August 9, 2009 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Companion

Calum I. MacLeod
Executive Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 34:1–8
John 6:35, 41–51

“I am the bread of life.”

John 6:35 (NRSV)

God, food of the poor;
Christ our bread,
give us a taste of the tender bread
from your creation’s table;
bread newly taken
from your heart’s oven,
food that comforts and nourishes us.
A fraternal loaf that makes us human.
A warm loaf that makes us a family.

“Psalms for Life and Peace,” Lima, Peru
Bread of Tomorrow

What is it like when your most cherished beliefs or your most basic assumptions or your adopted worldview is challenged by an event or a series of events or by some new piece of information or knowledge? What is it like when that which you have utterly relied on as a way of understanding your world is challenged or lost? This, I think, is not an uncommon event in this postmodern world of ours, a global village in which news and information is available, as they say, “at the click of a button”; when plurality and diversity are the words by which we live by, not homogeneity.

I would think that for many people the experience that we’ve had in the current and ongoing economic crisis would speak to something of this—the people who thought the stock market was always going to go north and never go south despite the warnings in the adverts; those who thought that house prices would always increase, that the money stowed away for retirement would continue to grow, that the endowments and invested funds that helped support the work of churches and nonprofits would always give the kind of yield that they had. Those beliefs and assumptions are necessarily challenged by the events of the last year. How do we respond?

A particular challenge that hit quite close to home this week for me was a report in the news media that one Catherine Brown, a historian of food, had made a discovery that haggis was invented by the English, not the Scottish. (She cites the first published haggis recipe, which appeared in an English, not Scottish, cookbook.)

Now there has been much ink spilled on this topic, much airwave time. I have heard it on the news, on National Public Radio last Wednesday, and there on Thursday this whole topic gets the august placement on the op-ed pages in the New York Times. Alexander McCall Smith, Scottish author and humorist, writer of the Number One Ladies’ Detective Agency novels, had center space to complain that something that was Scottish, obviously, that we believed in that was ours, had been hijacked by the English. McCall Smith said this, and I quote, “It’s like saying baseball was invented in Romania (which it was).”

McCall Smith waxes lyrical about the joys of this traditional Scottish dish (made up of all the things that you don’t want to know about that go into sausage-like foods and then are stuffed into the stomach lining of a sheep and boiled). One blogger responding to McCall Smith wrote this: “The author seems to be laboring under the misconception that haggis is food.” I thought that was great.

But this is a great example of how people react when something they hold onto as a belief or an assumption is challenged. Some simply refuse to believe. McCall Smith’s argument was that of course haggis was Scottish, but everybody knew the recipe so they didn’t have to write it down. It was only the English who had to write it down, so he was still holding onto his belief that haggis was really Scottish. Some, of course, adjust their worldview in order to accommodate the new piece of information, the new event or series of events.

Psychologists and sociologists have a phrase for this. They call it “cognitive dissonance.” When we have a shift in our cognition, our understanding of a situation has to change because of that.

There is a story I love that speaks about how sometimes people can have violent reactions to episodes of cognitive dissonance. It’s about one of the famous Kaisers in Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm who ruled in the early eighteenth century. Friedrich Wilhelm was known to be a short-tempered man. He also detested ceremony. He would walk the streets of Berlin unaccompanied, and if anyone happened to displease him—a not-infrequent occurrence—he would not hesitate to use his walking stick on the hapless offender. Not surprisingly, when people saw the Kaiser at a distance, they would quietly leave the vicinity. Once Kaiser Friedrich came pounding down a street when a Berliner caught sight of him, but too late—so his attempt to withdraw into a doorway was foiled. “You there,” said Friedrich, “where are you going?” The man began to shake. “Into this house, your Majesty.” “Is it your house?” “No, your Majesty.” “A friend’s house?” “No, your Majesty.” “Then why are you entering it?” asked the Kaiser. The man now began to fear that he would be taken for a burglar, so he blurted out the truth: “To avoid your Majesty.” “Why would you wish to avoid me?” “Because I am afraid of your Majesty.” At this, the Kaiser became livid with rage, and seizing the poor man by the shoulders, he shook him violently, crying, “How dare you fear me? I am your ruler. You are supposed to love me, you wretch. Love me.”

