Hard Sayings (John 6:56-69)

At the time John wrote his gospel, seventy years after the death of Christ,  rumors were flying about Christians practices. It was whispered that they met in each other’s houses,  to engage in sexual orgies. And during the orgies,  they ate the body of their dead leader, in acts of ritual cannibalism.  And it’s no wonder that's what non-Christians thought –  The communal meals of believers were called “Love Feasts,”  and they climaxed with sharing the body and blood of Christ.

Jesus did say “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood  abide in me and I in them.”  And to devout Jews,  the thought of eating another human was horrifying – as horrifying as it is for us today.  John makes it clear he was talking to devout members of the Hebrew faith – in verse 52 he identifies his audience as “the Jews.”  When John says “the Jews,” he means leaders of the religious establishment.  It all happened, remember, after Jesus fed the five-thousand,  and walked out across the water to join his disciples.  On the other side of the Sea, he preached to the crowd:  “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”  He went on to explain how he'd come down from heaven, to do God's will.  As we saw last week, when the religious leaders  got wind of it, they complained – “What's all this talk about coming down from heaven? Isn't this Joseph's boy Jesus, and didn't we see him grow up?”

Now, as today's passage opens, Jesus is answering their complaints,  teaching in the synagogue at Capernaum.  And he tells them  “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them. Whoever eats me will live because of me.”  Now, if I came up to you, and said “If you'll eat my arm, everything will be Ok,” you'd say “All right, just calm down . . .," back up a few paces, and send for the men in the little white jackets.  And that's what his audience must have thought, too . . . “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” they said.

Of course, when we hear it, we immediately think “Communion – the Lord's Supper.”  But the religious leaders didn't know that –  in John's story, the last supper hadn't happened.     And even if it had, the religious authorities wouldn't have understood. Indeed, history shows that most of them didn't get the crucifixion and resurrection when it happened.  But if Jesus wasn't looking forward to communion, what was he trying to say?

It helps to look at a story like this on a couple of levels. First, there's the level of the narrative itself –  what does it say about Jesus, about what Jesus said,  and about what Jesus did.  Then there's another level,  often equally useful,  and that's the level of the author's intentions. What does the author of the book want to tell us?  And in our case, this episode of Jesus's life is one that only John includes. No other Gospel tells this story.  So it's useful to ask ourselves  “what did John want to tell us here?”

And as we saw last week, we can go back to the first chapter of his book:  “In the beginning was the Word,  and the Word was with God,  and the Word was God.”  And we Presbyterians take that seriously.  Jesus Christ is the true Word  –  and what we have in Scripture is the word written, a witness to that true Word.

And so, we can get an idea, at least, of what Jesus means here,  and why John thought it so important to include it. When Jesus said that we must eat of his body,  eat of his flesh,  we're supposed to remember  what John said in the beginning, that Jesus is the Word made flesh, which dwelt among us. And now it begins to make sense – If we eat of the Word,  ingest it into our lives, into our bodies,  into our very beings, we shall have life. “The one who eats this Word will live forever.”

Well.  It's obvious that the religious leaders didn't understand what Jesus was talking about.  They had no idea that Jesus was the word, and wouldn't have believed it if they were told.  They thought all this talk  about coming down from heaven was ridiculous . . .  and more than a little blasphemous. Was Jesus claiming to be God?  Everyone knew there was only God, and it wasn't the son of any carpenter.

But, what about the disciples? What did they know?  How did they understand these strange words of Jesus? It looks like they had trouble with them too,  because when they heard them they said  “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” But notice that:  they don't say “who can understand it,”  they say who can accept it.  Or, according to one translation, “who can listen to it.”  It was hard for them to hear, hard for them to buy.  And Jesus confirms it by what he says next:  “Does this offend you?”  Again, another translation sheds some light –  it says “Does this cause you to stumble?” And I think it's as close to the truth as anything – the disciples were in danger of stumbling  when they heard these hard things. They were in danger of tripping in their walk with Jesus, falling on the road with the master.

