The Bread of Life

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Herb Montgomery, August 10, 2024

If you’d like to listen to this week’s article in podcast version click on the image below:

Our lectionary reading from the gospels this week is from the gospel of John:

Then Jesus declared, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.

At this the Jews there began to grumble about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” They said, “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I came down from heaven’?” 

“Stop grumbling among yourselves,” Jesus answered. “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them, and I will raise them up at the last day. It is written in the Prophets: ‘They will all be taught by God.’  Everyone who has heard the Father and learned from him comes to me. No one has seen the Father except the one who is from God; only he has seen the Father. Very truly I tell you, the one who believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. 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. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.” (John 6:35, 41-51)

Any responsible commentary on the gospel of John must repeatedly correct the way the Jews as a whole are repeatedly villainized over and over again in the gospel of John. During the years this gospel was written, this was a debate on the inside of the Jewish community between varying Jewish voices. Christianity was separating from its Jewish roots and seeking to distinguish itself for political reasons. As benign as some commentators say that separation may have been originally, John Dominic Crossan rightly demonstrates that the rhetoric by Christians against the Jewish community would become lethal once Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire.

As long as Christians were the marginalized and disenfranchised ones, such passion fiction about Jewish responsibility and Roman innocence did nobody much harm. But, once the Roman Empire became Christian, that fiction turned lethal . . . Externally, records of pagan contempt and records of pagan respect for Judaism started as soon as Greek culture and Roman power integrated in eastern Mediterranean into a somewhat united whole. Internally, divergent groups within Judaism opposed to one another in those same centuries with everything from armed opposition through rhetorical attacks to nasty name calling. Read, for example, Josephus on any other Jews he dislikes, or read the Qumran Essenes of Dead Sea Scrolls fame on those other Jews they opposed. Christianity began as a sect within Judaism and, here slowly, there swiftly, separated itself to become eventually a distinct religion. If all this had stayed on the religious level, each side could have accused and denigrated the other quite safely forever. But, by fourth century, Christianity was the official religion of the Roman Empire, and with the dawn of Christian Europe, anti-Judaism moved from theological debate to lethal possibility. (John Dominic Crossan, Who Killed Jesus?)

Especially when reading John, we must be honest about the narratives of Jewish rejection and Roman innocence found in this gospel. John’s version of the Jesus story has led to untold harm from Christians to the Jewish community throughout the centuries. 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. 

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!

The kind of Jesus following that is only about managing fear of death is also convenient for those in positions of power who benefit and are privileged by unjust systems and ways of shaping our societies. Death-management-only Christianity leaves unjust systems unchallenged, unchanged, and thus untouched. This is why a heaven-focused version of Christianity is often promoted by people in power. They know that a Christianity that is other-world-focused leaves this world, their world, unchanged. I’m reminded of the words of Howard Thurman: “The opposition to those who work for social change does not come only from those who are the guarantors of the status quo. Again and again it has been demonstrated that the lines are held by those whose hold on security is sure only as long as the status quo remains intact.” (Jesus and the Disinherited, p. 14)

We would do well to remember that people don’t get beheaded like John for only showing people a path to heaven. People don’t get crucified like Jesus for only passing out tickets to heaven. People meet those ends when they become a threat to the powerful within the status quo. 

All of this reminds me that a gospel of love must be engaged in our material world. A gospel of love calls us not to minimize the importance of our material world, but, rooted and grounded in our gospel of love, to work to shape our world into a just place for everyone. Believing in a gospel of love summons us to the work of compassion, not just pulling people out of the harm our society too often plunges them in, but reshaping our society in ways that also mitigate or entirely remove that harm to begin with.

I’ll close this week with the words of Walter Rauschenbusch, a key figure in the Social Gospel movement of early 20th centuries, for your consideration. Though the Social Gospel movement was woefully silent on matters of racial justice, today we can choose to engage justice work much more inclusively, including issues of race, women’s rights, LGBTQ justice, and more. 

