Wednesday 6 March, 2019

41 At this the Jews there began to grumble about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” 42 They said, “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I came down from heaven’?” 43 “Stop grumbling among yourselves,” Jesus answered. 44 “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them, and I will raise them up at the last day. 45 It is written in the Prophets: ‘They will all be taught by God.’[a] Everyone who has heard the Father and learned from him comes to me. 46 No one has seen the Father except the one who is from God; only he has seen the Father. 47 Very truly I tell you, the one who believes has eternal life. 48 I am the bread of life. 49 Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, yet they died. 50 But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which anyone may eat and not die. 51 I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.”

Divergent and convergent realities?

I recently had a very brain bending conversation with an atheist that talked about the concept of divergent and convergent realities.

For him, a divergent reality was a person’s perspective that didn’t seem to align with another person’s view of the world, like if two witnesses saw very different versions of events in the scene of a crime, or a person who hallucinated bugs on the wall vs a person who saw no bugs. For this person, everything an individual experiences is their individual reality.

While this level of relativism is quite challenging to my perspective, I am intrigued in this passage of John chapter 6 to read of Jesus talking about physical realities and spiritual realities in a very interchangeable way. Almost as though there are two convergent realities at work.

The people who were the audience of Jesus’s speech were clearly perplexed, and even after 2000 years of thinking and analysis on this passage, I feel like there is more that we as Christians can learn from it, especially me!

Thank you Lord that your ways are rich and deep, and to know you is like experiencing fine wine!

Written by Ps Justin Ware