The Bread of Life - 2 Samuel 11:26-12:13a; John 6:24-35

I have had many literary heroes over the years, but the first time I truly identified with a fictional character was in the 6th grade, when I read E. L. Konigsburg’s 1968 Newberry Award winning classic, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. The book follows 12-year-old Claudia Kincaid and her little brother Jamie as they run away from home and spend about a week living in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. While there, they learn about a recently donated sculpture that might have been made by Michelangelo. They become determined to solve the mystery of the sculpture’s origin, because, of course, in any children’s book worth its salt, children are far more capable than adults.

Recently, comedian Guy Branum took to twitter and expertly summed up why I loved this book and this character so much. He said, “there is no villain in "From The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler" (hereafter MUF). Other, lesser works give you a great big bad with no moral ambiguity. Voldemort, White Witch, etc. The villain in MUF is existential dread, it's knowing how boring your life will be.” Twelve-year-old Hannah felt this deeply. Both Claudia and I, in our pre-teen angst, considered our life and thought, is this it? Naturally, I cringe at the memory of that attitude today. 

But while it can be comical when suburban middle schoolers complain about the dullness of their lives, we have all experienced the feeling of deep dissatisfaction with what life has given us. Perhaps it is a job we hate but can’t get out of, or an in-law who makes our blood boil, or a chronic illness that makes daily tasks difficult. Or perhaps, like Claudia, the cause is harder to name, just a general dissatisfaction, a hunger for something unexpected, something life-giving, something awe-inspiring. The pandemic has offered us a wealth of dissatisfaction: isolation, unplanned homeschooling, and endless zoom meetings, just for starters.

There’s also a lot of dissatisfaction in our scripture readings today. David is the king of all Israel.  He has wealth, safety, occupation, entertainment, companionship. For all intents and purposes, he has everything he needs and much, much more. But for some indiscernible reason, when David sees Bathsheba for the first time, everything he has is no longer enough. He is not satisfied. To be satisfied, he must have her as well. 

Likewise in John’s Gospel, 5000 people have just eaten their fill and witnessed incredible miracles, yet when they see that Jesus has left them and moved on, they cannot abide it. Everything they’ve just experienced is not enough, and they hungrily seek more. I just love this season in Lectionary Year B. Week after week, we listen as both King David and Jesus are confronted with similar trials, but make drastically different choices with drastically different consequences. 

In our lesson from Samuel, Nathan tells David the story of a greedy and dissatisfied man who uses violence and exploitation to get what he wants. David is appalled at the tale, not realizing at first that the story is about him, and Bathsheba and Uriah. Nathan shows David that when faced with his own dissatisfaction, David did what he usually does: he chose earthly power. He chose the kind of might that humans often grasp, might can be exerted over other humans for selfish and destructive purposes to satisfy the powerful. 

Then, in John’s Gospel, the crowd shows signs of similar violence, pressing Jesus to provide more food, more miracles, more answers. They want their new hero to satisfy all their hunger. At this point in the story, a modern reader might expect Jesus to acquiesce to their requests out of his eternal kindness and generosity. But Jesus resists. He resists perpetuating this cycle of consumption of things and power. 

“I am the bread of life,” he says. You don’t need more food or money or astounding miracles to experience true satisfaction. I am all you need to be satisfied, fulfilled, content, empowered, forgiven, healed, loved. The bread of life metaphor is complicated and multifaceted and will definitely take more than one sermon to unpack. Luckily, the lectionary serves us bread for the next several weeks. But a good place to start is with what we learn today, from Jesus and from David. We learn what the bread of life is not. 

Jesus’ response to the crowd is in every way different from David’s response to his own hunger. When David experienced that existential longing we all feel from time to time, he brandished his wealth, he coerced the disenfranchised, and he took a life. Christ offered life, and he offered it to everyone. The bread of life that God gives us is never violent or exploitative or dependent on earthly goods like political power or monetary wealth. The kind of satisfaction that Christ offers is even more fulfilling than a perpetually full belly, more life-giving than any physical sensation we can imagine. 

We also learn today that we have some responsibility. Jesus says that whoever comes to him will never be hungry. As we learned from our Hebrew ancestors, God may rain down manna from heaven, but we still have to eat it. This sounds so simple, accepting the grace of God’s love and turning to Christ for satisfaction. But more often than not, when we are dissatisfied with life and hungry for more, we turn to David’s violent, exploitative methods. We dish out funds hoping our Amazon wishlist will finally bring us peace and happiness. We try to get others to provide emotional satisfaction for us, and blame our friends and families when we don’t feel good our lives. We’ll even step on a few other people to get what we want, putting lives in potential danger to eat at a restaurant unmasked.

I do not mean to accuse. I’m just as guilty of these behaviors as the next girl. I crave my favorite booth at Pizza Café. I’m desperate for live music. I want the same perfectly clean home and exciting overseas adventures we all want. But what the Holy Spirit is showing us in today’s lectionary is that when we seek fulfillment in earthly things, in anything we can attain all by ourselves without God’s grace, chances are it’s only going to leave us more dissatisfied, or even, in David’s case, with a lifetime of trouble ahead. 

Most of us can agree that this pandemic has challenged our ability to seek only the bread of life for comfort and fulfillment. This is partly because we’re stressed and exhausted, but partly because it’s hard to know how the theological concept of eating manna from heaven translates in 2021. Like the crowd that pressed in on Jesus, we want to know what to do to receive the bread of life. Do we just believe really hard? Pray more? Donate more money? Help someone cross the street?

I suspect the answer is different for everyone, and I don’t have an easy solution for you today. I’m hopeful that we’ll learn more as John’s Gospel continues to teach us about bread in the coming weeks. But for now, I think we can start by taking a lesson from David, and remembering that if our search for satisfaction has us spending all of our money or ignoring the needs of others for our own convenience, we are probably not taking the bread of life. 

Now, in case you’ve not yet had the pleasure of reading From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, I won’t spoil the ending for you. But I will tell you this: my hungry-for-life hero, Claudia, discovers that life can be just as exciting and fulfilling in her own boring suburb as it can in a place like the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Perhaps she has something to teach us about the bread of life, and where we don’t have to look for it. Amen.