Fourth Sunday in Lent (4)
“I am the bread of
life” (John 6:35)
When we want to compare one thing to another, we have a number of ways of doing so. We can use a simile, like Jesus’s “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed (Mt. 13:31). We can use metaphors, like the Psalmist’s “The Lord is my rock, my fortress and my deliverer” (Ps. 18:2). We can use an allegory, like Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress—a literary form surely inspired by Jesus’s parables like: “A sower went out to sow.” Today we still use figurative language; we talk about a bull market when we are referring not to the selling price of bulls but to the way business is charging ahead (and that itself is a metaphor). Using a characteristic of one thing as a picture to highlight a characteristic of something else is as old as humanity, and such examples as these show no sign of dying out (we still might say: you are my rock).
However it is sometimes a challenge to make the connection between the image and its reference, to understand exactly what the metaphor is a picture of. Today this is in part because our modern world began its move into modernity at a time of profound religious and social upheaval. Up to that time a correlation had been assumed between the (imperfect) visible world of matter and the (perfect) invisible world of ideas. The word used to describe this traditional correlation is not simile or metaphor or allegory, but symbol. Symbolism occupied a place of growing honour in the Western world in the first 1500 years of the common era. The arcane traditions of a monarchy much in the news today were founded in the heyday of symbolism. A pope and a king, the supreme symbols in Christendom, may have been all too clearly imperfect in their conduct and rule, but their position was the earthly reflection of the supremacy of the King of kings and the first head of the Church on earth, so respect and reverence were due. But when the world of humans, the world of seeds and bulls, rocks and kings, came to be seen not as a visible reflection of an unseen reality, not as a set of material examples of timeless ideas, but as an autonomous world in its own right, governed by specific discoverable laws, this correlation was no longer taken for granted. The execution of a king was one of the most profoundly shocking events of 17th-century England. It marked the irreparable split between timebound things and the timeless realities they had previously represented.
For all its benefits,
the Reformation, coinciding with the rise of science, contributed much to this
split, to this loss of the symbol, and to the determination that from then on
the main way to compare things would be by way of similes. Hence the
difficulties we have today with the very concept of a monarchy and with the
symbolism of the complex etiquette surrounding the royals.
But symbolism is profoundly Christian, as both Brian Black’s course on medieval illuminated manuscripts and Jason’s course on the sacramental life make unforgettably clear. Symbolism developed out of the fundamental biblical revelation that human life was created in the image and likeness of God, and that all creation is sacred as the expression of God’s omnipotence as Lord, His love as Saviour and his infinite wisdom and beauty as Creator. This means that the world of earthly symbols and that of the Kingdom of Heaven are inextricably bound together, and what God has joined, let no one put asunder.
We can now see why, in our text for today, Jesus does not say: “I am like bread…I am like the way, the truth and the life…I am like a good shepherd.” His statements do not connect two disconnected worlds by way of a simile. To Christians, Jesus is living water, He is the bread of life. To the eye of faith, God’s gifts to us of bread and wine belong to a treasure of created things (‘creatures’ as our eucharistic liturgy sometimes delightfully calls them) that occupy both realms of human and divine and freely move back and forth between them. God gives us bread not just to satisfy physical hunger but as an expression of our dependence on His very body for the life of God in all its fullness. God gives us sheep, and he called a shepherd to found a people of his own, not just to kick-start a pastoral farming industry, but to prepare us to understand the One who is not just the Lamb of God but also the Shepherd of our souls. The King of kings allowed the Israelites to have a king despite the inevitable disappointment human kings would turn out to be.
The profound importance of symbolic thinking in the Bible did not prevent Israelites from finding it puzzling and even alien. The woman at the well, Nicodemus, the religious leaders who witnessed the miracles of feeding—all were hampered by literalism when it came to understanding how Jesus could claim to be the water of life or the bread of life, or how he could insist that “you must be born again.” Eventually the disciples, as literal-minded as any, and their descendants down the centuries, understood how heaven and earth came together in Jesus, and that this reality could be expressed in symbols, from the cross on a grave, to the fish drawn by Christians in the catacombs of Rome, right up to the glorious symbols of a gothic cathedral.
The period of Lent lies under the shadow of the most powerful symbol of all times and all places. Unlike water, wine, bread, sheep and kings, the Cross, in its physical sense, was not an expression of God’s loving creatorship but was crafted out of the darkness of human rebellion against the Creator. God doesn’t make crosses, only fallen humans do. And yet the Cross of Christ became God’s glory, and we sing of the power of the Cross. How could that be? Even all the Lents of time and eternity may not be long enough to sound the full depths of this now-treasured symbol.