See . . . I think that, unlike the others, the disciples knew exactly what Jesus meant.  They weren't stupid,  and they'd been following him for some time.  I think they knew that Jesus spoke symbolically,  that he didn't mean physically eat his flesh.  I think they knew  what eating the Word, what consuming his essence, what ingesting his very life would entail.  I think they knew it, and it scared them to death.

When Old Testament prophets were called into service, strange things happened.  In Jeremiah, God reaches out and touches the prophet's mouth, and says  “Now I have put my words in your mouth. Today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant."  And Isaiah saw the Lord sitting on a throne,  so big that only the hem of God's robe filled the temple.  And Seraphim – flying snakes with six wings – were flitting around God's head, chirping to each other “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts!”  And one of them flew right at Isaiah and branded him on the lips with a live coal.  And God said “Whom shall I send?” And Isaiah said—I imagine with fear and trembling—“Here am I . . . send me!”

But the strangest tale is what happened to Ezekiel when he was called. He saw four creatures, with fire moving to and fro amongst them. And something like four wheels, wheels within wheels, that flashed and veered with the creatures. And then the Lord handed Ezekiel a scroll and said “O mortal, eat what is offered to you; eat this scroll, and go, speak to the house of Israel.” And Ezekiel ate it, he took it and put it in his mouth, and chewed it and swallowed it, and digested the words of God. And all through his career Ezekiel was driven to do strange things for the Lord. He was struck with fits of dumbness and immobility, and forced to perform weird symbolic acts. He constructed little toy towns  and lay on his left side 390 days  and then on his right side forty days.  He ate ritual food cooked on a fire of cow dung.  All this because he was called by God, because he ate the Word of the Lord.

So, is it any wonder that the disciples found Jesus' words hard to hear?  Is it any wonder that most of them left, most of them quit following Jesus? They had a pretty good idea of where  eating the Word of God would lead, what kind of life they were asked to endure.  They were asked to totally incorporate the Word  of God into their lives, to live it and breath it. To let it own them.  To spend their lives in service, not of themselves, as they were inclined to do, but of Jesus Christ, Son of the Most High.  “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.”

And we’ve seen in past weeks what “abide in me” entails.  If Jesus asked them to lay on one side for 390 days and on the other for forty, that's all part and parcel of abiding in God.  If Jesus asked them to pluck up or to pull down, build or plant,  that was what they'd have to do. And if Jesus asked them to die, to partake of whatever fate awaited him, well, walking with God is hard to do.

It's no wonder that most of Jesus' followers deserted him after this.  They knew that they'd be called upon to participate in more than just his ministry, more than just his healing, more than just his work among the poor. They knew that life  is followed by death, and that prophets are often beaten, tortured, and killed for their beliefs. They knew that blood can be drunk only after it's shed.

The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Among us, human beings on this  ball floating through space. And as disciples of the Word, as disciples of Jesus,  we are called to eat of that flesh,  eat of that Word.  We are called to consume it, devour it, ingest it, feast upon it.  We are to take it into our bodies, into our selves,  into our lives.

Next week, when we take communion, the next time we hear the words  “Do this in remembrance of me,”  let’s remember what it is we're supposed to do.  Remember what eating the Word means.  It means service, it means discipleship.  It means participation in the life and the death, of our Lord Jesus Christ.  And although no Christians in this country are dying for their faith, they are in other parts of the world.  They're being slaughtered by the thousands for believing in Christ Jesus, for walking on the road with the Master.

But in this country,  we're being reduced to irrelevancy. While we might not get arrested for  practicing our faith,  we can get ridiculed for it.  The images we see,  the magazines we read, all point to the proposition that Christianity is just some quaint, outmoded way of passing a Sunday morning. Just a way of propping up the lives of those who can't make it on their own, who have to have some make-believe way to cope with life. Modern men and women can take care of themselves ‛cause what life's all about –  taking care of numero  uno. And if we play the game right, if we worry about ourselves first, and our families first, and everybody else second, we'll be rewarded by all the trappings  of our society.  All the cars, boats, houses and things that money can buy.

