No doubt many of you are familiar with the Simon and Garfunkel song “Mrs. Robinson.” It first was heard in the 1967 movie “The Graduate.” A full version was released by the duo in 1968 and in 1969 it became the first rock song to win the Grammy for Record of the Year. I can’t tell you when I first heard it, but I do recall that I was struck by the music and the references to Jesus and Joe DiMaggio. Those lines about DiMaggio are widely remembered: “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you. What’s that you say, Mrs. Robinson? Joltin’ Joe has left and gone away.”
While the song was a huge hit at the time and has become an iconic part of the American musical canon, those lines seemed to confuse the good Mr. DiMaggio. Paul Simon has spoken on several occasions about an encounter with The Yankee Clipper. In a New York Times article written in the wake of DiMaggio’s death in 1999, Simon recalled:
A few years after "Mrs. Robinson" rose to No. 1 on the pop charts, I found myself dining at an Italian restaurant where DiMaggio was seated with a party of friends. I'd heard a rumor that he was upset with the song and had considered a lawsuit, so it was with some trepidation that I walked over and introduced myself as its composer. I needn't have worried: he was perfectly cordial and invited me to sit down, whereupon we immediately fell into conversation about the only subject we had in common.
"What I don't understand," he said, "is why you ask where I've gone. I just did a Mr. Coffee commercial, I'm a spokesman for the Bowery Savings Bank and I haven't gone anywhere."
I said that I didn't mean the lines literally, that I thought of him as an American hero and that genuine heroes were in short supply. He accepted the explanation and thanked me. We shook hands and said good night.
Simon went on to explain that DiMaggio represented dignity, grace and class and thus embodied a cultural longing for heroes in an era when those qualities seemed to be sorely lacking—and, I might add, for that elusive mythical past when everything was better and simpler.
In a 60 Minutes interview with Mike Wallace, Simon, recalling that encounter with DiMaggio and his befuddlement with the lyrics, quipped, “Obviously Mr. DiMaggio is not accustomed to thinking of himself as a metaphor!”
Most of us don’t speak metaphorically about ourselves, yet in this morning’s selections from the Gospel of John, Jesus does just that. Much as, in the Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, Jesus employes metaphor when he tells parables to describe the Kingdom of God, here in John, he uses metaphors to describe himself. In our Lenten Study, Adam Hamilton contends that John is attempting to answer two essential questions: Who is Jesus? and What difference does he make in the lives and communities of those who believe in him? [80] To answer these questions, John turns to a series of metaphorical sayings which all begin with the words, “I am.”
Those are common words, everyday words. But in scripture they can point to something far from commonplace. You may recall that at the burning bush, God commissions Moses to return to Egypt on a mission of liberation for the enslaved Israelite people. Moses asks who he should them has sent him, a quite reasonable question given the multiplicity of gods in the Egyptian, perhaps as many as 2000. God tells Moses “I AM WHO I AM.” [God] said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’” [Exodus 3.14, NRSV] The name with which God identifies God’s self to Moses in know as the tetragrammaton because it is composed in the Hebrew of four consonants: YHWH. No vowels are given but it is widely believed it is pronounced Yahweh. In English translations, it is usually rendered as LORD in all capital letters. Yahweh may be taken to mean “I Am Being Itself” or “I Am the Source of All that Exists.” Or as the theologian Paul Tillich said, God is “the Ground of all Being.”
So, when, in John chapter 8, Jesus tells his religious opponents, “Before Abraham was, I Am,” it is an extremely bold and scandalous claim. He is asserting Divine identity, and his opponents immediately prepare to stone him for blasphemy. But this claim is fully consistent with the high Christology which John establishes in the opening verses of the Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God…all things were made through him…and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” What the other, earlier Gospel writers imply and point to indirectly, John declares, repeatedly and clearly: Jesus is God incarnate.
Thus, in these seven “I am” statements, the Greek words ego eimi seem to be meant to identify Jesus with God. At the same time, they flesh out what this identity means and how it makes a difference in the lives of Jesus’ followers.
“I am the light of the world,” invokes the common association of God with light. For example, Psalm 27 declares that “the LORD is my light and salvation.” Further, Jesus declared himself “the light of the world” during the Festival of Booths, during which the Temple was illuminated by four 75-foot-tall lamp stands, recalling how God had been present to their ancestors and guided with “a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night,” as they wandered in the wilderness for 40 years. The association of Jesus with God would have surely been clear to the readers of John’s Gospel.
