This Is A Problem

So the Jews grumbled about Jesus, because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” [John 6:41] This is a problem. This is the text given for consideration in churches around the world on the very Sunday that groups of White Nationalists, White Supremacists, Anti-Semites, Neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan and others gather in our nation’s capital for their Unite The Right rally. This is a problem, as passages like this in the Gospel of John have been cited throughout the Church’s history as justification for anti-Semitism and all claims of White Christian Supremacy, which includes justified misogyny and anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and actions.

Most English translations render the Koine Greek οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι as “the Jews” 67 times throughout the Fourth Gospel. This is a problem. Sermons making “the Jews” appear to be enemies of Jesus has been used to justify anti-Semitism from the earliest days of the Christian Church, through to the Holocaust and in Washington DC today. The writers and editors of the Gospel of John would have no idea how this could have happened. For the word translated as “the Jews” probably means “Judeans” – those who lived in and around Jerusalem and Judea during the time of Jesus. This was a cosmopolitan mix of peoples from all over the ancient world, alongside those who worshipped in Jerusalem and lived in the regions of Judea and Galilee, and who knew themselves as Israelites. Further, arguably what we refer to as “the Jewish people” did not really exist until after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple by Rome in the year 70ce, which was the advent of today’s Rabbinic Judaism. Long after the time of Jesus.

Even if we accept the translation “the Jews,” then one needs to understand that every single person and crowd depicted in John then are Jews. Jesus himself is buried as οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι, “a Jew,” and he is portrayed as saying, “Salvation is from the Jews.” This is a conversation within Israel.

So this grumbling, or murmuring, or complaining crowd with Jesus is not some group of “others.” In the world of John, they are all descended from the mixed crowd of Israelites depicted in Exodus chapter 16: “And the whole congregation of the people of Israel grumbled against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness.” Like the crowd with Jesus, they too are complaining and grumbling. In both cases the issue revolves around food – and specifically manna, or bread that comes down from heaven. Bread that falls from the sky.

In John chapter six they are grumbling because inexplicably Jesus claims that he is the bread that falls out of the sky. But we know your parents, they say. You have brothers and sisters, they say. You could not possibly have fallen out of the sky! You are flesh and blood and got here the same way we all got here – from your mother and father. From the very beginning to this day, this is what the Jewish people do. Israel, as we all know, means “to wrestle with God.” Wrestling with God often means “wrestling” with one another. Discussing, debating and working over things like this is the very nature of what it means to be Israel! Murmuring, grumbling and complaining is all part and parcel of being in the community of YHWH’s people.

Note, John, like Mark’s gospel, does not know anything about a ‘virgin birth.’ John’s and Mark’s Jesus has a mother and a father. No doubt the crowd is also grumbling about the very fact that Jesus keeps appropriating God’s name for himself: “I Am.” This also is a unique feature of the Fourth Gospel – Jesus always saying, “I Am”: I am the bread of life; I am the light of the world; I am the door of the sheep; I am the good shepherd; I am the resurrection and the life; I am the true vine; I am the way, the truth and the life.

As much as claiming to have fallen out of the sky like David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth, all Jesus’ compatriot people hear is “I am.” All the rest like Bread and Light and so forth may as well not be there because once they hear the words spoken to Moses at the Burning Bush as the name of God, that’s all there is to hear. And let’s face it, in this gospel John is making a fantastic claim from the outset that the Word, the Logos, was with God in the beginning. And the Word, the Logos, is God. And the Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood. God comes to dwell among us. And the people in the crowd are just having difficulty wrapping their faithful to YHWH’s heads around all this “I aming” all the time! How can God be flesh and blood like us? That’s absurd! So they murmur, and grumble and complain, and, as we progress through the sixth chapter of John, Jesus pushes right back. This is how Israel does theology.

Just as we are meant to read ourselves as “the disciples” in the other three gospels, we are “the Jews,” or better yet “the Judeans” in the fourth gospel. John and his community of Jews who followed Jesus would be appalled that his story of Jesus would be used to justify the kind of hate-speech, racism and anti-Semitism that have all misconstrued the quite natural and important debate going on this gospel. We have all been wrong to read any and all of this as the foundation of justified division. The crowd’s response to Jesus is blocked by a common-sense logic that takes on the character of certitude. It is honestly difficult to easily absorb what Jesus in John asserts. Yet, it is this kind of “certitude” on all sides of all such discussions that sows human discord and disunity. Such certitude is the enemy of true faith.

Would that generations of Christians would heed what Jesus really says here: it is God who attracts and invites people to this new way of being God’s people that sets about to dissolve barriers and differences between peoples. Everywhere we look in the gospels, Jesus announces that the world is no longer to be divided into us and them, clean and unclean, pure and impure Gentile and Jew. The very name of God at the bush is a form of the verb to be: I am who I am. Or, I will be who I will be.” And this name is not to be pronounced – ever. Scrolls from the time of Jesus even write the tetragrammaton YHWH in a different form of script as a reminder: do not pronounce God’s name out loud. No wonder the people are disturbed at hearing Jesus saying “I am” all the time! For it sounds like that which is not to be spoken out loud.

The assumed pronunciation of the letters YHWH are believed to be an imitation of human breath – Yah – Whehh. If this is the case, God’s name is the first thing we say when we come alive at birth, and the last thing we say as we breathe our last breath. There is no Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Taoist, Buddhist way of breathing. There is no White European, African, Asian, Indian, or Latin American way of breathing. There is no young or old, male or female or LGBTQ way of breathing. There is no religious or scientific or agnostic or atheistic way of breathing. The very name of God levels the playing field. All living creatures on earth breathe that same name, just as we are all made of the same stardust that has been recycling itself throughout the known universe for nearly 14 billion years. From cave dwellers to astronauts, from one continent to another, we all breathe the same way the same breath.

It is a scandal and tragedy how the Church and others have used these stories in the Bible to divide rather than unite us as we already are united by simply breathing. And just this week the Department of Justice has announced a Religious Liberty Task Force. At its unveiling its task appears to preserve conservative Christian Values rather than those of all citizens and religious groups most under attack in the US: Muslims and Jews – both of which are Semites – and the greater LGBTQ community. Much of which stems from poor choices in translation and interpretation of The Bible like we see in John. This is a problem, and judging from what is happening in our nation’s capital on Sunday, and at DOJ, it is a problem for us all.