Well.  How can we fight this? How can we live as disciples of Christ,  fed by the Word,  fed by Jesus' body and blood,  in the face of the seductive, glittering, glamorous world of the self in which we are immersed? Jesus said it in our passage –  he gave both the challenge and the means  to meet it in the same sermon. He said “It is the spirit that gives life;  the flesh is useless.  The words that I have spoken to you  are spirit and life.”  It is the spirit that gives life;  the spirit that quickens;  the spirit that enables us to walk the way of the Lord.  John Calvin said it this way:  “The Holy Spirit is the bond by which Christ unites us to himself.”  We are bound to Christ by his Spirit,  given the strength to live in him.

An old adage says –  “God never gives us anything we cannot bear.”  I like to amend it by saying “God never gives us anything we have to bear alone.”  Jesus said – again, in John –  that God will send us an advocate to be with us forever.  And this advocate,  this Holy Spirit of God, is life.

And so through this Spirit, with its help and its comfort,  when Christ asks us  “Do you also wish to go away?”  we can look around at our shallow, greed-driven culture, and reject it.  We can say with Peter  “Lord, where else can we go?  You have the words of eternal life.”

Hallelujah.  Amen.

Tough Crowd (John 6:51-58)

    Last week, we dipped our big toe into the “Bread of Life” discourse from John, and this week we’re going to dive right in and paddle around a little bit, and Alert Readers will have noticed that the lectionary passages from last week and this week and the next – by which time we might all be sick of bread – that the lectionary passages overlap.  Last week’s passage ended up with verse 51, and this week’s passage begins with verse 51: “I am the living bread that came down from heaven.  Whoever eats of this bread will live forever, and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”  Our passage ends with verse 58, but next week’s includes that verse and the two preceding it as well.  And although it’s partially a strategy of the very modern creators of our lectionary to remind us from week to week what this long passage is all about, it also reflects in an important way the structure of the speech itself, both in what must have been its original form, but especially in the way the John has edited and structured it.  Jesus restates the same basic premise again and again – I am the bread of life, I am the bread of life – but also adding to it, refining it as he rolls along through the speech.  And each time he adds something new, John pauses for a little crowd-reaction shot . . . Thus we get I am the bread of life, come down from heaven, and then the crowd grumbles, saying how can he be from heaven, we know where he lives, we know his mom and dad, we played stick-ball with him back in the day, shot some hoops out in the driveway, how can he say he’s from heaven?

     Well, Jesus does a little explanation – although as usual in John he doesn’t directly answer their questions – and then restates his thesis, adding oh, by the way, this bread I told you about, the bread you’ve gotta eat to get eternal life?  Well, it’s my flesh . . . and immediately John cuts to the crowd who’re saying “Holy guacamole, how can this man” – note the this man, to emphasize his mortality, and maybe diss him a little bit – “how can this man give us his flesh to eat?”  And they’re disputing among themselves which, by all accounts, is a polite euphemism for what they’re actually doing, the Greek translated here as disputing has violent overtones, as in they’re duking it out, as in his statements have cause a violent reaction – more about that next week – and then we’re back to Jesus, back to the speech, and another one of his elliptical answers . . .

     But before we look at those words, let’s look at the crowd, shall we?  John has carefully presented Jesus’ speech so that the crowd plays an integral part in the proceedings, so they’re a character in our drama, so maybe we ought to think about who they are and what part they play . . . the crowd that Jesus is addressing is the same crowd that got fed in John’s version of the feeding of the five-thousand . . . remember?  A little boy with five loaves and two fish saves the day, and that same crowd is so impressed that it tries to take Jesus by force and make him king . . . seems more like a mob to me . . . and then, you’ll recall, the disciples set out in a boat without him, and he walks across the water to catch up, and that same crowd, that was fed the miraculous bread, the same crowd that tried to force him to be king, piles into boats and comes after him, wanting to know how he got there . . . and the bread discourse begins in fundamental misunderstanding, about the nature of Jesus’ mission, and more pointedly, about the nature of belief . . . the crowd thinks it followed him because of the signs they saw, but Jesus knows it was because of the bread they ate . . . but the crowd keeps on asking for a sign, and Jesus explains no, it’s the bread, which of course is from God, it’s God who is the author of your belief, not because you have seen signs . . .

