Summary: The Bible doesn't "say" anything - not until the words in question are interpreted. When such interpretive work is ignored, the words in the Bible can be misused in destructive ways. As a case in point, the passage we read today from the Gospel of John needs to be handled with special care to prevent it from being used - as it sometimes has been in Christian history - as a warrant, or excuse, for anti-Judaism, the theological bigotry found at the root of antisemitism, which is an ethnic and racial bigotry. John's primary message is "Trust Jesus to show us the way to have a life-giving relationship with God."
We'll get to the passage we read today from the Gospel of John in a minute. But first, we need to say a few things about how we should read such passages so the Bible makes the most sense. When people quote the Bible to win an argument, they frequently begin by saying, "The Bible says ...." And then they recite some short passage to make their point.
Scholars call that practice "proof-texting," which means people pick out one or two verses to try to prove something they already believe. It's a highly misleading practice based on the idea that the Bible actually "says" things. The truth is that the Bible doesn't "say" anything - at least not until the words in question are interpreted.
Indeed, even Jesus thought that people quoting scripture must do interpretive work and not just imagine that the meaning is obvious. In Luke 10, for instance, we find Jesus telling the parable of the Good Samaritan. It starts this way: "An expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. 'Teacher,' he said, 'what must I do to inherit eternal life?' He said to him, 'What is written in the law? What do you read there?'"
Did you hear his question? "What do you read there?" He didn't ask, "What does it say?"
That particular wording of Jesus' question is from the updated edition of the New Revised Standard Version. But other translations make it even plainer that Jesus wants to know how the expert in the law interpreted what he read in scripture.
For instance, both the New International Version and a translation by Christian Orthodox scholar David Bentley Hart put Jesus' question this way: "How do you read it?"1 And Eugene H. Peterson's paraphrase of the Bible, called The Message, makes it even plainer. There, Jesus asks this: "How do you interpret it?"2
What that means for us is that there's work to do to understand what those words - and, indeed, any words in the Bible - might mean. That work, for scholars, includes going back to the original Greek, Hebrew or Aramaic in which the Bible was written and figuring out to whom this or that book or passage was written and for what purpose. It means doing word studies. It means understanding the historical context in which the words were written. And on and on. And, by the way, every translation from the original languages into English is itself an interpretation.
As you can see, there are many ways to miss or misread the meaning of passages in the Bible by not doing the necessary interpretive work. When such interpretive work is ignored, the words in the Bible can be misused in countless destructive ways.
All of that is a way of telling you that the passage we read today from the Gospel of John needs to be handled with special care to prevent it from being used - as it sometimes has been in Christian history - as a warrant, or excuse, for anti-Judaism. By anti-Judaism I mean the theological bigotry found at the root of antisemitism, which is an ethnic and racial bigotry.
What we know about antisemitism is that it's among the world's oldest hatreds and that it came to its most vicious zenith in the Holocaust, or what our Jewish friends today call the Shoah, in which Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime murdered some six million Jews in World War II, along with millions of others that the Nazis declared unfit to live - gypsies and homosexuals among them.
Many scholars believe that the Gospel of John - more than the so-called synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke - has been a source of prejudice against Jewish people. Why is that?
Well, let's look at just the first verse of the action of the passage we read today. It says this: "Then the Jews began to complain about him because he said, 'I am the bread that came down from heaven.'"
Why did John use the term "the Jews" and how are we supposed to understand it today? Wasn't everyone in Israel back then, including Jesus, a Jew, except for the Roman occupiers? And what did the Greek word that got translated into English as "Jews" really mean?
As Jim McDermott, an editor of the Jesuit magazine America, has written, "The term 'the Jews' (hoi Ioudaoi in the original Greek) occurs almost 70 times in the Gospel of John. Not every instance is actively hostile; in the Passion story, for instance, Jesus describes the synagogue as a place where 'the Jews' gather ...."
But, he writes, "Scholars generally agree that despite how it sounds, John did not mean 'all Jews.' (The scholar Adele) Reinhartz notes how John uses the term interchangeably with the Pharisees, at one point even in the same passage. For John, 'first-century Ioudaioi were not a monolithic undifferentiated group,' she writes. Indeed, he frequently alludes to the Judaism of Jesus himself."3 So when John writes "Jews," he often simply means residents of Judea without direct reference to Judaism. But that's not how it always gets read.
Was John just saying that some Jewish people at the time of Jesus rejected him? If so, that's fair and accurate. But if John's term "the Jews" now gets used to criticize Jewish people generally as "Christ killers," as has often happened, then we've got a major problem.
Well, you are encouraged to do your own research into the problematic ways that the term "Jews" is sometimes found in English versions of John's gospel. As McDermott notes, it's easy to get a first - and wrong - impression that the gospel writer is being endlessly critical of Jewish people. And that might lead us to conclude that if John thinks that way, we should, too.
In the Christian church today, we want to try to understand what John's Jesus might have been saying not just to the people of Jerusalem then but to us.
If we boil down the passage from John to a single sentence - and sometimes that's a dangerous thing to do - we might put it this way: "Trust Jesus to show us the way to have a life-giving relationship with God."
There's more to the passage, of course, but it's in harmony with the whole thrust of John's gospel, which is stated clearly in chapter 20, verses 30-31, where John writes this: "Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples that are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may continue to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name."
The "bread-of-heaven" language in the gospel reading today reminds us of Holy Communion, or the Eucharist. In that sacrament, we consume Christ so that we may metabolize his holy presence as food for the hungry, housing for the homeless, care for the sick and advocacy for justice for all.
That eucharistic language should remind us that our consumption of the body and blood of Christ, after all, is not simply for our own personal salvation. It's also a way of empowering us to be Christ's active body in the wounded world.
Remember the short passage we just read from John 20, which explained why he wrote his gospel? It was so that "you may have life in his name."
Friends, lots of people seem to want to make Christianity mostly about Jesus' death and what happens after we die. In that theology, swearing allegiance to Jesus and his own death on the cross is simply our ticket to heaven. But John says he wrote his gospel not so the followers of Christ would focus on his death and theirs but, rather, so that we may have life and have it more abundantly.
The Rev. Dr. Mike Graves, author of a recent book called Jesus' Vision for Your One Wild and Precious Life, puts it this way: "(W)hile it's plain and obvious that we aren't born just to die, for some reason a lot of people think Jesus was, that dying was his purpose in life, making Christianity all about death and the next life. Not me. I don't for a moment think Jesus came just to die. I believe he came to live, and for the way he lived, he was put to death."4
Remember that the passage of John that we read today ends with Jesus talking not about death - either his own or ours. Rather, it ends this way: "Whoever eats of this bread will live forever, and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh."
Jesus came to give us life. And if, for you, that life hasn't really started yet, it can start today. It's a gift of divine grace, and life doesn't wait until we die and experience eternity in the divine presence. It starts today.
The Bible says so. Well, wait. No, it doesn't say so. We have to study the Bible's words and interpret what they mean for us in our time and place. But having done that with today's Gospel reading, I'm confident that a fair reading of that passage will lead us to conclude, in Mike Graves' words, that Jesus offers us a vision of our wild and precious life today.