A violent response to an episode of cognitive dissonance. Something similar happens in our gospel reading from John this morning. Jesus has done the miracle of feeding the 5,000, and then, surrounded by his disciples and others in Capernaum, he launches into one of the several discourses that we find in John’s Gospel that begin with the phrase “I am.” Jesus says, “I am the bread of life, bread that came down from heaven.” What do the people gathered around Jesus say? They say, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph?” Or we might put it colloquially: “Who does this guy think he is?” Or the great old Scots phrase that’s used as a putdown to someone who is getting above their station: “Ah kent his faither,” meaning “I knew his father.” That’s what the people are saying; they are attempting to cut Jesus down to size, because the import of what Jesus is saying to them is a challenge to every assumption and belief and worldview that they have. So they push back.

This is the first of the “I am” sayings in John’s Gospel. John’s Gospel, probably the last of the four Gospels we have in the canon to be written, was written after a period of time in which much theology and reflection had been done on the meaning of Jesus and in the oral traditions and written traditions passed down. So in John’s Gospel we have these almost mystical, meditative, reflective moments grouped around these authoritative sayings of Jesus, the “I am” sayings”: “I am the bread of life”; “I am the gate for the sheep”; “I am the good shepherd”; “I am the resurrection and the life”; “I am the way, the truth, the life”; “I am the true vine.” Theologian William Placher, reflecting on the “I am” sayings of Jesus, speaks of the authority that Jesus is invoking. “‘I am,’” writes Placher, “was by Jesus’ time something like a name of God,” going back to when Moses encountered God in Exodus: God said Moses was to tell the people that “I am sent you.”

“I am the bread of life” is a multi-meaning metaphor that we encounter in the mystical world of John’s Gospel. What might Jesus be saying in using this metaphor of bread? Perhaps there is in it a promise that, in Jesus, God is our companion. Think of that word companion, made up of two Latin words—com, meaning “with,” and panis meaning “bread.” A companion, a bread fellow. A friend that we eat with—that is the literal meaning of it, expanded now, of course, to the concept of a fellow journeyer, a walker-with, a pilgrim together. Placher reflects on this in his book Jesus the Savior, and he uses a word in conjunction with companion. He writes, “Christ saves us simply by being God with us, having solidarity with us even in the worst of our sufferings.” Solidarity.

Leonardo Boff, the great liberation theologian, once said, “Solidarity is love made public.” Love made public. What might it mean for us? For you? If the claim “I am the bread of life” meant that, in Placher’s words, “Christ is the great companion,” we have a fellow sufferer who in solidarity with us understands our being. God as companion. Might that force us into experiencing some cognitive dissonance ourselves? Might it force us to move away from notions of God learned in elementary school? God out there, God in the sky, God as man with white beard. Might it force us to embrace new and different notions of God—of God within us, of God among us? God is companion in Christ—might that open us to challenging the notions of God as a superhuman being? Or deist watchmaker, winding up the universe and letting it go? Or of God as a puppeteer? Might it instead challenge us to reflect on, to meditate on, to enter into a relationship with God that is not static but evolving as we journey together as companions? To see God not as randomly or arbitrarily deciding issues of life and death but saying in Christ, “I am with you; I am with you until the end of time”? And might it be then that our notions of what eternal life is—the promise of eternal life from the bread of life—would be understood not as some kind of reward after death but, in the words of writer Bruce Epperly, “eternal life as the experience of living in God’s company.”

There is a lovely meditation written by a woman called Barbara Cawthorne Crafton on this passage. She is an Episcopal priest and retreat leader. She talks about how the notion of Christ as the bread of life is transformative of all that is ordinary in our world. She writes, “Jesus says, ‘Let your simple bread become me. Don’t let a single thing in your life, however ordinary a thing it may be, remain untouched by your new life in me. Don’t think for a moment that it is an ordinary thing. There are no ordinary things Allow your eternal life to transform this life so that the two are one thing, a seamless garment.” We hear echoes of Hopkins: “Christ plays in ten thousand places.”

Christ our companion—precious Lord, take my hand. May our prayer be that as we open our hearts to Christ as our companion, we will have our eyes and ears and hearts open to be companions to those whom Christ loves. Thanks be to God. Amen.