John 6:24-35
Tenth Sunday after Pentecost
2nd August 2015
Sacrament of
the Lord’s Supper
For what do
you hunger? For what do you crave? How many times have you said, “I wish...” and
for what?
“I wish….” Stephen
Sondheim built an entire musical around those two words, “I wish.” At the beginning of Into the Woods the narrator tells us, “Once upon a time in a far off kingdom there lay a small village at the edge of the woods.”[1]
And then we are ushered into the story and introduced to the first character, Cinderella,
who says, “I wish.” She wants to go to
the king’s festival at the palace with her stepmother and stepsisters in the
hope of dancing with the prince. And
there’s Jack and his cow Milky White; Jack wishes that his cow would produce
some milk. There’s the baker and his
wife who are childless and wish for a child.
“More than anything,” they sing, “more than life, more than jewels, more than riches, more
than the moon,” they wish. Jack’s mother sends him to market to sell the cow so
that they could buy some bread because they’re starving. She sings, to herself, “I wish my son were
not a fool. / I wish my house was not a mess. / I
wish the cow was full of milk. / I wish
the walls where full of gold- / I wish a
lot of things....” Little Red Riding Hood shows up at the baker’s. She wishes to buy a loaf of bread for her
grandmother who is home in bed at the mercy of the Big Bad Wolf, who wishes to
eat her grandmother. And then there’s
the witch who lives beside the baker and his wife, the witch who put a curse on
the baker because his father stole some magic beans out of her garden many
years ago. The baker’s father and mother
wished for something that didn’t belong to them and so the baker’s son was
paying the price. He had a curse on him,
a curse the baker didn’t know about until the witch showed up and gave them the
chance to “reverse the curse.” The witch, too, wishes for something. She wishes for
beauty regained, to reverse the curse her mother inflicted on her for losing
the magic beans that were planted in her garden. So, now the baker and his wife wish to have
the curse reversed and soon all of them—Cinderella, the three stepsisters and
stepmother, the prince, Jack, his cow, Little Red Riding Hood, the baker and
his wife, the witch—add a giant who lives in the sky at the top of a beanstalk and
Rapunzel locked away in a tower (they, too, wish for things)—are implicated in
each other’s lives. And all of it is
resolved—or not!—in the mysterious
woods. And so they go; they journey into the woods.
I think Sondheim offers a brilliant
arrangement of Grimms’ so-called "Fairy Tales." The
musical first appeared on Broadway in 1987 and the film adaptation was released
in 2014. This original, creative telling
of these tales by the Brothers Grimm is a searing and profound psychological
analysis into the wishes and desires and drives that determine and shape our
lives, sometimes consciously, often not; sometimes dictated by our own personal
choices; sometimes shaped by external circumstances that we have no control
over; sometimes paying the price, as it were, for decisions made, for desires
pursued in the lives of the people who have come before us.[2]
The moral of the story, from
Sondheim’s perspective, is found in the closing song, “Children Will Listen”:
Wishes are children
Careful the path they take
Wishes come true, not free
Careful the spell you cast
Not just on children
Sometimes a spell may last
Past what you can see
And turn against you
Careful the tale you tell
That is the spell
Children will listen.
Wishes are children.
It’s a cautionary tale that pulls us
inward to consider the wishes and desires and hungers of our lives, which sends
us into the woods to get the curse reversed.
For what do you hunger?
For what do you wish? For
yourself, your partner, your spouse?
What do you desire for your family? For your children or parents? For what are you searching, craving? Where’s
the arrow of desire taking you, moving you?
Can you say? What makes you
tick?
For some, for many, these are not easy questions to
consider. Many move through life
unreflectively, giving little thought to what invites them to get up in the
morning and propels them into the day and then to do the same tomorrow and the
next day and the next. There are some
who don’t know what they want because they’ve never been asked. Others cannot acknowledge their own feelings; they haven’t been given permission to say what they want, to honor and value
what they desire. Others, still, are
afraid to say what they want and wish for because if they do they might somehow
jinx it. We’re all a little
superstitious at times. Or, maybe, if we say what we wish for then that means
we’re responsible for it, that we need to do something about it, to go after
it.
