Gift of self

Tenth Sunday after Pentecost; 1 August 2021; Proper 13B (RCL); 2 Samuel 11:26-12:13a; Psalm 51:1-13; Ephesians 4:1-16; John 6:24-35.

The little vignette of Nathan’s challenge to David would make you suspect David didn’t think he’d done anything wrong until Nathan told his little story. Imagine being Nathan, and having to tell the king he messed up. This was a king who regularly killed those who killed his enemies, so he clearly had a temper. Like a good court jester, Nathan gets David to pass his own sentence.

David has done the things Samuel warned the people of; conscripted men for his army, taken women for himself, and even had Uriah killed to cover his crime. One begins to wonder why David is looked back on as the ideal king, given the rocky history of his reign. Just how is it that he was a man after God’s own heart?

Perhaps the nostalgia is for the kingdom as it was under David and Solomon. Last week’s lesson began with the line, “It was the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle.” If YHWH got his start as a war god, the a warrior will be seen as the ideal king. Over and over again in the psalms, prayer is made for the king’s success in battle. David was certainly a successful warrior.

A nation’s identity is often founded on its success in war. John Murray (in We hold these truths) wrote that the existence of the nation-state is predicated on the ability to make war. Certainly, American civic religion values our ability to make war, and we are willing to forgive ‘successful’ politician a lot in exchange for their ability to increase our standing in the world.

David forged the national identity of Israel as the single kingdom uniting the tribes of Israel, Judah, and Benjamin. One expects such behavior of a warrior, and so it is forgivable. Jesus is forging (or perhaps baking is a better metaphor) a different kind of identity. He has fed 5000 people in the wilderness and escaped from the crowd’s attempt to make him king. And in today’s reading, we learned that Jesus has created this identity by the gift of himself.

Moses brought together the people of Israel in the wilderness through the gift of the manna. People who share a meal become at least for a moment a cohesive social unit. The children of Israel shared the same meal for 40 years in the wilderness, and found their identity as a people dependent on the grace of God. The prophets often looked back to that wilderness experience as the honeymoon of the marriage between God and God’s people.

In his discourse following the feeding of the 5000, Jesus suggests that that identity is in the past tense: It was not Moses who gave you bread from heaven, but my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. And this bread will last forever. And this bread is Jesus himself. The identity Jesus gives to us is created through his gift of himself as our food. It is not created by a king who brings us success in war.

This should force us to rethink how we interact with one another. A nation grows by taking resources from the periphery and bringing them to the center (Jerusalem, Rome, America); Jesus’ community expands by taking resources from the center and pushing them to the periphery (the gift of self to others). The two could not be more opposite. And if we built community after the fashion of Jesus, no one would ever be hungry or thirsty again. Sir, give us this bread always.

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