Sermons

August 20 - The Rev. Christopher McLaren - The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost

Sunday August 20, 2006 Proper 15 B
Text: John 6 54-59

Jesus can be difficult. One of his problems was that he lacked a good Public Relations staff. He was always getting himself into trouble, saying difficult and downright offensive things. Today's gospel is a "hard saying." Our text begins well enough. "I am the living bread that came down from heaven" (6:51) says Jesus. He has fed the hungry multitudes using a young boy's lunch. He has escaped a crowd that wanted to make him king by force. He continued to engage with the crowds, extending his teaching about the feeding in difficult and parabolic ways. He refers to "the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh." Hearing this we naturally think of the Eucharist, that holy meal that we share here, in which we have found healing, communion and a tangible reminder week in week out of God’s love for us.

But Jesus' critics ask, "How can this man give us flesh to eat?" It is quite likely that some thought the statement of Jesus to be pure error or nonsense, while others thought it could be given real meaning if spiritualized. Jesus then cranks the conversation up more than a notch or two by responding, "Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you" (6:53). Evidently none of the disciples had any PR background or they just couldn’t find the right firm in Jerusalem with a satellite office in Caper’na-um. No one steps in front of Jesus to say, “no more questions,” or “that will be all for today concerning the bread of life.” Jesus wades in deeper, reiterating that eating of his flesh was necessary in order to have any “life” at all, but on this restatement he adds an additional requirement to eating the flesh of the Son of Man...the equal necessity of drinking his blood.

Eating flesh, drinking blood? These are extremely repugnant notions. What on earth could Jesus mean by this? It is little wonder that the early Christians suffered by reputation and at the hands of angry mobs who thought they were a new cannibalistic cult. Fine young cannibals those early Christians. In the Greek, the whole thing is even more repugnant. The very word translated here as "eat" is actually closer to our words "chew," or "gnaw," or "gulp." This is an offensive saying! The phrase would have been quite startling, even horrifying, to the Jews as to ourselves. The blood of animals was not to be received as food: “Be sure thou shalt not eat the blood; for the blood is the life; and thou shalt not eat the life with the flesh.” (Deut. 12:23) We attempt to soften some of the blow by saying that Jesus is speaking in metaphor, referring perhaps to the Eucharist.

However, there is one significant difficulty with that interpretation. Iin the Gospel of John, there is no reference by Jesus to the bread as his "body" or to the wine as his "blood" at the Last supper. John is very careful to keep all of this teaching which could so easily be understood as Eucharistic separated from the Last Supper and the Eucharist itself. He has another purpose in this writing. There is a deeper meaning that must be found. "Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them" (6:56) he says. And what do we, his disciples, say to Jesus? "This is a hard saying; who can take it in?"

After this discourse, John says that many who once followed him turned away. And who can blame them? Jesus here seems extremely strange, distant, and hard to take. Why, if Jesus is the manifestation of Almighty God, does that manifestation come to us in a way that is so inaccessible and off-putting? He is the "bread that came down from heaven" (6:58). That is a beautiful image. But, Heaven is a long way off from those of us who must make our homes down here on earth.

So what are we to make of this passage? How are we to understand it if it is not intended to be overtly Eucharistic? We are challenged by Jesus, “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood you have no life in you.”

Flesh and blood constitute a pair used in reference to the sacrificial giving and taking of life. All of this is difficult for us moderns to understand. We don’t operate within a sacrificial system anymore. There is no easy equivalent to bringing an animal sacrifice to the Temple to atone for sin or as an offering of thanksgiving. We don’t have huge altars with fire and basins to catch the blood. We don’t really deal with the practice of sacrifice in such vivid and visceral terms. In fact, we only partially even understand the way it operated or functioned. For the ancient Israelites, the act of sacrifice was a powerful and costly way to connect to God. There we something primal and moving about placing one’s hand on a valuable animal as it was slaughtered by the priests. The very act itself opened one’s faculties up to compassion, loss, remorse, and awareness of the preciousness of life in ways that aided worship and repentance, especially when all of it was happening in the grand and awe-inspiring precincts of the Temple. Sacrifice was a mode that those who listened to Jesus understood. Flesh being offered up on the altar and blood being spilt was not a novel idea. However, Jesus’ invitation to the eating of his flesh and drinking his blood as a way to connect to God was challenging in the extreme.

But for us as Christians all of this must be understood in the context of both the sacrificial system and the reality of the resurrection. To “eat the flesh” and “to drink the blood” of the Son of Man are not the same thing. To eat the flesh is to receive the power of Christ’s self-giving and self-sacrifice to the uttermost. It is to embrace the wildness of God that would dare to enter His own creation, lowering himself in great humility to save that which he both created and loves.

To “drink the blood” is to receive, in and through that self-giving and self-sacrifice, the life that is triumphant over death and united to God. Both of these- “the flesh and the blood”- the sacrifice of God and the triumph of God are necessary to the full act of communion. The life that gives itself even to death and the life that rises from death to union with God: these are the divine gifts without which we have no life in ourselves.

It is the tasting and enjoyment of these gifts that leads to eternal life. "Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them" (6:56) These words express the deep mystery and completeness of the Christian life. It is not the momentary eating but the permanent abiding that is of primary importance.

In a certain way what I, and I believe St. John, are saying is this: The Eucharist is fine as far as it goes, but it is not enough. The sacrament of the Eucharist of Holy Communion has as its end communion and that is good and beautiful and necessary. But what I want to say is that it intends to point us toward what is truly necessary, what is truly essential and that is our intimate ongoing connection to the life of Christ – to feeding on him in our hearts continually. The Eucharist is a sacrament that points us to the goal of the Christian life which is union with God through Christ, that abiding relationship that is so intimate, so close, so substantive that Jesus could only use language like “unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood you have no part with me.”

In the end, through these hard sayings of Jesus, St. John is telling us of the beautiful and mysterious truth we all need to be reminded of; it is Christ that nourishes us and gives us strength. That is the point. Just as Christ’s life comes from his intimate connection to the Father, so our life comes from our connection to Christ. The Eucharist calls us to feed upon Christ this day but we are to feed upon Christ each and every day so that in assimilating Christ, becoming like him, He becomes our very life.