Jesus said to the Jewish crowds: “I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world. . . Just as the living Father sent me and I have life because of the Father, so also the one who feeds on me will have life because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Unlike your ancestors who ate and still died, whoever eats this bread will live forever.” (John 6.51, 57-58)
In his definitive and expositive book on the life of the last Comanche chief of the Great Plains, Quanah Parker–the book is called Empire of the Summer Moon–journalist and writer S.C. Gwynne describes the final years of the great warrior’s life as he lived on a plot of land on an Indian Reservation near Cache, Oklahoma. Gwynne describes how Quanah built a two-story house for himself in 1890, a house that held ten rooms.
But for Quanah, the most important room was the dining room with its ten-foot, pressed-tin ceiling and papered walls. There was nothing in the room but a long table and a wood-burning stove. A window showed the shadows of the scenic Wichita Mountains. The rectangular table seated twelve people comfortably and notable persons of the time, including Teddy Roosevelt, Charles Goodnight, and Geronimo, ate at the table with Quanah. As Gwynne explained, “Quanah laid a splendid table.”
But it was not only important or well-known people that he fed. More often than not, it was the opposite. According to Gwynne, one of Quanah’s abiding qualities was his unfailing generosity, resulting in his feeding many hungry Comanches over the years and never turning anyone away. In fact, feeding members of his tribe was the main use to which he put his private herd of cattle. His house always had tipis pitched around it that held sick and hungry Comanches who came to him for something to eat.
When he died in 1911, Quanah had little to nothing left. His adopted son explained it this way, “My father fed a good many Indians. He had a great herd of cattle and horses in 1890 and when he died in 1911 he did not have many left because he was so generous. When a person became hungry he fed them. He could not stand to see any one of his tribe go hungry.”
A local storekeeper in Cache said much the same thing. He offered this thought on Quanah, “By 1910, owing to his generosity and kindheartedness, he was a very poor man. A great deal of his own food supplies were given away to his tribe and there were always hundreds of Comanches camped around his home. He was always kind, never speaking ill of anyone.”
When Quanah died, his death moved “like electricity” through Oklahoma and Texas. By morning, hundreds of mourners had gathered at Quanah’s house and by noon the crowd had grown to two thousand people. As Gwynne noted, “There were whites wearing Sunday clothes and Indians in buckskins and blankets.” As his casket was lowered into the ground, the gathered assembly sang “Nearer my God to Thee.”
It is difficult to determine the roots of Quanah’s concern for the well-being of others, especially his fellow tribesmen. One real possibility, among others, was the Comanche belief that no one owned the land and in their practice to share in common the benefits of a buffalo hunt. Theirs was a communal way of living that emphasized sharing, not hoarding. They simply did not have any concept of wealth or personal property. It seems likely Quanah brought those lessons with him to the Indian Reservation.
Many years before, another man held much the same belief and, like Quanah, he was perhaps best known for his table fellowship. His name was Rabbi Jesus and he lived in a faraway land called Galilee. The stories that stayed after his death always told of his remarkable kindness towards others and his laudable concern for those who were hungry. On one occasion, when his followers urged him to send the crowds away so that they could scavenge for something to eat, he said to them, “Feed them yourselves.”
He also sat at a table with both great and small people, but showed a particular interest in providing food for the poor and the outcast. Once, when dining with people in high positions who pointedly told him to throw out a woman with a less than stellar reputation who had intruded on their meal, he responded that she should be left alone because her heart knew love far better than their own hardened hearts.
On more than one occasion, it was said that he fed thousands, finding food for them where others could not, believing that none should go without food, and proving that genuine generosity can go a long way. He forewarned his own followers that their lives would be judged in the end, not by their possessions or by their positions, but by their feeding the hungry and giving drink to the thirsty.
It was appropriate, then, that his last night upon the earth should be spent at a table with the twelve where he shared a cup and broke bread with them, telling them that if they truly wanted to be like him, then they should continue to sit at table together and to pass bread from one to another. It was, he said, the way he wanted to be remembered. “Do this in memory of me,” he said, his words making clear that just as meal fellowship defined his life, so it should define theirs in the future.
