The Jews murmured about Jesus because he said,

“I am the bread that came down from heaven,”

and they said,

“Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph? 

Do we not know his father and mother? 

Then how can he say,

‘I have come down from heaven’?”

Jesus answered and said to them,

“Stop murmuring among yourselves.”

Ouch! Jesus, alluding to the murmuring against God of the Israelites wandering in the desert, tells them to stop. They won’t, however, and next week we hear their greatest grumble, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” At Jesus’s teaching that his flesh is real food and his blood is real drink many will turn away. Today, however, they ask a different question, “How can he say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” On one level, this is solved by the Catholic response of both/and versus the typical either/or. Was Jesus the boy we saw grow up with his family or has he come down from heaven? These seem mutually exclusive, but the Catholic response, as is typical (and as one author dubbed the “eternal and”), is that Jesus was both the son of Mary who grew up in Galilee and he was the Son of God come down from heaven. Writ large, this question gets at another both/and answer to whether God is either transcendent or immanent. God is both transcendent, beyond all that is, and imminent, intimately connected to all that is. Of course, the real question, then, is, “How?” How can this Jesus (the child of Mary) also be the full revelation of God (the Word in the flesh)? Or, even, how can this simple bread and wine also be the real body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus?

Theological libraries could be and have been filled trying to write an answer to this important question. It will be necessarily brief and woefully inadequate, but in the remainder of this reflection and continued next week, I will sketch one possible answer. I have written before about the concept of kenosis, especially as we hear it from Paul’s Letter to the Philippians, “…Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross.” Kenosis is the self-emptying or self-limitation of Jesus in his divine privilege and power to willfully take on our humanity in all its frailty out of love. This self-limitation is a positive act of love that unites his divine nature with our human nature in his own person, so that where he has gone, we may also go. We see that love by its nature is sacrificial, willing the good of another no matter the cost. In a specific way, God entered creation. 

Similarly, there is a kenotic movement in creation itself. If you can imagine before anything existed, there was only the Triune God, three persons in perfect unity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the dance of love. In order to let the divine love flow out, God limited himself to create other existence (an “out”): time, and space, and all that is. Like a mother waiting to give birth creates room within her own body for another person to live, by kenosis God similarly created the “space” for us to exist and there is a way to understand that all that exists does so in some way within God. God doesn’t inhabit this world like a pagan god in a tree, but his love and existence undergird and permeate this world because our finite reality exists within and is dependent upon the infinite love of God. The transcendent God is also immanent to, in, and through creation. Stay tuned!