This also echoes John’s declaration in the Gospel’s prologue, “In him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” Those 75-foot tall candlestands in the Temple were a vivid illustration of the power of light against darkness, in much the same way that our lighting of candles on Christmas Eve does. Both illustrate that the Divine light, the power of God’s love, grace and mercy, is greater than the darkness of the world.
Those opening verses of John also declare that Jesus, the Word made flesh is “the true light, which enlightens everyone.” He is the source of all that is true and good. Justin Martyr, a second century theologian, argued that wherever we hear truth or observe goodness, even if it is from non-Christians, we are encountering the influence of Christ, who is at work in all people leading them to the light of God.
I see a connection here between Jesus being the light of the world and his statements that he is “the way, the truth and the life.” Anyone who comes to God, does so because of what God has done in Jesus, whether they know it or not. As Hamilton puts it, “If Jesus is God’s Word enfleshed, as John asserted, and if Jesus and the Father are one, as he asserted, then any who experience God’s providence, any who know God’s love, any who find God’s peace, any who are granted eternal life, will have received these through Christ, again, regardless of whether they are conscious of it or not.” [99-100]
Thus, Jesus is also “the resurrection and the life,” the one who raises us up to the life abundant, the life that really is life, in the here and now and the one who will raise us up to the life eternal, life beyond death, for he, the Divine Word has overcome the grave, God’s life has defeated death.
Jesus’ use of shepherding imagery in John 10 perhaps requires the least explanation. The popularity, indeed, ubiquity of Psalm 23 has made the metaphor of God as shepherd an essential part of our understanding of God’s nature and activity. As Hamilton observes, Jesus is here identifying himself as the “gate by which we enter God’s pasture and protection. He protects us from the ‘thief’—the evil one who would harm us—and seeks to give us abundant life.” By invoking the image of a good shepherd, Jesus is identifying himself with God and claiming that he is the “one shepherd,” descended from David whom Ezekial prophesied he is God’s promised Messiah. As such, “Jesus is the Good Shepherd who strengthens the weak, heals the sick, binds up the injured, brings back the strays, and searches for the lost.”
Both the “true vine” and the “bread of life” are images of nurture. The “true vine” seems to be a riff on the Old Testament image of God as a vineyard owner. If a branch is chopped off of a vine, it will wither and die. But as long as it stays connected to the vine and its system of roots, the branch will thrive, growing and producing fruit. So too, Jesus’ followers must stay connected to him, must be nurtured by him if they are to produce the fruits of the spirit: love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
The “bread of life” metaphor also points toward the sustenance necessary for thriving. Jesus delivers this “I am” statement soon as part of a dialogue with the crowd of people who have just experienced his miraculous feeding of 5000 people with only five barley loaves and two fish. In his discussion with the crowd, which we heard a portion of earlier, this action is associated with God’s miraculous provision of manna from heaven to sustain the Israelites during the Exodus. Though the people seek physical bread, which in scripture represents all of the food which is essential to human life, Jesus tells them they have needs other than the physical. They need spiritual bread, “the bread come down from heaven,” in order to thrive, in order to truly live.
Scott Hozee suggests a special type of bread found in J.R.R. Tolkien’s tales of Middle Earth, is a good illustration of what it means to say Jesus is the bread of life. He writes:
Lembas is bread used for long journeys by elves in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. It has amazing powers to both sustain travelers and even bring healing to the wounded or sick. One piece of Lembas was enough to last a traveler a full day. Its delicious honey-flavor evokes images of the manna God provided Israel in the wilderness.
However, a quote from The Return of the King suggests Lembas has even more striking powers: “The Lembas had a virtue without which they would have long ago lain down to die. It did not satisfy desire, and at times Sam’s mind was filled with the memories of food, and the longing for simple bread and meats. And yet this waybread of elves had a potency that increased as travelers relied on it alone and did not mingle it with other foods. It fed the will, and it gave strength to endure, and to master sinew and limb beyond the measure of mortal kind.”
We are all empty; we are all hungry. We are born “with a God shaped hole in our hearts.” We seek to fill it with all the wrong things. But out of a great love for us, God comes to us in our need. We are fed with the Bread of Life: Jesus Christ, the very presence and life of God incarnate among us. He strengthens our hearts and minds, giving us strength to do what is good, courage to seek justice, hope in times of trial, understanding of what is right, love for God and all our diverse neighbors, and confidence and peace in the face of death. God gives us God’s own life in Jesus that we might live abundantly now and eternally hereafter.
