Fragment #10: Classic
“Man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord” - Deuteronomy 8:3
Preface
This post may wind up a little heavy-handed with the whole God business, however, please don’t consider me an evangelist. I won’t try to convince anyone that Jesus is Lord. Instead, I’d like to propose that Jesus is merely the greatest character in the greatest story ever written.
For a few minutes, let us pretend that we’re literary fanatics, the kind who do not mind wielding a yellow highlighter, dogearing pages, and writing notes in the margins, the sort of people who ingest large novels that others use for paperweights. We consider Scott Fitzgerald something of a prophet and hold fast to his immortal words that “a classic is a successful book that has survived the reaction of the next period or generation,” and we decide to crack open the dusty Holy Bible on our shelves (probably given to us by some well-intentioned but fundamentalist relative) because, after all, the Bible has outlived a few generations.
And so let us begin.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…
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Several Months Later
By the time we reach the New Testament, we have read nearly a thousand pages, most of which was tough slogging.
But the Gospel of Matthew marks a turning point. We are introduced to the character of Jesus, a descendant of other important characters—King David, Jacob, Abraham, and of course, that cursed fellow, Adam. We discover that all of Matthew seems to be predicated upon earlier sections, and that this Jesus character has been subtly foreshadowed throughout the narrative. He is conceived by a virgin (foretold by the prophet Isaiah), born in a town called Bethlehem (predicted by Micah), and baptized by a man named John (again we turn back to Isaiah).
In the fourth chapter of Matthew, we stumble upon the following verses: Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil. After fasting forty days and forty nights he was hungry. The tempter came to him and said, “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.” Jesus answered, “It is written, ‘Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’” We might not recall where exactly this quote is from, but eventually we find it in Deuteronomy 8: Remember how the Lord your God led you in the desert these forty years…He humbled you causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna…to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.”
The author clearly expects the reader (us) to connect the Israelites wanderings and Jesus’s temptations in the desert, not simply because of the surface-level repetition (I.e. forty days, forty years), but because the character himself quotes directly from this earlier section of text.
Which brings us to the second, far stranger parallel—that the author/character equate physical food (i.e. the manna) with the word of God. We don’t yet know what to make of this, so we scribble a note in the margins.
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Several Days Later (or maybe it’s hours or weeks, idk, everyone reads at their own pace)
By the time we reach the Gospel of John, our pages throughout the entire narrative are worn and inked black with cross-references between the text. We now understand that Jesus is the narrative’s central character, the “cornerstone” as the psalmist might say. His crucifixion is a tragedy unlike any other, not even those written by Shakespeare; his resurrection might be unbelievable when viewed under the damning microscope of reality, but we are literary students, not scientists, and we know the joy of suspending our disbelief. The moment Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene might just be the apogee of literature itself.
The Gospel of John begins with a notably different tenor than its counterparts: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…And later in the opening chapter, we read, The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We underline all of this, puzzled by what it means.
The character of Jesus breaks onto the scene with no introduction—not even a family lineage like those provided in Luke and Matthew’s gospels—and begins performing miracles. He turns water into wine at a wedding, heals the paralyzed, feeds thousands with five loaves and two fish. News travels. There is a stampede around the Sea of Galilee as people search for the man who can feed them from nothing. When they find him on a distant shore, Jesus sees through their disheveled garb and into their hearts.
“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.”
The crowd bristles, and understandably so. They have walked a great distance in the hopes of finding food.
“What miraculous sign then will you give that we may…believe you?” they demand. “Our forefathers ate the manna in the desert; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’”
Jesus says, “I tell you the truth, it is not Moses who has given you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven…I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in will never be thirsty…Your forefathers ate the manna in the desert, yet they died…If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.”
The Biblical narrative coalesces with this passage, and we are struck by an epiphany about that strange verse from Deuteronomy: man does not live on bread alone but on every word from the mouth of the Lord. We flip back a few pages to the start of John’s Gospel…The Word became flesh…Of course. Jesus is the Word of God come down to earth in human flesh, the symbolic bread from heaven, and if the Israelites would only believe and accept his sacrificial death, they would never hunger again.
But then the scene takes a strange and unsettling turn.
“The Jews began to argue sharply among themselves. ‘How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”
To which Jesus replies, “I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him. Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your forefathers ate manna and died, but he who feeds on this bread will forever.”
Even Jesus’s disciples are miffed by this appeal to cannibalism. “This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?” they say, and many of them “turned back and no longer followed him.”
When Jesus says that his flesh is real food and that his followers must eat him, the story has either crumbled under its own weight, like a plot twist that the reader cannot believe, or it has transcended its own meaning and achieved something greater. Our initial understanding of Jesus as the spiritual bread from heaven is spoiled by his claim that “my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink.”
Bear in mind, this discussion is purely literary. We are not speaking of Jesus as a historical figure or the truth of the Bible, merely its strength as a story. And as far as the story goes, this is a crucial plot twist—the central character claiming his flesh is food for people to eat. We don’t necessarily need to understand all of the mechanics of how one might eat his flesh, not yet anyhow, but we do need to decide whether this claim is believable within the confines of the story. By making this seemingly absurd claim that Jesus’s followers can and should eat his flesh that is real food, the author robs the reader of the far easier and more intelligible interpretation that Jesus is the symbolic bread come down from heaven.
He is either far more or far less.
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In a strange way, this section in John highlights the problem of reading the Biblical narrative as a literary text (despite my vain attempt). It cannot simply be a great story encoded with spiritual truth. The narrative, specifically its climax in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, is either fact or absurdity.
The truth is we cannot treat the Bible as just another classic. Until we reach the four gospels, perhaps—but after the story of Jesus’s death and resurrection, we no longer have recourse to this more comfortable belief.
As John says at the end of his gospel, he writes his account so that “you [the reader] may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” He tells of the disciple, Thomas, who initially did not believe in Jesus’s resurrection until he saw his risen Lord and physically touched the wounds where nails had been driven through Jesus’s hands. In painstaking detail, John emphasizes the bodily resurrection of Christ (as do the other writers in the remainder of the New Testament).
Either the historical man Jesus literally rose from the dead and the Biblical story means something far greater than the spiritual or psychological meaning embedded in the narrative…or Jesus did not rise from the dead, the gospel authors are liars or fools, and any meaning is undermined by the fact that liars and/or fools are the ones peddling this false claim.
The great irony of the Bible is that it is a great story—no small miracle when you consider that it was written by many authors spread across centuries who could not communicate or collaborate on the plot—but its greatness is predicated on the literal resurrection of Christ.
If the Bible is to be a classic, it must be the classic that’s true.
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