Could you allow me to start with a silly story from my school days? I remember two brothers at school who were almost identical twins. Their father had a business making plastic mouldings and, on a school visit to the factory, I remember, joking in a rather unkind teenage way, that his sons must have been fashioned in the same mould as they looked just like their father. A bad joke, I know!

Who is this man?

I begin with this story because today we continue with John’s account of the ways in which the disciples, the crowds, and the religious authorities, all attempted to understand Jesus. They tried to place him in a ‘mould’ that would make sense to them. ‘Who is this man?’, the disciples asked when he calmed the wind and the waves. Was he another Moses the crowds asked, as he had fed them with bread in the desert as Moses had?

No, the religious authorities replied,

‘This is the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know.’

John 6: 42

That was, in a sense true, but it did not explain or contain the whole truth, because Jesus escaped and continues to escape all attempts to categorise or contain him, either within philosophical, religious, scientific, or any human definitions. Instead, Jesus talked about coming from heaven.

‘How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’? John 6: 42

That is a question we continue to ask today, and indeed struggle to answer because he continues to escape us, or at least escapes the mould in which we attempt to place him.

Matisse

The artist who best expresses the uniqueness of artistic genius is, to my mind, Matisse, but before he discovered his own unique style he went through many others. Starting as a student at the ‘École des beaux- arts’ he was trained in the grand traditions of French painting, but he soon moved on. He was introduced to Impressionism by the Australian artist John Russell, but moved on, again, to the Post Impressionists, and then the Neo-Impressionists before launching out in a new movement ‘Fauvism’. The Fauvists were called ‘Wild beasts’ because of their bold use of colour and it was with colour that Matisse discovered his own vision.

The Red Room 1908

‘The Red Room’ is the painting in which Matisse finds his own voice or, more correctly his own vision. Using colour alone to define the spaces he creates what is, at first sight, a red room, but the flat surfaces and spiral patterns suggest that this is more than a painting of a room, it urges us to think further and imagine more. Matisse has given us a room so we can locate ourselves within it, it is solid and we can identify the objects in it, but it suggests that beyond what we can see is another world of wonder and beauty. This is the artist’s eye giving us an insight into their world and their unique vision of it.

The Bread of Heaven

I want to use that image as a way of speaking of Jesus' words ‘I am the Bread of life’. We all know what bread is and how it sustains life so we can begin to understand what Jesus is saying. He is the one who sustains life, but then we get lost when he repeats the words adding:

‘I am the living bread that came down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die.’ John 6: 50

Here we are asked to think beyond the bread we eat to a mystery that escapes us, as Jesus escaped the crowds, as Jesus still escapes all attempts to put him in a box and market him as some kind of wonder loaf! The words ‘From heaven’ are, I think, a way of saying ‘This is beyond you’

But there is another way of understanding these words because Jesus adds that ‘the bread comes down from heaven’, in other words, it is given to us, and it comes down to us so that we do not have to attempt the impossible and reach up to heaven with our own ideas.

‘I am the living bread that came down from heaven.’ John 6: 51

This is the bread that Jesus gives to us, not bread we can grasp at for ourselves. It is all gift or as Paul describes it ‘Grace’. More than this Jesus has left us a meal in which we can actually eat this bread, it is real bread, though in wafer form. It is physical bread just as Jesus was really physically present on earth, and as he promises, he is now present in the bread and wine of Holy Communion.

Son of the Father

The religious authorities thought they could identify Jesus because they knew his parentage. They were wrong about that, but if they had listened to him they might have guessed what he was saying:

‘Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father’ John 6: 46

Jesus was not the son of Joseph, he was and is the Son of God, and like those two boys I remember from school, he is the very image of the Father. If we truly want a taste of heaven we are invited to the heavenly banquet today.

‘Whoever eats of this bread will live forever, and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh’ John 6: 51