Rauschenbusch reminds us that when we allow our Jesus following and our belief in a gospel of love to move us to engage our material world around us, this is simply “the old message of salvation, but enlarged and intensified. The individualistic gospel has taught us to see the sinfulness of every human heart and has inspired us with faith in the willingness and power of God to save every soul that comes to him. But it has not given us an adequate understanding of the sinfulness of the social order and its share in the sins of all individuals within it. It has not evoked faith in the will and power of God to redeem the permanent institutions of human society from their inherited guilt of oppression and extortion. Both our sense of sin and our faith in salvation have fallen short of the realities under its teaching. The social gospel seeks to bring humans under repentance for their collective sins and to create a more sensitive and more modern conscience. It calls on us for the faith of the old prophets who believed in the salvation of nations” (Walter Rauschenbusch, A Theology for the Social Gospel, p. 5-6)

Discussion Group Questions

1. Share something that spoke to you from this week’s Podcast episode with your discussion group.

2. How is your following Jesus about more than what happens to us in an afterlife? How does your Jesus following define how you show up in our world here and now? Share and discuss with your group.

3. What can you do this week, big or small, to continue setting in motion the work of shaping our world into a safe, compassionate, just home for everyone? 

Thanks for checking in with us, today.

I want to say a special thank you to all of our supporters out there. And if you would like to join them in supporting Renewed Heart Ministries’ work you can do so by going to renewedheartministries.com and clicking donate. 

My latest book Finding Jesus: A Fundamentalist Preacher Discovers the Socio-Political and Economic Teachings of the Gospels is available now on Amazon in paperback, Kindle and also on Audible in audio book format.

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You can watch our YouTube show each week called “Just Talking”. Each week, Todd Leonard and I take a moment to talk about the gospel lectionary reading for the upcoming weekend. We’ll be talking about each reading in the context of love, inclusion, and social justice. Our hope is that our talking will be just talking (as in justice) and that during our brief conversations each week you’ll be inspired to also do more than just talking. If you teach from the lectionary each week, or if you’re just looking for some thoughts on the Jesus story from a more progressive perspective within the context of social justice, check it out, you might like it. You can find JustTalking each week on YouTube at youtube.com/@herbandtoddjusttalking. Please Like, Subscribe, hit the Notification button, and leave us a comment.

And if you’d like to reach us here at Renewed Heart Ministries through email, you can reach us at info@renewedheartministries.com.

Right where you are, keep living in love, choosing compassion, taking action, and working toward justice.

I love each of you dearly,

I’ll see you next week.

New Episode of “Just Talking” Now Online!

Season 2, Episode 23: John 6.35, 41-51. Lectionary B, Proper 14

Each week, we’ll be talking about the gospel lectionary reading for the upcoming weekend in the context of love, inclusion, and social justice. Our hope is that our talking will be “just” talking (as in justice) and that during our brief conversations each week we’ll be inspired to do more than just talking.

If you teach from the lectionary each week, or if you’re just looking for some thoughts on the Jesus story from a more progressive perspective within the context of social justice, check it out at:

New Episode of The Social Jesus Podcast

A podcast where we talk about the intersection of faith and social justice and what a first century, prophet of the poor from Galilee might have to offer us today in our work of love, compassion and justice. 

This week:

Season 1 Episode 17: The Bread of Life

John 6:35, 41-51

“The kind of Jesus following that is only about managing fear of death is also convenient for those in positions of power who benefit and are privileged by unjust systems and ways of shaping our societies. Death-management-only Christianity leaves unjust systems unchallenged, unchanged, and thus untouched. This is why a heaven-focused version of Christianity is often promoted by people in power. They know that a Christianity that is other-world-focused leaves this world, their world, unchanged. Faith that has become mere death management is, ironically, death-dealing. Faith should first do no harm. It should call us to consider how we show up in our world while we are alive and inspire us to shape our shared world into a compassionate, safe home for everyone.”

Available on all major podcast carriers, 

Or at this link:

https://the-social-jesus-podcast.simplecast.com/episodes/the-bread-of-life

Now Available on Audible!

Finding Jesus: A Fundamentalist Preacher Discovers the Socio-Political & Economic Teachings of the Gospels.

by Herb Montgomery, Narrated by Jeff Moon

Available now on Audible!

After two successful decades of preaching a gospel of love within the Christian faith tradition Herb felt like something was missing. He went back to the gospels and began reading them through the interpretive lenses of various marginalized communities and what he found radically changed his life forever. The teachings of the Jesus in the gospel stories express a profound concern for justice, compassion, and the well-being of those in marginalized communities. This book navigates the intersections between faith and societal justice, and presents a compelling argument for a more socially compassionate and just expression of Christianity. Herb’s findings in his latest book are shared in the hopes that it will dramatically impact how you practice your Christianity, too.

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