So, when I got older, like in my adolescence, my grandparents got a whole lot dumber. Now, let me clarify. I'm pretty sure they didn't REALLY get dumber. I'm pretty sure they stayed more or less the same gentle, wonderful, brilliant people that they always were. I think what happened is that I got a whole lot more uppity and snooty.
I was a college man, you see. I knew stuff they didn't know. And I just couldn't imagine that they didn't want to know all I knew whenever I visited. Yet for some reason they simply weren't interested in what I'd just learned in political philosophy. They couldn't give a hoot for the music I was discovering. They couldn't care less about the ironic friends I met at pubs, smoking cigarettes, and sneering at life.
They were just so ordinary. They were farm people. They covered their parlor furniture was from the fifties. They had hand soaps shaped like flowers in a dish on the bathroom sink. They drove old people cars. They never moved too far from home. And every Sunday, at church, they would sit during the sermon and begin to unwrap peppermints that seemed to make more noise the more you tried to keep it quiet.
They were just so annoying.
And soon, I drifted away. My heart hardened, and I went my own way.
Absalom kinda did that, too. Now, granted, his family was famous and royal. But I have a feeling that some of Absalom's emotions were similar to mine at the core. I can imagine Absalom thinking, “I can do this so much better. If only Dad were out of the way. I mean, this is all going to be mine anyway, and he's not getting any younger. Why doesn't he just admit that I'm a better person – the man of the future – and just fade away into the sunset?”
And before he knows it, Absalom is estranged. And more than estranged. He's at war. He's the leader of a civil war, trying to wrest control from David and win the throne and people's hearts.
Man, it's hard to stop these things when they get going. You get so far down the road that you can't even remember what made you take that awful fork to begin with. You just let shame and disgust and hatred layer themselves on each other and you just can't get back to the way things were.
And you die a little inside. Or in Absalom's case, you die period. In any case, there's a death involved. And things are changed forever.
And there's also a mourning. Because David mourned Absalom. As the end of our passage we look in on the king and witness him mourn: “When David heard that Absalom was slain, he went up into his chamber over the gate and wept, and thus he said, 'My son, my son, O Absalom my son, would God I had died for thee! O Absalom, my son, my son!’”
You can feel the emotions welling up inside David, this poor lonely man on the back side of his life, wrestling with his grief and anger. You can hear him, angry with those who did this to him, grieving for the loss of his son, furious with himself for maybe not giving in and letting Absalom rule. And suddenly bereft of all he held dear. Wailing aloud, falling to the ground in sorrow. Suddenly empty. An empty man. Just a man, for all the trappings of royalty. Empty of everything but love. Love for his son. And that's what he clings to for the rest of his life.
Isn't it funny? The people who love us, when we do so much to hurt them. . . they don't hate back. But, oh, how they grieve when they lose us.
In our Gospel reading today, Jesus is doing something astoundingly miraculous, and the people just aren't getting it. He's just this neighborhood kid that grew up around them. They've seen him running around, skinning his knees, probably getting in trouble by throwing pebbles at goats, pulling pranks on his mama, learning how to hammer a nail from his father. Probably learning how to shout like his father when he hits his thumb with that hammer.
Just seemingly a mundane guy who's no better than them. And here is goes with all this “I am the bread of life” talk. And they begin to turn on him. And I bet later on down the road, when they see him hanging on the cross and they think, “Mmmmhmmm. Well, he did have it coming.” I bet none of them could remember what exactly it was that caused them to drift away. What it was that caused bemusement to turn into hatred, that caused joy in his miracles to turn into joy at his death. That something that caused them to shout “Crucify him!” when just a few days before they were shouting “Hossana!”
And like David, here is Jesus, an empty man, this time empty of his own life, hanging on a cross. And like David, stripped of everything but love. But unlike David, Jesus' love survives, because, turns out, Jesus IS the bread of life. They had gotten that much of it wrong. Jesus is the bread of life, that goes on day after mundane day, like manna, our daily bread. Providing us with life, sustaining us with his love, a love that survived death and conquered it.
A bread that keeps us alive, whether we deserve it or not. That changes us when we most need to be changed.. Because little by little, bit by bit, when we feast on THAT bread, we become that bread, too. And we are there for others, sustaining them, loving them.
You know, there are plenty of people out there who still think that something like living a Jesus-filled life is mundane and stupid. Quaint. Plenty of people who feast on power and wealth, thuggishness and retribution. People who measure their self-worth by humiliating and hurting others. People who live in a zero-sum world where they can only win if we lose. But that kind of bread sours eventually, just like manna.
But not the bread of life. It will go on forever, sustaining us and drawing us closer to the love some many often sneer at as so. . . so ordinary. Almost too ordinary to notice.
But I noticed it one day, a few years before my granddaddy died. He called me and said he wanted to see me. I went over to their house, not really wanting to waste my time, but doing it anyway. And my granddaddy took me out to his garden, pointed out some things coming in. Then he turned to me, took my shoulders in his hands, and said, “Son, why are you being such a jackass?”
“I don't know,” I whispered. Then he hugged me. He just hugged me, and we cried on each other's shoulder for a while. And there I was...forgiven and loved.
And we went inside, and we sat down to my grandma's cooking. Now I've told you before that she is perhaps the worst cook that ever lived. But that night, the chicken and okra and biscuits were life giving. And we thanked God for our food and did it in Jesus' name. It was the bread of life, indeed.
Amen.