Proper 13: John 6:24-35
They said to Jesus, "Sir, give us this bread always."
Law, broadly speaking, involves four elements: law is the ordering/organizing of behavior through good thinking (reason), for the general good (a common goal that all serve), made by whoever has care of the community, and declared or somehow announced. So a command to do a particular act is a law in the true sense only when it promotes the general good; where general good means not some generic goodness of certain individuals, but some single common goal that all serve. A true law promotes human well-being.
This is all well and good as definitions go. It provides some terms for judging what constitutes law, and what is closer to lawless action. The daily news cycle presents numerous examples of laws being challenge, re-written, or created that may, or may not, order our behavior through good thinking or be for the general good. Such is the reason why law schools continue to prosper while other schools (seminaries) are closing left, right and center. Law is good business.
So when we watch or experience a ground-shift in the 'law of the land', where the law-making authorities are overthrown or made redundant , we pay attention. To see the demise of a dictator or the collapse of an oppressive regime , and in the clearing smoke and clutter, to see arise a new order that is truly an expression of good thinking and the common good, is to be privy to a remarkable working out of human well-being. I have in mind the myriad of shifts that go under the title of Arab Spring, but you may have other places and times in mind.
For our purposes this morning, if we are to consider the Arab Spring as a re-ordering for the common good, what kind of change is it? Tariq Ramadan, one of the foremost Muslim intellectuals, calls the events "uprisings", more permanent than "revolts" but still short of thoroughgoing "revolutions". According to Ramadan, a revolution requires a complete change in the political rule and economic structure. If it is incomplete or manipulated, or if it fails, it becomes a revolt in history, expressing the peoples’ aspirations without concretizing their hopes. Thus for Ramadan, the term “uprisings” conveys cautious optimism. In his estimation, Tunisia is the only clear democratizing success, and there it remains unclear if the new dispensation will be fundamentally more just than the last.
A true revolutionary change does not occur by mere progress along the established lines, but by radical transformation of the lines themselves. A creative, revolutionary change even though it is not a mere advance along the old lines of continuity, but a discovery of new lines, does not fully realize itself until it can be seen as in a new kind of continuity with the past. The revolution is not consolidated until it sees itself as the 'natural' fulfillment of the aspirations of the people. Standing on the other side of such a change, the idea is to look back and see the new order as expressing the deep and often unspoken hopes for human well-being, hopes that could only be realized with a tectonic shift in how a people and a country are organized towards common goals and common goods for the benefit of all.
If we follow Tariq Ramadan's analysis, the events since 2010 in Africa and the Middle East fall short of revolution, despite the laudable rhetoric often thrown around by politicians and pundits. We may wonder: can there ever be a true revolution, one where radical transformation takes place that bring about a true and lasting order? Can there be a new way of being community, a new law?
If we stick to my general definition of law as the ordering/organizing of behavior through good thinking (reason), for the general good (a common goal that all serve), made by whoever has care of the community, and declared or somehow announced, then we glimpse an emerging new order in Jesus' words from St. John: ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.' We may take this on some spiritual level, and leave Jesus' words as poetic metaphor, or we might hear in such a declaration an announcement of something truly creative and revolutionary: that humanity is summoned, called, to a destiny where the goal of human living is not the fragmented state that we see all around us, but a unity, a point of view from which all our striving for community and justice and love, is made possible and intelligible through a renewed humanity. For the Christian, this new order is our incorporation into the divine life of love and joy through our unity in Christ. In his human life, and eventual death and resurrection, his body becomes the foundation of a new humanity.
We generally do not talk, let alone think, of Jesus in this way, even in the safety of the church. We are more likely to limit the influence of Christ to private spirituality or politicized moral debates, yet what scripture attests to is something far more radical. In Jesus is human communication with God, and this communication, this bodily contact, enables us to criticize the present world, our present society, in terms of a future development which we can for the moment only dimly understand. With the confidence of being held in loving existence by the Creator of all, we can venture forward into an area of which we have no maps, doing so in faith, that the revolution of our world and it's loves and desires, will, in God's time, be complete. Then we will truly see and understand our destiny as friends of God and each other. Then the words of the people, "sir, give us this bread always" will be a request that is finally and ultimately met.
It must be asked: when and where will this revolution of Jesus take place? If the response is: at some future time, after the collapse of other competing legal or political systems, then we are no better off than the dreams of the likes of Karl Marx. What Christianity declares is that the revolution is here and now. We hear this in St. John, as the verbal tense that describes Moses and the given of bread from heaven is transformed into the present tense: it is my Father who gives you the true bread of heaven. In our lives ordered by God's gracious acts of mercy and forgiveness; in our daily life organized towards the good of friend, neighbor and even enemy; in our desires, shaped by justice and charity; we participate in the formation of a people who think and act in the present and in doing so foreshadow the promise of eternal provision and care.
What has taken place in countries like Tunisia is therefore not simply a curiosity of history, but is a reminder that our deepest longings and our proper destiny is to be a people ordered to freedom and peace. For the Christian, we recognize such uprisings as something belonging to God's desire for us all. Yet we also recognize that the only revolution that will satisfy our human longings has begun in Christ: the one in whom we have life eternal. It is he who gives life to the world. In him is the hope of a new humanity
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