannot accuse of Solomon of suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect, that cognitive bias which leads people to believe they are smarter and more capable than they are. Solomon is wise enough to know that he’s not wise enough yet to govern, and he is wise enough to understand that wisdom is is relational. One can only be wise “in the midst of the people.”[7]

Both of these Old Testament passages remind us that for John, Christ is God’s Wisdom incarnate. This is the central meaning of his Prologue with its great Logos hymn: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”[8] For John “Word” and “Wisdom” are synonymous. As John Calvin wrote in his commentary on this Gospel in the Institutes of the Christian Religion, “‘Word’ means the everlasting Wisdom, residing with God, from which both all oracles and prophesies go forth… [and which] was at the same time the cause of all things, together with God the Father.”[9]

When John’s Jesus declares himself to be “the bread of life” which “came down from heaven,”[10] it is a direct reference to his being Wisdom incarnate. Like the Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus draws the image of bread from the Exodus story. However, instead of linking himself to the unleavened bread of liberation by referring to the consumption of his flesh and blood as a sort of Passover meal, he links himself to the manna the Hebrews received in the desert of Sinai. In last week’s gospel reading, which comes right before what we heard today, he says: “Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This [referring to himself, to his flesh and blood] is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die.”[11]

We all know the story of the manna, right? How it appeared with the dew, looking like coriander seeds, and had to be gathered each morning, how each person was allotted an omer (which is about 3-1/2 pounds), how it could be made into a sort of bread or cake, and how it couldn’t be kept overnight. We all know it as a story of God’s provision for the Hebrew refugees. What isn’t often mentioned in Christian teaching is the allegorical interpretation of the event that is part of the Jewish understanding of their history. For example, a contemporary of John the evangelist, the First Century Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria, in his treatise On the Changing of Names, wrote that the manna represents “heavenly wisdom which is sent from above on souls which yearn for virtue.…”[12] According to the Kabbalah, the mystical teaching of Judaism whose origins are lost in antiquity, the consumption of manna was “a method for internalizing divine wisdom.”[13] In the Zohar, a principal kabbalistic text, we read that the manna represents wisdom which enters and becomes part of the person who consumes it.[14] So what John’s Jesus is saying is that he is a sort of super-manna, a wisdom that surpasses the wisdom provided by that earlier form.

As John Calvin explains, “[R]eferences to eating and drinking are taken as figures for receiving divine teaching and thereby entering into an everlasting covenant.”[15] We find examples of this idea throughout the Scriptures. When the prophet Ezekiel is commissioned he sees a vision of God in which the Almighty “said to me, O mortal, eat what is offered to you; eat this scroll, and go, speak to the house of Israel. * * * Then I ate it; and in my mouth it was as sweet as honey.”[16] In the Book of Revelation, an angel gives a scroll to St. John of Patmos saying, “Take it, and eat; it will be bitter to your stomach, but sweet as honey in your mouth.”[17] In Psalm 119, that long hymn praising the God’s law, the psalmist exults: “How sweet are your words to my taste! They are sweeter than honey to my mouth.”[18]

We still use this metaphor today for studying and learning. A few years ago, when the series Downton Abbey was running on PBS, the New York Times ran an article about how book publishers were cashing in by coming out with various histories, travel guides, memoirs and such, betting that fans of the series were “likely to devour books on subjects the series touches.”[19] More recently, Dartmouth College published note-taking tips for incoming freshman urging students to give most attention to a lecturer’s main points saying, “Concentrate on the ‘meat’ of the subject and forget the trimmings.”[20]

The late Presbyterian scholar Hughes Oliphant Old, relying on John Calvin’s exegesis of John’s gospel as I have done, writes that we feed on Christ in worship in two ways, both by hearing the Word and sharing the Sacraments: “If it is true that the Word of God is a sacred food and drink which nourishes unto eternal life, it is also true that this food is given both in the reading and preaching of Scripture and in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper.”[21] But we also do so beyond the four walls of our worship space! As theologian Jan Heilmann puts it, “[B]elievers’ need to eat, to drink, and to chew—in other words, to incorporate completely—the incarnated logos of God that has become flesh and blood”; the Wisdom of God “reveals itself only if readers chew and drink the words of Jesus in the text through an intensive and repetitive reading process.”[22] In other words, we must study the Bible again and again and again, and incorporate the example and teachings of Christ into our lives.