      No one can come to me unless drawn by God . . . it has nothing to do with your volition, like you saw a sign or something and were convinced, it’s not something you can reason about, it has to do with God . . . this is the work of God that you believe in the one God sent . . . and so this crowd is the same one who were fed the miraculous bread, who misunderstood the nature of his mission so much they tried to use violence to make him king, who misunderstood the nature of belief so much they thought it was because of signs, of flashing lights and showy miracles . . .

     But who are the people in the crowd?  Well, we know there are insiders – people like the twelve, who consider themselves in the inner circle – but there are also more casual followers, shepherd-on-the-street types, inquirers, seekers, drawn to what they had heard, and whom they’d heard it from . . . and there are also undoubtedly some local religious authorities, perhaps some local synagogue officials and the like.

     In other words, the crowd listening to Jesus’ speech is a lot like . . . us.  Some of us are devout, some of us consider ourselves insiders, like the twelve . . . others of us aren’t so sure, we’re seekers who, though certainly Christian, have our doubts about some of the things Jesus is saying, some of the stuff he’s asking us to do . . . and there certainly are some religious authorities here as well, some of us professional Christians whose charge it is to hold interpret the law and prophets and gospel just so . . . so, when we read this discourse, when we read this speech, perhaps we shouldn’t read it so much from above, so much from the standpoint of somebody who knows the score, but from below, as if we Christians were the crowd . . .

     Let’s try it . . . let’s imagine we are the crowd.  John said that they disputed among themselves, fought among themselves, saying “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” And certainly, we can feature that . . . we’ve fought for two millennia over just what it means to eat Christ’s body . . .  and Jesus says “Truly I say to you:  “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.”  And we say . . . yechhh!  This is even worse than before, now he’s talking about us drinking his blood like so many middle-class vampires . . . our nice, clean Calvinistic theology – something about being lifted into the presence of the risen Christ – seems a lot more . . . tidy than this . . . this is messy and dirty and not-at-all Reformed.  This business about eating of his flesh and drinking of his blood is just about as hard to take for this 21^st Century crowd as it was for the first century one . . .

     And as if to shock us even more, as if to point up the messiness, the untidiness of it all even further, Jesus switches verbs on us . . . before, he was using a polite verb for eat, the standard one for people sitting down for a meal, but now he switches to one that’s much more harsh, much more earthy, even though our English translation is still simply “eat,” it has the connotation of chew or gnaw or chomp . . . “Those who gnaw, who chew on my flesh and who drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up . . . for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink, and we get that, we get that they are true in the deepest sense, true not only in the sense of “really . . . no kidding,” but true as in most real, bringing sustenance at the deepest level of our body . . . unlike the bread of the world, unlike all the things that claim to feed us, Christ’s flesh and blood are true food and drink . . .

     We are bombarded today with all manner of advertisements, all manner of promises to make our life easier, to meet our deepest needs . . . everything from television to personal computers to fast food . . . car commercials show happy shiny people riding in their SUVs, all with model good looks and killer hair-do’s . . . toothpaste ads show gleaming-mouthed young adults cavorting, and the message is clear – these things will solve your problems, they’ll get you the woman or man of your dreams, you’ll have 2.4 wonderful kids and a country home, and all your needs will be met . . . but we know, listening to Christ in the hot Galilee sun, that only his flesh is the true bread, only his blood is the true drink, and only they can bring true fulfillment.

     As a matter of fact, when we eat Christ’s flesh and drink Christ’s blood, we abide in him and he in us . . . and the concept of abiding or “dwelling-in” is important in John’s Gospel . . . in another metaphor, Jesus likens this relationship to a grape-vine . . . I am the true vine, he says, just as his flesh is the true flesh, and just as the branch cannot bear fruit unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me.  This abiding is a close, intimate relationship, a nourishing relationship . . . without it, we cannot produce fruit, either in our lives or the lives of others.