Of course, that meal fellowship, if it was to imitate his own way of life, had to be open to everyone and, above all else, to the poor and to the hungry. Places at table were not to be reserved only for the rich and the propertied, but also for the least and for the lowest. In fact, no reservations had to be made for a place at the table. Everyone was welcome anytime.
It is not a coincidence that Rabbi Jesus identified himself on two separate occasions with drink and with food as recorded in the Gospel of John. On one occasion, he told the woman at the well that he was “living water” for all who thirsted and any who drank of his water would not thirst again. Then, on a second occasion, he told the Jewish crowds that he was “living bread” for all who hungered and any who ate this bread would live forever.
That second reference is found in the so-called “Bread of Life Discourse” that we hear today. Found in Chapter 6 of John’s gospel, it follows shortly after the feeding of the five thousand. Not surprisingly, his listeners in Capernaum are as confused by his claiming to be “living bread” as the woman at the well was initially befuddled by his confession that he was “living water.”
The problem, of course, in both instances, was the literal-mindedness of both audiences who chose to hear his words in terms of the physicality of water and of bread when, in fact, he was speaking of a deeper reality, that of the spirit. His intent was to invite his listeners to recognize the innermost part of their being, a place that requires sustenance as much as the outermost part.
Some, such as the woman at the well, began to see what the Rabbi was saying, recognizing that the emptiness in her heart that she had been attempting to fill with multiple husbands could only be filled by a life lived for and with the Son of Man sent from heaven by his Father to set humankind back on course. This was the “living water” that she had been thirsting for, but failed to see in her desperate attempts to quench her thirst through physical means.
Surely some in the crowd in Capernaum also came to see what he meant when he spoke of “living bread” that satisfied hunger in a way unlike any physical bread, but–from all appearances–they were sluggish to grasp his message. John tells us that they “quarreled among themselves, saying, ‘How can this man give us his flesh to eat?’”
Unfortunately, we also may be slow to understand, substituting snack foods for the substantive food that Rabbi Jesus speaks of. The evidence is strong. We feel the emptiness deep inside us, but we attempt to fill it with high-caloric, metaphoric replacements that are non-satisfying and nonproductive. In the process, we become alcoholics, shopaholics, chocoholics, and workaholics, among other things. Like caged monkeys, we grab the closest banana, never realizing that what we really want is freedom from the prison we find ourselves in.
Knowing well our propensity for junk food and our proclivity for comfort food, Rabbi Jesus asks us to take a long and hard look at ourselves, asking if we are subsisting on a diet of finger food, substituting a cheeseball for a full-course meal. His argument is a simple one. We don’t have to stuff ourselves on hors d’oeuvres, believing that is all there is to be had. He can give us food that will finally satisfy that deep hunger we all carry within ourselves, a food made especially for that sacred place inside ourselves that can only be satisfied by God.
At some point in life, usually later than sooner, most of us come to see that there is more to life than the door prizes that most of us think we want–power, prestige, position–learning late in life that they prove self-damaging in the short run and unsatisfying in the long run. The wake-up call usually comes when we hear ourselves say the words, “There has to be something more to life.”
That something more is life with God, promised to us by Rabbi Jesus, if and when we seek something deeper than our stomachs, something higher than our egos, and something bigger than our bank accounts. And, as a rule, that life with God is found when we are able to put our lives in service to others, not to ourselves. That is the way of Rabbi Jesus and that is the way that he points us to.
As Quanah Parker neared the end of his life, he was relatively poor because of his unbridled generosity. It didn’t change his ways. He continued to share his food and his lodging with whomever showed up at his door. And while his celebrity continued to attract notable names, for the most part the people who knocked on his door for help were local Indians.
When his estate was settled, there was very little in it. His most prized possession was the photograph of his mother, Cynthia Ann Parker, that hung in his bedroom, a picture that showed “the white squaw” as she was called nursing Quanah’s baby sister. As Gwynne said, what he had amounted to “a nomad’s possessions.” And yet, for all that, he died a happy man. Along the way, he apparently had found food that did not perish
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 