What We Already Know

John 6:35, 41-51

Did you know already, before you got to church today, that Jesus is the Bread of Life?
Or were you surprised, when Deacon Leslie read the gospel, to hear Jesus announce that he is bread?

Yes, it’s old news to most of us. Maybe you’ve sung about it. Maybe you’ve noticed a theme around the communion table, in the Eucharistic prayers.

Some nineteen or twenty centuries ago, very early on in the life of the church, probably from the habits and stories of the disciples who literally walked with Jesus, people who knew Jesus knew that Jesus is closely associated with bread. For two millennia, around our holy tables, we’ve told the story of how Jesus gave bread to his friends, saying “this is my Body; eat in remembrance of me.”  For just about as long, we’ve taught one another that something about this bread has to do with eternal life.

Over the last two millennia there have been differences in interpretation and opinion about just exactly how this relationship between bread, Jesus, and life works out. There’s often quite a bit of difference in interpretation and opinion between any ten Episcopalians eating at the same altar, in fact. But we more or less know that Jesus and Bread and Life have a lot to do with each other.

And sometimes, still, it comes as a surprise to read along in John’s gospel and try to understand what Jesus means when he says, directly, “I am the Bread of Life.” Jesus himself (or at least John, trying to tell us what Jesus said) doesn’t seem to make it any easier, thoroughly mixing claims and commitments about who has access to God and how with strong statements about bread and meat and eternity.

No wonder his first listeners were confused:

Wait, what does he mean he’s bread that came out of heaven? I mean, we know him. We know where he comes from – we know his parents, his hometown, his family and history. This man doesn’t make sense.

The grumbling synagogue leadership who objected to Jesus’ “alternative facts” about who he is and where he came from had some reason to complain. They already knew quite a lot about Jesus, and now he’s spouting contradictions, telling them impossible things about himself as truth. And the truth they already know about Jesus – his family, his history, their relationship to him – is blinding them to the rest of the truth; truth they haven’t yet seen and heard and known.

The same thing happens to us, all the time.

Many of us grew up knowing that a nice tan was the glow of good health…and still have a little trouble with sunscreen.

I simply can’t seem to learn the fancier and more capable features in MicrosoftWord or on my phone because I already know how to do a mail merge or put something on the calendar.

What we know – what we’ve known forever, what was always true – keeps us from being able to learn new things, or to see new truths that don’t match what we know (or think we know).

And while you and I generally already know that Jesus is Bread, so we’re not as surprised as the first century crowds to hear it this morning, the same thing still happens to you and me and Jesus.

One of the spiritual growth groups that’s been meeting this summer told me how surprising it was to read right through the Gospel according to Mark and discover that Jesus really doesn’t seem to talk about love.
Because we’ve been learning since childhood that Jesus is all about love. We’ve heard it in Sunday School, we’ve heard it preached, we’ve sung it with our kids… and then we find it’s hard to know this Jesus in the gospel who talks a lot more about death and seeds and even money than love.

There are truths we want to know - revelation and life - in those unexpected words and deeds of Jesus. But it can be hard to wrap our minds around the contradictions.

If we already know what someone does and says and is, it’s hard to believe it when they tell you and show you a new side, a new truth. Hard even to simply see or hear something that doesn’t match what I already know.

That’s how prejudice works. It works naturally, on all of us, not just in the big “isms” of ethnicity or gender or age, but on the way we know individuals in our lives: strong enough to blind us, even when we want to learn more.

So if we already know who Jesus is, it’s hard – very hard – to hear and learn the truths we haven’t always known.

And yet, that’s what God wants from us, wants for us. God wants us to know Jesus, to know God, more deeply and closely and surprisingly than any of us here this morning already do.

And we don’t get that deeper knowledge from absorbing the conventional wisdom, from what everyone knows, or what I already know, or even by reading the Bible for ourselves, though that certainly helps.

“Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me.” Jesus says. “No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father.”

We can’t do it for ourselves.

We can only get that close to Jesus – only discover the true Jesus, only learn and absorb and know the truths God wants us to know, only get that deep and rich and whole-self relationship – from God’s own calling and teaching.

Sometimes I get uncomfortable when Jesus says these things about “no one can come to me except through the Father” or “no one can come to the Father except through me.”  It doesn’t sound like the welcoming, all-embracing Jesus I already know.

I grumble about it myself, the same way the religious leadership grumbled about Jesus trying to get people to think he came right down from heaven. Or that he’s edible, for that matter.

But if I get past my own blinders of inclusivity, this apparent exclusivity may actually be a more welcoming, giving, generous God, a more loving Jesus, than I thought I knew.

No one is saved by what we already know, Jesus is telling us. God prevents us from salvation of the mind alone: salvation without revelation or relationship, without an ongoing, growing experience of mutual discovery between us and Christ. A relationship and revelation that demands our whole hearts and lives, and gives us more abundant and eternal love and life.

No one can have Jesus without being invited by God. So no one of us, and no one else, can take, can seize Jesus for themselves. I find that reassuring in a world where a whole lot of people of differing opinion want to tell me that they’ve got the rights to Jesus.

In the midst of all that you and I already do know of Jesus; in the midst of a world where most of the people we know think they know enough about Jesus already; God isn’t satisfied. God keeps working to draw us closer.

God works to draw us into an ongoing, deepening, expansive relationship of discovery, of Jesus surprising us with new truth, and of you and I revealing more and more of our hearts and committing more and more of our lives to God.

God draws us, and Jesus surprises us, into new and deeper, more demanding and rewarding relationship: as intimate as eating, as daily and basic as bread, as lasting and abundant as eternal life.