A Sliver of Infinity

Propers: The Twelfth Sunday After Pentecost (Lectionary 19), AD 2024 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

“I AM the Bread of Life.”

This is the first of seven “I AM” statements, spoken by Jesus Christ in the Gospel of St John: I am the bread of life; I am the light of the world; I am the door; I am the good shepherd; I am the resurrection and the life; I am the way, the truth, and the life; I am the true vine. In two additional verses, Jesus declares Himself “I AM” yet without a predicate nominative. “Very truly I tell you, before Abraham was, I am.” And then of course when the guards come to arrest Jesus in Gethsemane, He says to them, “I am He.”

In that latter case, according to John, the guards fall down before Him, because Jesus has invoked the divine name. Ἐγώ εἰμι, an emphatic “I AM” is the Greek rendering of the Hebrew יהוה, the holy name of God, which pious Jews of Jesus’ day dared not speak. If the opening of John’s Gospel weren’t clear enough—“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”—nor Thomas’s confession of Christ’s identity at the end of John’s Gospel sufficiently blunt—“My Lord and my God!”—here John has Jesus continually and consistently identify Himself with God.

Welcome to the central scandal of Christianity. Welcome to the Incarnation. The whole of our theology and entirety of our faith rises and falls upon the brazen assertion that this man, Jesus Christ, is God upon this earth. Not some demigod, mind you, not some angel, but the infinite, eternal, transcendent One; Creator of this and all possible worlds; omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, and omnibenevolent; God with a capital G. God is Man, and Man is God, in Jesus Christ.

That statement is and ought to be a bombshell.

Everything that we do here, everything that we say or sing or practice or preach, hinges upon the conviction that when we become one in Jesus, we thus are made one with God. That’s why we study His Word, and breathe in His Spirit, and eat of His Body and Blood, and follow His commandments to the best of our ability, to walk in His Way together. If Jesus weren’t God, then He’d best get out of our way. But He is God. And so to know Him is to know the Father’s only Son, and Word, and Image, and to be made all one in Him.

Once upon a time, a single person, the Blessed Virgin Mary, knew union with Christ Jesus, sharing in His Body and His Blood. By grace and blood and water, He then called His holy Church, to serve as both His Body and His Bride, a kingdom of sainted sinners still at work within this world. One day He shall draw all that there is unto Himself, for so He has promised, and God does not break promises. Know this—know God in Jesus Christ—and you already have His everlasting life. Follow Him into the grave, and He shall raise you up.

“I am the bread of life come down from heaven,” Jesus says. To which the people around Him reply: “Well, what the heck does that mean? Come down from heaven—we know your dad, he’s a builder! And you’re bread now? We’re not even sure who made you a rabbi.” Honestly, their skepticism is rather understandable. So much of religious interpretation deals with how literally we take things. What of this is metaphor, and what of this is fact?

Years ago I heard a preacher on the radio rail against the Eucharist, or at least against the idea that it could be anything other than a symbol. Yes, he admitted that Jesus clearly states, “This is My Body. This is My Blood.” Yet he reminded us that elsewhere Jesus also says, “I am the door.” “Now, that doesn’t mean,” the radio preacher continued, “that He had a handle and hinges. Jesus wasn’t made of wood. It’s just a metaphor!” So too, he insisted, was Communion.

“Ah,” I remember thinking, even as I drove along, “but that isn’t what a door is, now is it? That’s what a door is made of: handles and hinges and wood. But that isn’t what makes it a door.” That isn’t its purpose, its function, its essence. A door opens a barrier. A door lets people through. And you had best believe that that’s what Jesus is for us. He is our gateway, our entryway to life, more so than any manufactured portal here below. Jesus isn’t just a door; He’s the door, the original idea of which all doors are imitations.

This applies to all the “I AM” statements. Jesus is our shepherd and light and resurrection, the way, the truth, and the life, the true bread come down from heaven to give His life for the world. People dismiss this as metaphor, as though to say that none of it were real. But in fact they have it backward. It’s that Jesus is more those things than anything mortal man has ever known. He’s the true bread, the true vine, the true life everlasting: the Archetype of all that’s ever been. And what we call the real world is a metaphor for Him.

Jesus says that what bread really is, isn’t just water, yeast, and flour. What bread really is, is that which comes down from heaven to bless us all with life. When the grain gathers the sunlight and then is broken for our bread, that’s the metaphor, the lesser truth that points to the greater. Jesus is the real thing; the only real thing. All the good in all the world remains but a shadow of the goodness that is God. Is Christ really our bread? O Christian, Christ is more our bread than bread could ever be.

In the Incarnation, our Creator has entered Creation, like an author stepping into her own book, or a painter who could walk within his painting. Indian theology speaks of God dreaming all possible worlds, while also entering into His own dreams as a character within them. We all come from God. We are all sustained by God. We all return to God. Thus He consecrates the whole of His Creation, a temple where His Spirit deigns to dwell. To say that God created out of nothing is to say that we are made from nothing other than Himself.

God dwelling within that which is not God—the Creator revealing Himself to His creatures through Creation—this too is Incarnation, the mystery of faith. Jesus is Creator and Creation as a whole. Finitum capax infiniti: in Him, the finite contains the infinite. This is how we understand the Sacraments, remembering that sacrament means mystery. Christ contains God. Bread contains Christ. When we eat the bread, the infinite dwells in us. We are made into Christ, and thereby made one with God.

The wonder of this promise ought to strike us where we stand, in silence, ecstasy, and awe.

Is such mysticism literal or symbolic? Do we hold it as a metaphor or fact? Truly I tell you, the older I grow, the less I distinguish the difference. I have within me a long-standing suspicion, which by now could be called a conviction, that when it comes to matters of the spirit, to the higher levels of reality, the distinctions which we draw here below between metaphor and fact, between art and science, all break down into truth. Truth determines reality rather than the other way around.

We hold up a morsel of bread and repeat the promise of Jesus: “This is My Body.” We hold up a chalice of wine and hear Him say, “This is My Blood.” Is it really, or is it a symbol? The answer of course is both. It is a symbol what contains that which it signifies. It is bread and Body, wine and Blood, Creator and Creation, a sliver of infinity contained within the finite. Behold the Incarnation, the mystery of faith. Taste and see that the Lord is good.

Of course, sometimes we must stop and shake our heads a bit to clear them. Wait, now, we have to ask ourselves, just how far does the rabbit hole go? Is this not the son of Joseph? Is He really come down from heaven? Just what is the bread of life; or the way, or the truth, or the resurrection gate? Who could ever be both infinite and finite? And what are we even talking about in matters human and divine? Who on earth would dare to try to save us from this mess? Is He just a man, or is He truly God?

To all of this and more, Jesus Christ proclaims: “I AM.”

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout
Blog: https://rdgstout.blogspot.com/
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St Peter’s Lutheran
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Nidaros Lutheran
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