Jesus said, “You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.” These words have been used as weapons for millennia – by Christians against Jews, by Protestants against Catholics, by evangelicals against the Anglo-Catholic wing of Anglicanism, and by many others against those who practice their Christianity in a different way.

In Deuteronomy, Moses seems to corroborate this perspective when he tells the Hebrews, “You must neither add anything to what I command you nor take away anything from it, but keep the commandments of the LORD your God with which I am charging you.” Implicit in both of these proclamations by Jesus and Moses is the idea that it is possible to distinguish between the commandment of God and human tradition, sifting out the weeds from the wheat, as it were, and that once we have done the sifting, we can choose God’s commandments over what humans have added.

Ignatian spirituality invites us to imagine ourselves in whatever scene the scripture we are reading presents. This is a practice with which I connect, as someone whose relationship with God and robust imagination go hand in hand.

Sometimes, we wonder who we are in a given scene. At the nativity, am I Joseph? Mary? The innkeeper? At the cross am I John, the beloved disciple? Am I the centurion?

In today’s passage from John, a continuation of the long “Bread of Life discourse” we have been reading, we might wonder if we are a disciple who leaves? Are we Simon Peter? Are we Jesus?

In the Gospel this morning we hear, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, “I have come down from Heaven?” This should sound familiar. We hear a story of Jesus teaching in the synagogue in Mark and Luke.

When I first learned in seminary that early Christians were accused of cannibalism by their religious competition in the Roman Empire, I was confused and astounded. How could anyone think that? And then my New Testament professor pointed to today’s Gospel reading to show how it wasn’t such an unthinkable proposition. Writing some 50 years after John, the early church father, Justin Martyr had to vigorously defend Christians against the charge of eating human flesh. If a Roman emperor, like the one Justin Martyr wrote to, had heard only rumors about what these Christians were up to, and then picked up a scroll of John’s gospel, and read Jesus saying “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life,” well, we begin to see why Justin had to write his defense.

In our gospel reading for today we find Jesus on the other side of the sea, having fed thousands with five barley loaves and a few fish. In him the power of God to feed and save has been manifest, and the people cannot help but follow him, longing for more of the miraculous and lifegiving power they have witnessed. What is going on, they want to know – when they ask Jesus, “What must we do to perform the works of God?” I think they are really asking, how can we continue to experience the saving power of God as you have shown us? We are hungry, Jesus – yes, for physical food, but also for the mystery that you have shown us.

I was talking with my friend and colleague, Bob, this week and when I told him I was preaching today, he told me that the Gospel this morning has special meaning for him: “…gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost.” Bob had once felt like the fragment, the bit not to be lost. “The church that hated me was also the church that saved me,” he said. Readings like ours this morning are reminders of God’s abundance and compassion. Nothing and no one is to be lost to God.