Perhaps you know what you desire,
what you wish for, what your soul hungers for.
But the deeper question, the more important question is why?
Why do you wish for the things you wish?
Why do you crave the things you crave?
Why do you hunger for the things you hunger for? The source of your motivation, that which
determines the vector of desire, the direction of your life, that which moves
you, flows from how you respond to the why
question. Perhaps you know; perhaps you don’t; perhaps you’re afraid to say.
But somewhere in your soul, you know.
That’s what Jesus is trying to get
the crowds to access, that deeper part of their souls. Desire and hunger are all over John 6. The crowd just witnessed Jesus feed five
thousand. He gave them bread. He met one of our most basic needs. Hunger satisfied. But then the crowd goes after him, hunts him
down, all the way to the other side of the lake. They ask him, “When did you
get here?” Meaning the other side. Jesus
gets to the point, “Let’s be honest here, guys, you’re looking for me, not because
you saw me demonstrate the power of God but because you ate your fill of the
loaves. That’s what you’re really
looking for, that’s the hunger that’s motivating you, isn’t it? That’s why you’re following me around, not
because of your love for God, but because you want to get something out of me
for yourselves.” They reason with him,
try to look as if they’re concerned with performing the works of God. They want more proof, more signs. They can’t see it. “How are you different from Moses? He gave manna, food in the wilderness,” they
said to him. This coming from the crowd
that just witnessed Jesus providing food in their wilderness!
Jesus says, “Let’s be honest again
here—Moses didn’t give you the bread from heaven. God gave it to you. And God is still giving you bread from
heaven, bread that gives and sustains life, true life, abundant life.” They said to him, “Sir, give us this bread
always.”
Did they really know what they were asking? Did they know why? Were they ready to be fed by the bread of
life—always? Really? Are you? Am I?
God created us with feelings,
desires, cravings, and hungers. They
come with being human. Sometimes they
get the best of us and get us in terrible trouble and lead us far from home. Sometimes they’re holy, when our desires and
cravings and hungers of the soul actually help lead us to God, in whom all our
desires and cravings and hungers are truly satisfied. That’s what Jesus wants us to see. For what
are you hungry? Why? What we wish for, hunger after will be
realized, fulfilled in him. Follow the
craving, the hunger, the deep desire of your soul, for it will lead you to the
One who placed that hunger there in the first place.
“I am the bread of life,” Jesus
said. “Whoever comes to me will never
hunger, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty” (John 6:35). So where do we get this “bread”? How?
Malcolm Guite is a contemporary poet and Anglican priest who
lives in Cambridge, England. Over the weekend he shared one of his sonnets in
which he asks precisely this question.
Where to get bread?
Where to get bread? An ever-pressing question
That trembles on the lips of anxious mothers,
Bread for their families, bread for all these others;
A whole world on the margin of exhaustion.
And where that hunger has been satisfied
Where to get bread? The question still returns
In our abundance something starves and yearns
We crave fulfillment, crave and are denied.
And then comes One who speaks into our needs
Who opens out the secret hopes we cherish
Whose presence calls our hidden hearts to flourish
Whose words unfold in us like living seeds
Come to me, broken, hungry, incomplete,
I Am the Bread of Life, break Me and eat.[3]
[1] Into the Woods,
music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, book by James Lapine.
[2] Grimms’ Fairy
Tales was first published in 1812 by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. It’s often claimed that Into the Woods was inspired by Bruno Bettelheim’s (1903-1990) The Uses of Enchantment, which offers a
Freudian analysis of fairy tales.
However, Sondheim says, “Everybody assumes we were influenced by Bruno Bettelheim, but
if there’s any outside influence, it’s [Carl] Jung.” Sondheim views fairy tales through lens of Jungian archetypes and the process of
individuation. During
the composition of the musical Sondheim met with Jungian analysts to access the
archetypal dimension of the tales (or Märchen). For a Jungian perspective see
Marie-Louise von Franz’s (1915-1998) The
Interpretation of Fairy Tales.
No comments:
Post a Comment