Proper 16, Year B | II Kings 8 (selections) | Ephesians 6:10-20 | John 6:56-69
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
August 25, 2024
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
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After taking a break from our regular texts the last two weeks, we jump back in to find ourselves in overdrive, covering the end of David’s story (sort of), sorting out the closing chapter of Ephesians, and finally reaching the end of five weeks spent in what’s known as Jesus’ “Bread of Life Discourse”—and each one of those things deserve some attention.
Two weeks ago we read the story of the death of one of David’s sons, Absalom. What we missed between that event and the sordid tale of David and Bathsheba was their baby’s death and yet another troubling story of failure: this one regarding David’s inaction. David’s eldest son, Amnon, raped his half-sister, Tamar. When David found out, he chose not to act against his heir apparent. Two years later, Absalom, Tamar’s full brother, took his revenge, assassinating Amnon in front of all his brothers. After three years of exile and two additional years without seeing his father, Absalom launched a coup, during which David was forced to flee Jerusalem. He very nearly took the entire kingdom but was killed—against David’s express command—when discovered trapped in the aftermath of a battle. David returned to the throne, but his mourning for Absalom disheartened the people who had supported and defended him.
Last week then we would have heard of David’s death and the rise of Solomon, another son of David and Bathsheba. Solomon was committed to following the Lord, and God honored him with the wisdom that he had requested. Solomon went on to defeat his remaining brothers in the war of succession and establish himself as king over Israel, as David had promised Bathsheba. He then had his people set to work building a temple for the Lord, and today we read of its dedication.
Moving on to Ephesians, after our first two weeks of praise and awe for God’s work in reconciling long-divided peoples through Jesus, Paul had moved on to more practical recommendations, encouraging people to demonstrate this new reality through their daily lives by living in honesty and love. Today we finish up our series of readings with instruction to don God’s armor, which is entirely structured around self-defense, not attack, and to continue offering prayers for one another. However, it’s important to note that the Lectionary skips over a section of the letter known as “the household code,” which includes the infamous verses about wives submitting to their husbands and slaves submitting to their masters, “doing the will of God from the heart…” and “[rendering] service with enthusiasm.”[1]
Our Gospel, then, concludes Jesus’ long discussion about the Bread of Life, which began shortly after the Feeding of the Five Thousand. After seeing Jesus miraculously provide food for that many people, a crowd sought him out in hope of establishing him as a new king. Jesus, not remotely interested in the promotion, spends the next thirty-some verses trying to redirect the peoples’ attention from the miracle itself to what the miracle was demonstrating. In the process of declaring himself to be the bread that comes down from heaven and encouraging everyone to “eat” this bread and “drink” his blood—a metaphor for remaining in faithful relationship to him and, therefore, to God—quite a few of his followers decide that this isn’t what they had signed up for and choose to walk away.
On the surface, these three texts appear completely unrelated to one another, but they do contain a subtle theme: the concept of containing God, of restricting how, where, and among whom God is allowed to work. Solomon’s prayer wisely recognizes the futility of building a Temple for the Lord and assuming that the One beyond all creation will literally dwell in it. Still, he asks that God would somehow do so—or at least honor the attempt and intent. But understanding frequently fades with time, and within a few hundred years, we find the people of Israel making presumptions about God’s support and protection simply because they possess that particular building. And when the Babylonians ultimately plunder and level Solomon’s Temple, the people think that God has abandoned them.
Ephesians requires us to consider the “household code” to fully make sense of its connection to containing God. There’s substantial division among churches today regarding those verses, with some congregations and denominations, genuinely desiring to be faithful to the Bible and longstanding tradition, requiring their people to adopt those same practices while others, just as intently striving to be faithful to the spirit and direction those verses point, seek to honor their implications without imposing the culture of 1st Century southwestern Turkey on modern American life. Having grown up in the first camp, I recognize and respect that sincere hope of serving and pleasing God through fastidiously following what the Apostles wrote, but I think we also need to take the verses we read today into consideration.
