Everyone is impressed by something. What impresses you? Perhaps someone who can sing extraordinarily really strikes you as outstanding. Maybe it’s someone’s ability to speak or demonstrate what you consider to be great leadership skills. Maybe you are amazed by someone’s ability to landscape or design spaces where people gather. You may be particularly enamored of someone whose mind seems to flow in mathematics. Perhaps it’s the art or cooking, dance or dexterity that really impresses you. In today’s first reading, people are struck by the extraordinary wisdom as expressed by Stephen (ACT 6: 8-16):

Stephen, filled with grace and power,
was working great wonders and signs among the people.
Certain members of the so-called Synagogue of Freedmen,
Cyreneans, and Alexandrians,
and people from Cilicia and Asia,
came forward and debated with Stephen,
but they could not withstand the wisdom and the Spirit with which he spoke.

As the story goes on, we see spiritual envy emerge among these people, who are so awed by Stephen and the purity and clarity of his wisdom that they accuse him of speaking against Moses and God and they even bring in false witnesses to testify against him in front of the Sanhedrin. “We have heard him claim that this Jesus the Nazorean will destroy this place.” Even the Sanhedrin sense something unique about Stephen, seeing that his face was like the face of an angel, but they too are unable to receive the wisdom of Stephen and consider it on its own grounds. Wrapped up in their own agendas, they fall into a defensive mode as a reaction to what they perceive as a threat.

What was it about Stephen that was so heavenly so to speak, but at the same time threatening? What type of wisdom is this that He witnesses to? He seemed to be following closely in the footsteps of the One to whom he was deeply listening. John’s gospel, describes this as belief in the One sent.
In a similar account of how being impressed can function in a very misguided fashion (JN 6: 22-29), we hear in John’s gospel how the crowd who had been fed by him diligently seek him out. Jesus confronts their motives – their reasons for being so impressed with him.

…when they found him across the sea they said to him,
“Rabbi, when did you get here?”
Jesus answered them and said,
“Amen, amen, I say to you, you are looking for me
not because you saw signs
but because you ate the loaves and were filled.
Do not work for food that perishes
but for the food that endures for eternal life,
which the Son of Man will give you.
For on him the Father, God, has set his seal.”

After calling them out on their motives of seeking him being based only on surface fulfillment, Jesus invites them to work for food that endures, which the Son of Man will provide, for it is the Son of Man upon whom God has set his seal. Here is a notion of working for food that endures. The Acts of the Apostles mentioned this notion of work as well, “Stephen, filled with grace and power, was working great wonders and signs among the people.” Jesus seems to be trying to move directly through this whole idea of being impressed and appreciating something simply because it is spectacular and brings temporary enjoyment and satisfaction. The work he seems to be talking about has to do with something deep, more clarified, not in the sense of detail and precision, but rather clarity in terms of aliveness.

Jesus is cutting to the core of the availability of this wisdom, the clarity of impressions. The Son of Man, available to all of us, will provide it. This is the Son of Man in the broadest terms. This means that we have access to this aliveness from within ourselves. We have this same seal that, when accessed and clarified, can purify our impressions so that God’s aliveness is enduring and actually feeding us in an ongoing and enduring way. The wisdom teacher, Cynthia Bourgeault, speaks of this availability to each of us as persons in terms of qualities of aliveness, names of God that can be discovered within, and indeed are intended precisely to be discovered and shared. This is a divine commission so to speak to cultivate and release that unique name of God – that special manifestation of how God’s aliveness can be expressed in and through you and me.

A further step, perhaps even more important is that the divine names inasmuch as they are released become a type of food that is desperately needed in our world. We as humans are entrusted with bringing forth these qualities of aliveness and providing this food to each other. This is the work that must be done. The crowd in John’s gospel seems to be catching on with their question…

So they said to him,
“What can we do to accomplish the works of God?”
Jesus answered and said to them,
“This is the work of God, that you believe in the one he sent.”

The work is to believe in the one he sent. And who is that One sent? Jesus, yes. Christ, yes. You, yes. Me, yes. The work is to believe in the aliveness that we each have to share as food with each other. What does this type of believing mean? This believing is not a head game or even just a movement of the emotions. Instead, it is a full participation in the responsibility that we share in feeding each other qualities of Divine aliveness in our lives.

This requires a clarity of impressions, which means that we are not led off the rails by impressions that arise out of the attractions to our own agendas. We can begin to see wisdom as the work of God in our lives as clarifying the divine names in our lives – the unattached impressions that we give to and receive from one another. We don’t so much get impressed, but rather we exchange impressions as the truth of wisdom coming to us in the divine presence of aliveness manifested in our lives.

Is this not one way of looking at rising from the dead and remaining in the aliveness of our God, who is always feeding us eternal food in the very fabric of our lives? Dare we accept the honor and seal of being the One sent to name and clarify – believe in ourselves as food – clear impressions of God naming Godself in our lives as the Divine delight?