     Last week we explored some of the Eucharistic implications of all this, some of the Lord’s Supper connotations, but that can’t be the whole story, it can’t be the only context, because if it were just about the physical act of Eucharist, which we practice once a month in this sanctuary, then that would raise troubling questions, not least of which is the nature of salvation, the requirements for it . . . is belief necessary, as Jesus himself emphasized earlier in this speech, and which he said comes from God, or is it necessary only to take the Eucharist, as this passage would imply?  In fact, both are intertwined, inseparable in this passage – see Jesus and the fourth evangelist’s overlapping of theme and content – and inseparable in Reformed theology . . . belief is indeed required for salvation – which, remember, is here and now according to John as well as in the future – belief is necessary, but, as Christ said, that is the work of God . . . and the communion with Christ that is at the heart of the Eucharist – that mystic, sweet communion, as the hymn says – provides grace, sustenance, and nourishment for the abiding-in Christ – and Christ abiding-in us – that is the reality of salvation in the Gospel of John.

     The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, was incarnate among us, walked and talked and lived among us . . . it says so in John’s sweeping, beautiful prologue, and so we should relate every mention of flesh in his Gospel to that first mention of flesh, and so if we ingest his flesh, if we take it into ourselves so that it becomes our flesh, we take in the Word of God, we incorporate him so that he abides in us, and we in him, wholly analogous to those ancient prophets – God has put God’s word into our mouths no less than he did Jeremiah when he touched his lips, or Ezekiel, when God fed him the Temple scroll, bite by tasty bite . . . they internalized the Word so they could proclaim it, just as we have done to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ . . .

      Brothers and sisters, we come to God, like that crowd came to Jesus on the mountain, hungry and thirsty for something authentic, something real . . . and like that first century crowd, we at times misunderstand our own salvation, we do not get the very nature of our belief . . . we want signs, a king who does flashy things for his subjects, a Christ of the glitter and glitz . . . but instead of flash we get flesh, the flesh and blood of the incarnation, that mysterious emptying out of God-hood from our God . . . the world gives shallowness and superficiality, things that stay awhile then evaporate like the morning dew . . . Christ gives true food and true drink, and we who have partaken of him, we who have eaten that flesh and drank that blood will never, never hunger and thirst, but have eternal life.  Amen.

Our Daily Bread (John 6:35, 41-51)

    There was a time, in a galaxy not so far away, when bread-machines were all the rage. They were on everyone’s Christmas list, and they still sell fairly well, I think . . . you can find whole web-sites devoted to bread-recipes and bread-machine recipes, and there are folks who swear by their bread machines, and others who think they’re sacrilegious . . . and bread is like that, it evokes strong feelings in a lot of people, strong sense-memories of wonderful times and meals, memories of going to grandma’s house and smelling the bread, of romantic times, a loaf of bread a jug of wine and thou . . . for me I think about simple breakfasts of cheese and marmalade and hot French bread served to Pam and I in a hotel near the Eiffel Tower . . . but in Jesus’ day, bread was a matter of life and death, and it’s in a way redundant when Jesus says “I am the bread of life” because bread is life in the ancient middle east . . . it’s kind of like saying “I am the life of life,” isn’t it?  Or maybe he means more like “I am the basis of life,” just as bread is the basis of life in the ancient middle east . . . or “I am the essential ingredient of life” . . . Of course, it doesn’t help that he qualifies the saying with another peculiar statement: “whoever comes to me will never be hungry” – and how is that like bread, if I eat bread for breakfast I’m getting a mite peckish long about lunchtime . . . and what about this “whoever believes in me will never be thirsty” stuff?  Since when did bread quench your thirst?

     Well, we can think of today’s reading as a meditation upon this saying, a meditation by way of explanation . . . exactly what does he mean when he says this?  In what way is Jesus the bread of life?  Well, the religious authorities – whom John rather pejoratively calls “the Jews” – when the religious authorities hear about this, they begin to complain – and another way to translate it might be “to mutter” – they began to mutter about it among themselves “Isn’t this Josephs’ boy, whose father and mother we all know?  I mean, we did business with his daddy, we were served Seder by his momma, how dare he say ‘I am the bread come down from heaven?’  Who does he think he is,  the Pope?”