One of the world’s great philosophical questions is, “What is the nature of ‘evil’?” When we hear the term, some people might imagine some sort of personification like a devil or some other monster. For others it could look like a sort of nebulous badness—a sort of conglomeration of harmful actions or intents somehow condensed into a dark, ominous cloud. But the word that Ephesians—and nearly the entirety of the New Testament[2]—uses has a much more practical definition: oppression. That’s what we read about in today’s passage—not some sort of generic “evil” but oppressive spiritual forces and a time of oppression. It’s also what we’re requesting in the Lord’s Prayer: “deliver us from oppression.”[3]
Now what people understand to be oppressive can vary from era to era and culture to culture. The Ephesian household code describes common and generally unquestioned[4] realities of Greco-Roman thought and practice at the time it was written. The ancient world’s understanding of women—and children—had them functioning more along the line of what we think of a property rather than their own full persons. With few exceptions, men made and were responsible for life’s important decisions not only at home but across society. Likewise, slavery was a widespread fact throughout the Roman Empire. Paul wasn’t endorsing or promoting its institution or practice;[5] he’s addressing an everyday reality his audience would have actively experienced.
For us in 21st Century America, however, those instructions fall under the Bible’s concept of “evil.” When everyone—men and women—are supposed to have equal rights and we strive to treat everyone equally, demanding that someone “submit” to another is a form of oppression. Likewise with any attempts to justify or reimplement slavery. What was simply a fact of life two-thousand years ago on the opposite side of the world is utterly (and appropriately) foreign to us, and forcing those customs upon people today is rightly viewed as oppressive or “evil.”
This is where we see another attempt to contain God. God’s work and presence aren’t limited to one era or one culture or one set of family or social practices. God’s ways can’t be restricted by words on a page, no matter how important we might consider those words to be. In Galatians Paul tells the Greco-Celtic people of central Turkey that they don’t need to adopt traditional Jewish practices in order to be true Christians. In Romans, he argues the opposite, saying the Latinate Christians can’t rightly force Jewish Christians to abandon their customs and culture. Christianity isn’t revealed by how a certain people do something or by the rules they follow but by the fruit of their lives and actions. Nothing prevents God from working among people, no matter where or when they live or how they think or what they might value. Nothing binds the movement of the Holy Spirit. God cannot be restricted or contained—not by buildings, not by cultures—not even within sacred texts.
And that brings us back to our Gospel, where we find Jesus going out of his way to liberate God’s work and presence amongst the people of his day and, eventually, throughout history itself. Jesus, the incarnate Christ, lived as God’s active presence in early 1st Century Palestine. But that presence has never been restricted to one particular time or place, nor was it contained within any one of his miracles. So he called on people craving the gifts he could offer them to shift their focus and instead chew on who he was, to take this reality of God’s presence among them and then to consider its implications and digest its truth until they could recognize not only that presence standing in isolation before them but God’s presence among and within themselves.
With the gift of his flesh and blood, Jesus liberated God’s presence from any form of containment save God’s own Image. He released that presence from one single human body to the Body of Christ, which stands without limit. So we, members of that body, consecrate the bread and wine, recognizing both the memorial and that same mystical presence of Christ’s body and blood as the disciples experienced. We join together as family to feast, ingesting and becoming both in and among ourselves that same body and blood. And having fed, we realize that same presence, not simply isolated within our individual selves but moving and living and loving, throughout our week and throughout our world.
God cannot and never has been contained within one building or one people group. God’s presence and activity have never been restricted to one culture or one set of words or even one individual. God flows freely throughout Creation, making themself known through faithful acts of love. God walks among us and within us, body and blood, as we share that love each day of our lives.
[1] Ephesians 6:6-7 | All Bible quotations are from the NRSV unless otherwise noted.
[2] 95 out of 111 (85%) of all appearances in the NRSV
[3] Matthew 6:13 | KJV | alteration mine
[4] At least by those with the power to change them
[5] He may not have even been able to imagine a world without those structures present.