Please give me a Sign

You are looking for me. How poignant was Jesus’ statement taken from last week’s gospel. Yes, the followers of Jesus, still not wanting to believe through the signs they were already provided, were looking to be spoon fed what they half-heartedly wanted to believe. Yet, by virtue of their human nature, found it hard to believe. Doesn’t this sound familiar to us now, here in the present? Show me please, so that I may trust.

We are taught to read literature as if it were a newspaper. Time is sequential and reality is “flat.” It’s one–dimensional, in that the words on the page are an assemblage of alphabets to communicate information in our language through our intellect in real time. What we see on the surface is what really is in black and white. This is not the case when we read the Gospel and especially John’s.

David Steindl-Rast writes in Deeper than Words: “to understand John’s gospels in the way they were meant to be understood, we must develop a sense for poetic language. These images speak to our intellect through our poetic sensibilities…Tuning in to this language means both taking it seriously and not taking it literally.” Marcus Borg tells us that John’s gospel invites his hearers to see in a radically different new way. His appeal is to the imagination, to that place within us where our images of reality and of life itself reside.

So when John begins the first chapter of his Gospel with In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God (verse 1)…And the word was made flesh and dwelt among us, he announces the incarnation of God in his fullest humanity as the Word became flesh in Jesus, and by extension, he also signifies that the Word becomes flesh in us.

So back to our Gospel (John6:41-51). The signs Jesus followers are asking for are signs that were prophesized in the coming of the Messiah, namely, the return of manna falling from heaven. But Jesus attempts to raise their hearts and minds to a higher level, away from manna, the perishable food: I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the desert, but they died; this is the bread that comes down from heaven so that one may eat it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven…whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.

With this, Jesus makes the distinction between the perishable things of this world and the eternal life in God, lived through Jesus’ Word made flesh in us as we become the bread of life when we share our lives with compassion for one another.

When Jesus speaks about “live forever,” he is talking about eternity. When we think of eternity, we usually think of the afterlife. But eternity is timeless; it has no before or after; eternity is the “life to come” but it is the present life. We are living in eternity, now. So we look for signs and ask: how many times have we seen God acted out in the love of Christ, in the little things of life and yet, resisted or failed to make the connection? There are no coincidences; God reveals himself in the here and now.

It’s a quiet thing that happens when we are immersed or as I often like to think, marinated in the words by our sharing of his bread with one another. It all seems to happen on tip toes.

When it all comes true
Just the way you planned
It's funny but the bells don't ring
It's a quiet thing
When you hold the world
In your trembling hand
You think you'd hear a choir singing
But it's a quiet thing
There are no exploding fireworks
Where's the roaring of the crowd
Maybe it's the strange new atmosphere
Way up here among the clouds

Happiness comes in on tiptoe
Well, what do you know
It's a quiet thing
A very quiet thing.

        Kander and Ebb, Flora the Red Menace