Every now and then a line from the Bible brings me up short. Turn the other cheek. Love your enemies. Stop judging. These are challenging statements. Today’s epistle to the Ephesians contains another startling demand. “Be imitators of God.” Be imitators of God? Are you kidding me? I can’t put together an IKEA bookshelf much less create the universe. My powers consist of being able to flip a light switch, not spangle the night with a billion, trillion stars. If my computer stops working I know to turn it off and hope that the problem fixes itself, not ultimate foundation of the entire space-time continuum. How can I be an imitator of God when I can’t create, have little to no power, and possess very limited knowledge? Well, those aren’t the kinds of divine things St. Paul thinks we should imitate. He spells out what he means: “Be kind to one another, compassionate, forgiving one another.” Okay, those characteristics of God seems more do-able… which is not to say they are easy. I can be kind to someone who is kind to me but what about if someone calls me everything but a child of God? I am compassionate with those who have the covid virus but not so much with those refusing to get the vaccine and then get sick. I try to forgive but doesn’t that expose me to being hurt all over again? Even these more do-able ways of the imitation of God are a stretch. What will help me to get there? Let’s turn from the epistle to the gospel to answer that question.
The short answer: eating the living bread that came down from heaven transforms us in a way that enables us to imitate God’s kindness, compassion and forgiveness. Let’s unpack what that means. Jesus in John 6 is talking about the Bread of Life. He is attempting to get his listeners – and ultimately you and me — to understand that deep, personal intimacy with him – an intimacy that transforms us – is possible. You are what you eat, goes the cliché. Since Jesus made himself available to us as the bread of life we can literally internalize the real presence of Christ in our hearts. Catholics have woven this truth into our spirituality. We make the Bread of Life, the Holy Eucharist, the Blessed Sacrament an element of every Sunday celebration. By consuming the Body and Blood of Christ in Holy Communion we are staking our claim on the ability of Christ to transform us into a closer approximation of the children of God we are meant to be. Just as the bread and wine are changed into the Body and Blood of Christ, so we, in sharing in the Bread of Life, are changed into his ongoing presence as the Body of Christ in the world which is the Church.
Think for a minute about how food works. Each kind of creature needs the proper kind of food in order to flourish. Cows need grass. Horses need hay. Dung beetles need … well, never mind. By eating the food appropriate for their species they stay healthy and thrive. They are made for a certain type of food. Grass eaters have a cud. Meat eaters have sharp teeth. Anteaters have long tongues. This is specific for each species. Just because grass is good food for a cow does not mean it will be good food for a dog. In fact, when you see a dog eating grass you know that something is wrong. Each creature is made to eat a certain type of food because of the kind of being that they are. What does that say about us as believers that we are given the living bread come down from heaven to eat? We are the creatures who in the very design of our nature are made to live forever. We are made in such a way that the bread of life nourishes us. We’re not going to thrive in our natures unless we are eating the food that strengthens us in our very make-up as people. The fact that we eat the heavenly bread tells us that we are constituted in a way that the divine banqueting table is our natural habitat.
Which brings us back to St. Paul. When he says, “Be imitators of God” he is not asking us to become something that we are not. The fact that we consume heavenly food demonstrates that we are made in such a way that we are at home with heavenly things. We have been looking at human nature through the wrong end of the telescope. We ordinarily notice our faults and failings, our limitations and imperfections. Those are not the things that define us. They have crept in over time and they obscure our true nature and identity. As the children of God we are constituted of divine elements that are the truest parts of our nature.
However, that is not what we see when we look at human nature. We see a city torn apart by violence, we see a society unable to confront the racism woven into its very fabric, we see a toleration of hunger and homelessness as somehow normal, we see a demonizing of those who don’t look like us or talk like us or think like us. So the evidence contradicts the message of Scripture. And that is where we, in this church, at this time, come in. We are called to take a stand and contradict the negativity, the destructiveness we see around us. We show what it means that we can eat the living bread come down from heaven by how we live, by the care we show toward one another, by the welcome we extend to the new people who come into our lives, by our outreach to those who are hurting or needy, by shifting our focus off of ourselves. Imitate God by “Being kind to one another, compassionate, forgiving one another” and change the world.
