Water and Bread
a Sermon on Genesis chapters 6 and 7 and Mark chapter 8 given at The College of the Transfiguration, Grahamstown, South Africa, 17 February 2009
by
“Why are you talking about having no bread? Do you still not see or understand? Are your hearts hardened? Do you have eyes but fail to see, and ears but fail to hear?”
In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Both our texts today—the beginning of the story of the flood in Genesis, and, in Mark’s gospel, Jesus’ comments about yeast and bread—can be read sacramentally, that is, in light of a Christian theology of sacraments: water and bread. In this way, I hope to draw out some practical encouragements for us.
What has God to do with water and bread? Why do these things constantly come up in all of Scripture? How does God use them in the divine economy?
Like all material things that God creates and then turns to the purposes of divine salvation, God uses water and bread to touch and heal us—to save us. This is the essence of sacramental theology.
A sacrament is “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual reality,” according to
1. Fear God
“The Lord saw how great human wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil all the time. The Lord was grieved that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain. So the Lord said, ‘I will wipe humankind, whom I have created, off from the face of the earth,’” and also “‘animals, and creatures that move along the ground, and birds of the air—for I am grieved that I have made them.’ But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.”
Here is the gospel in a nutshell, or at least, a foreshadowing of it in its fullness:
(i) God grieves in the face of human sin, because it is a radical distortion of human flourishing.
(ii) In response, God lifts up a holy people,
(iii) which he enables to be holy, in part, by his preservation of them.
There is a paradox here, that can also be tracked in terms of Scripture’s use of the language of “fear.” On the one hand, as all of Scripture teaches, none are holy in themselves; all have sinned and fallen short of God’s glory, so that those who are righteous are made righteous, not by their own accomplishment but by grace. “He promised to show mercy to our fathers and to remember his holy covenant,” sings Zechariah on the birth of his son, John the Baptist; “This was the oath he swore to our father Abraham, to set us free from the hands of our enemies, Free to worship him without fear, holy and righteous in his sight all the days of our life.” God is less fearsome when he is merciful. What, however, does it mean to be set upon the pilgrim’s way, to be saved from ourselves and our enemies, if not also to say with Mary: “He has mercy on those who fear him in every generation.... He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly”—we, who knew that we could not save ourselves and did not deserve to be saved; who humbled ourselves, or rather, were humbled by God’s grace.
In this way, we can understand the story of the flood as a kind of proto-sacrament of baptism, which is itself the prototype, the first and most necessary, of the sacraments. Baptism teaches us to call water a gift—over which the “Spirit moved in the beginning of creation;” through which God “led the children of Israel out of their bondage in Egypt into the land of promise;” in which “Jesus received the baptism of John and was anointed by the Holy Spirit as the Messiah, the Christ, to lead us, through his death and resurrection, from the bondage of sin into everlasting life” (American BCP [1979], p. 306; cf. analogously the South African APB [1989], pp. 371, 382-83). At the same time, in baptism “we are buried with Christ in his death” (ibid.; cf. Rom 6), a necessary prerequisite to resurrection. If we can learn to call this “life,” seeing not as the world sees but as God sees—incorporating all kinds of trouble, hardship, persecution, famine, nakedness, danger, and sword, as Paul says in one of his sobering lists (Rom 8.35); “if,” that is, “we share in [Christ’s] sufferings in order to share in his glory,” then we will, by the power of the Spirit, no longer be “slaves to fear,” says Paul, but the “adopted” sons and daughters of God (8.15, 17).
2. Follow God
A reoriented—baptized—“fear” of God thus yields, more properly, a concerted commitment, by grace, to follow him. And this is what the gospel that we heard is all about—filled with rhetorical questions from a Jesus who is keen to teach and to challenge.
Jesus has, by this point in Mark’s gospel, performed two so-called “feeding miracles,” of the 5,000 and the 4,000; and we know from two chapters earlier, following the first feeding, that the disciples “had not understood about the loaves,” for “their hearts were hardened” (6.52). Jesus continues to perform a host of miracles in their midst, however, not least walking to them on the water, when he said: “Take courage! It is
Take courage. Don’t be afraid. These are words of grace that continue to frame, and may be used to interpret, our gospel text, which shows Jesus striving to help his disciples understand the significance of the bread.
It is interesting to note that just before our reading, following the feeding of the 4,000, the Pharisees come to Jesus to test him and ask him “for a sign from heaven,” to which he replies, sighing: “Why does this generation ask for a miraculous sign? I tell you the truth, no sign will be given to it” (8.11-12). And yet all around this interchange are miraculous signs, that will continue for six more chapters, leading up to the Sign of Signs, the Eucharist itself, when Jesus, Mark tells us, “took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to his disciples, saying, ‘Take it; this is my body’” (14.22).
We might ask: Are not all of Jesus’ miracles, and especially the Eucharist, signs from heaven; even sacramental signs that he used to teach and impart grace? In every case—as we know more from the other gospels than from Mark, who is always pressing on with Jesus to Jerusalem—the outward or visible action corresponds to something we would want to call “spiritual,” as a comfort, an encouragement accompanies the miracle.
I think Jesus’ point to his disciples, however: “Watch out for the yeast of the Pharisees and that of Herod,” is to encourage them to be discerning about which signs are from God and which are not (cf. I Cor 11).
As Jesus says to the crowd in John 6, at the outset of the famous “bread of life” discourse: “I tell you the truth, you are looking for me not because you saw miraculous signs but because you ate the loaves and had your fill. Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you” (Jn 6.26-27). Once we have fixed our eyes upon the food that endures to eternal life, then we will “have eyes... to see,” as Jesus says in today’s text (Mk 8.18).
There is, therefore, in the Eucharist, as in baptism, a spiritual curriculum that Jesus’ word asks us to open our “hearts” to, by faith (Mk 8.17). “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent” (Jn 6.29). That is: “Everyone who listens to the Father and learns from him comes to me” (Jn 6.45). In the strength of that assurance, we can also say with the Jesus of Mark: “whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours” (Mk 11.24).
May we have eyes to see and ears to hear the truth of this promise.
In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Dr Christopher Wells takes up his new post of Executive Director of The Living Church in the summer of 2009. He is a co-founder of Covenant and, since January, has been lecturing in theology at The College of the Transfiguration,
