The difference between existence and Life; the difference between life and eternal life; the difference between bread that enables survival and Living Bread that gives eternal life – this is the theme of Jesus’ discourse on the Bread from Heaven (John 6: 22ff) with which we have been engaged over the past weeks. This is John’s Jesus: he is the One who has ‘come down from heaven’ to bring eternal life.
What is eternal life? In 6:58, Jesus says,
‘This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died’.
It’s a repetition of 6:50. Sounds great, doesn’t it? But the reality is that those to whom Jesus was speaking died just as the Israelites who ate manna died! ‘The one who eats this bread will live forever’, he goes on to say. Jesus sounds as though he’s claiming to be the mythical Elixir of Life – a guarantee of living on and on and never growing old – or at least, of never dying. This is apparently the difference between bread and Living Bread.
There’s another contrast which, on a literal reading of his words, sounds both fantastical and grotesque: the bread we eat each day to sustain life is bread; the Living Bread is his flesh which we eat and his blood which we drink. Small wonder, then, that many of his disciples ‘complain’ in 6:60, ‘This is a difficult teaching! Who on earth can accept it?’ If that isn’t the biblical equivalent of English understatement, I’m not sure what is!
Eternal Life in John’s gospel
Let’s look for a moment at how John presents Jesus as the bringer of eternal life. At the outset of his gospel, he identifies Jesus’ role (as the pre-incarnate Word) in creation: everything that has come into being has come into being through Jesus (1:3). All that is and all that lives, lives (ie has existence) through Jesus, who, as the Word, is God’s living, active intention for creation. He goes straight on to clarify what it is that has come into being in Jesus – life, which is the light of all people. This is a light that shines in the darkness of nothingness (ie the primeval chaos). Yet it is also the Light that shines in the darkness of human existence. To exist is not the same thing as having Life. The Word becomes flesh and dwells among us (1:14) as Light in our darkness.
This is John’s way of talking about creation as ‘fallen’. It has fallen from its original purposes under God. It has become a place of darkness, destruction and death, rather than a place of Light, Life and flourishing. Put differently: God intends the world to be a place of Life, and we have settled for mere existence. This extends also to death. Instead of death being the natural end to life and the passing into life with God, we die as we have lived: in darkness, cut off from God and from Life. We don’t have to imagine this in terms of heaven vs hell, and of going to a place of eternal torment instead of a place of everlasting bliss; John is using a different framework. The emphasis here is not on punishment, but on missing out on Life – both here and hereafter! In Jewish theology, the greatest sin is the sin of the unlived life – in John’s terms, of ‘mere existence’ instead of ‘abundant life’. It is wasted life. John here is thinking far more in terms of death as moving from existence (which is itself a parody of what God intends by Life) into non-existence, instead of passing from Life into its ultimate fullness in and with God. Hence he has Jesus summarise his mission in 10:10:
‘I am come that they might have Life, in all its abundance!’
What, then, is this ‘abundant life’? It is the very Life of God! Jesus is the agent of God’s intention for all of creation – that, here and now, we experience the very Life of God (eternal life) which begins now and goes on ‘forever’ because death is moving into the very presence of God to carry on the Life that has already begun (hence Jesus’ statement about ‘living forever’). Eternal life is about living as God’s children, instead of as self-declared enemies of God. It is Life lived in the Light instead of in darkness.
And how does Jesus accomplish this? John’s Jesus is the One who is ‘from above’. In other words, Jesus is the means through which God’s Life ‘takes flesh’ in the world. Jesus is God incarnate – literally, the presence of heaven on earth! [click to continue…]
No comments:
Post a Comment