     I ask you . . . what would you think if some local kid ran around saying “I am bread of life, sent down from heaven.”  Or to put it in more new-agey terms, “I’m Gaia, mother earth, source of all being . . . whoever comes to me shall never perish, but become one with my subterranean parents?”  I think we’d start edging toward the door, fingering our cell-phones, thinking “now just what was that number for the sanitarium . . .”  So I don’t think Jesus’ neighbors can necessarily be blamed for thinking “Oy vey . . . what do we have here . . . a nutzer?”

     Like them, we judge the truth or false-ness of a claim – I am bread of life, I am mother earth – by human categories, by what we’ve experienced, or by what we’ve been taught.  And since the enlightenment, since rational materialism has become the order of our day, it’s become nearly impossible to step outside the borders of the observable, of what has been shown scientifically, of what we “know to be true.”  How can this be?  We know that bodies can’t rise from the dead, we’ve never seen water turned to wine, it’s against the natural laws of the earth, and the best minds in our techno-scientific-consumer culture say that it couldn’t happen, therefore the miracle stories must be symbolic, some “primitive,” “superstitious” way of expressing the divinity of Christ, and because bodies don’t rise from the dead, the resurrection must have been some kind of transcendent epiphany in the disciple’s minds . . .

     Maybe that’s why Jesus doesn’t make some long, drawn out argument or explanation about how he can say that he is the bread of life, come down from heaven . . . he knew that in the closed world of his audience, in the belief-system that they were immersed in, there was no way to “argue” them into believing that he was the bread sent from heaven . . . only if they ceased their complaining, their muttering, their bandying back and forth of their really logical arguments about how this couldn’t be so, how that law – for them Torah, but for us maybe a law of physics – how this law or that theorem made it impossible, only if they ceased all that muttering and complaining would they be open to belief.

     And how do they come to that belief, what is the motive force?  Put another way, if they can’t come on their own, by listening to logic, how then do they come?  “No one,” Jesus says, “No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me . . .”   It is God – whom Jesus calls Abba, Father – it is God who draws a person to the Son.  And further, it’s written in the prophets – Isaiah for one – that they shall all be taught by God.  In fact, everyone who has heard and learned from God will come to Christ.  And of course this opens up that old can of worms that separates us from the Baptists . . . New Testament scholar Charlie Cousar calls it the “mysterious paradox of believing.  On the one hand, invitations are given to which humans can respond.  On the other hand, those who respond are drawn by the divine power, for nothing else can produce faith.”[1]  As Jesus himself put it, right before our passage, belief is the “work of God.”[2]

     So it sort of wipes out – or at least it should wipe out – that feeling of superiority some Christians have, kind of like we’re God’s people and you’re not, because if it’s up to God, then it’s not up to us.  Our belief, our faith is God’s work, not ours . . . whatever holiness – in the original sense of set-apart-ness – whatever holiness we have comes from God, not us . . . and of course that wasn’t particularly good news for the religious authorities of the day, who gained power and influence in part because they were a people separate from everybody else . . . but if they shall all be taught by God – everybody, the Jews, the Samaritans, the Iraqi’s, everybody – if they are all taught by God, how can anyone claim special treatment?  The answer is, of course, they can’t . . . they couldn’t in Jesus’ day, any more than we can today.   

     But there is compensation . . . as a final elaboration on what it means that he is the bread of life, Jesus tells us about it . . . and we know he’s serious because he uses the formula “Very truly I tell you,” more familiar to us in the King James as “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, whoever believes – and here we have one of those pesky participles “believing” again – whoever is believing, whoever is in a state of belief – which is, remember, the work of God – whoever is in a state of belief has eternal life.  And put this way, we remember that the Johannine conception of eternal life is not just life after death, but those who are believing have it now, it’s something that can be enjoyed in the present . . . and Christ is the bread of that life, the bread, the nutrition, the foundation of that eternal life . . .