There is much to be done in this world. As Jesus both taught and modeled, there are sick people to be visited, cared for, and if possible healed; there are people in prison who need to be visited; there are hungry people who need to be fed; there are thirsty people in need of refreshment; there are homeless people in need of housing; there are people in conflict in need of peace. There is much to be done and we are called to do it, but as followers of the Way of Jesus, the way of love, we must do so wisely. We must know why we are doing it and we must know from whence our power and authority to do it comes, and to know those things we must be grounded in and fed by the Wisdom of God.

We began our worship this morning with a prayer which acknowledges this dual nature of the Word Incarnate, praising God for giving Christ both as a sacrifice and as an example to be emulated, and praying for grace to learn from him daily. This echoes the metaphor of manna, which you remember had to be harvested every day. The rabbis tell us that the story of the manna teaches that a “daily [remembrance] of God’s blessings and their significant presence in our lives has the potential to elevate us,”[23] and that the Wisdom of God provides comfort and guidance only when it is “hardened on the forge of actual living” and “refined in the bellows of daily practice.”[24]

So let us follow Solomon’s example and seek wisdom through prayer, through worship, and through studying Scripture and following Jesus every day. In the words of the prayer which we offer on Bible Sunday when we celebrate it in November, let us not only hear the Holy Scriptures read in worship; let us daily “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them.” Amen.

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This homily was offered by the Rev. Dr. C. Eric Funston on the Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost, August 18, 2024, to the people of St. Thomas Episcopal Church, Berea, Ohio, where Fr. Funston was guest presider and preacher.

The lessons for the service were 1 Kings 2:10-12 & 3:3-14; Psalm 111; Ephesians 5:15-20; and St. John 6:51-58. These lessons can be read at The Lectionary Page.

The illustration is an image of Ezekiel eating the scroll is a detail from a 12th-century Latin manuscript, BNF MS Latin 16744, fol. 81r, from the collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

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Notes:
Click on footnote numbers to link back to associated text.

[1] L. William Countryman, The Mystical Way in the Fourth Gospel: Crossing Over into God (Fortress Press, Philadelphia:1987)

[2] Scott Gambrill Sinclair, The Past from God’s Perspective: A Commentary on John’s Gospel (Dominican Scholar, San Rafael, CA:2004), page 4

[3] John 6:58 (NRSV)

[4] John 6:59 (NRSV)

[5] Proverbs 9:5-6 (NRSV)

[6] 1 Kings 3:7 (NRSV)

[7] 1 Kings 3:8 (NRSV)

[8] John 1:1 (NRSV)

[9] John Calvin, Institutes of Christian Religion, I, xiii, 7

[10] John 6:35,51 (NRSV)

[11] John 6:49-50 (NRSV)

[12] Philo Judaeus, On the Changing of Names (De Mut. Nom.), 259-60, quoted in Joel Hecker, Manna and Mystical Eating, TheTorah.com, undated, accessed 6 August 2024

[13] Joel Hecker, Manna and Mystical Eating, TheTorah.com, undated, accessed 6 August 2024

[14] Ibid.

[15] Gabriel Williams, Wisdom Christology and the Bread of Life, reformation21, September 28, 2017, accessed 6 August 2024

[16] Ezekiel 3:1,3b (NRSV)

[17] Revelation 10:9 (NRSV)

[18] Psalm 119:103 (BCP Version)

[19] Julie Bosman, If You’re Mad for ‘Downton,’ Publishers Have Reading List, The New York Times, January 11, 2012, accessed 2 August 2024

[20] STU 100 – East – College Study Skills: Notetaking (Note Taking Tips from Dartmouth), Pima Community College, July 16, 2024, accessed 2 August 2024

[21] Hugh Oliphant Old, Biblical Wisdom Theology and Calvin’s Understanding of the Lord’s Supper, Sixth Colloquium on Calvin Studies (Davidson College, Davidson, NC:January 1992), 111-136, 118

[22] Jan Heilmann, A Meal in the Background of John 6:51–58?, Journal of Biblical Literature, Vol. 137, No. 2 (Summer 2018), 481-500, 496-97

[23] Lisa Gelber, Filling Ourselves with Gratitude: Beshallah, Jewish Theological Seminary, January 15, 2011, accessed 9 August 2024

[24] Bradley Shavit Artson, A Summary of Judaism: Beshalach, American Jewish University, January 30, 1999, accessed 10 August 2024