     Your ancestors – who, by the way, grumbled in the wilderness just like you’re doing – your ancestors ate manna?  That other bread that came down from heaven?  Well, they died.  This – and I can imagine he’s pointing to himself now – this is the bread that comes down from heaven so that you may eat of it and not die . . . and now we come to it, to the final, gasp-inducing point . . . how is Jesus like bread?  Because if you eat of him, you shall be sustained, you shall not die.  And to recapitulate and punctuate and accentuate it all he sums it up: “I am the living bread that came down from heaven.  Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and – you heard correctly – the bread that I give for the life of the world – not just Jews or Samaritans or even Presbyterians, but the world – is my flesh.”

     And we can almost hear the Jewish crowd – including religious authorities and his own disciples – let out a collective Whoosh, because this was pretty heady stuff . . . if you eat of my flesh you will not perish, you will not die in the wilderness of your own sin, but you will have eternal life.  But not only was it pretty heady stuff, but it was pretty blasphemous stuff as well, and besides all that, just plain old, downright yechhy . . . eating his flesh, gnawing through bone and sinew and gristle and heart . . . it’s no wonder some folks called the first Christians “cannibals.”

     Of course, John’s readers had no trouble identifying this last line as Eucharistic, as having to do with the Lord’s Supper, with Communion . . . and neither do we, here on the other side of the resurrection, on the other side of that last supper . . . and of course the equation of bread and Christ’s flesh hints of the mortality to come, the death of the one we call Lord and master . . .

     And now we can see a final significance to the bread imagery in this passage, a final distinctive feature . . . not only does it refer to the heavenly origin of Christ, to the bread come down from heaven, but it alludes to the very earthly, very earth-y nature of his flesh, rent and torn on the cross.  In a sense, the world – human-kind, those captured in the thrall of sin and of evil – ate his flesh on Golgotha, just swallowed him right up there on the cross, but the result, paradoxically, is life for all . . .

     And every time we eat from his flesh, and drink from his blood we do it all over again, we reenact that original consumption there on the cross . . . I know that it’s not good Reformed theology, Calvin’s probably spinning in his grave right now to hear me say it, but there it is . . . when we eat the bread and drink the wine we are ingesting our guilt, we are incorporating it right into our corpuscles, into our molecules . . . the Eucharist is a kind of a confession, an acknowledgement of our part in crucifying Christ . . . we absorb it, own it, make it part of us.

     What’s that you say?  You don’t like all this Dostoevskian talk of guilt and consequences? You don’t believe in all this stuff about collective responsibility?  I wasn’t on Golgotha 2000 years ago, no one related to me was on Golgotha 2000 years ago, to sum it up, I wasn’t there when they crucified my Lord.  And that’s fair enough . . . let’s take collective guilt off the table, just for argument’s sake . . . but don’t we crucify him over and over again daily?  Don’t we kill him all over again when we deny his place in our lives?  When we relegate him to an hour or two on Sundays, and maybe a Wednesday-night supper?  When we shove him into our private lives, into the private sphere, and don’t allow him to influence how we live in public?  Don’t we crucify him when we make all our decisions – like the religious authorities – based on human categories, based on what’s expedient, instead of what’s right?  Seems that way to me . . .

     Only by eating our guilt, only by incorporating our falling short of what God has intended for us into us, so that we are as familiar with it as we are the little pinky on our left hand, will we be truly liberated.  Because it’s only through the full knowledge of our complicity in and bondage to the structures of evil that rule this world that we will know how to defeat them in our own lives and communities.  You gotta’ know something’s there before you can avoid it.

     And so, when we ingest the bread sent down from heaven, when we eat the flesh sent from God, like Adam and Eve in the garden, we are eating knowledge.  Only unlike that golden-delicious apple, unlike the gossamer-flake wilderness manna, this knowledge is a saving knowledge.  As the prophets wrote, we shall all be taught by God, and this is the nature of the teaching: that we ingest, literally and figuratively, the Word of God, the Word made flesh which dwelt among us, and through that word, the truth will dwell in us and set us free, and we shall have eternal life.  Amen.

---

[1]    In Brueggemann, W., Cousar, C., Gaventa, B and J. Newsome, Texts for Preaching: A Lectionary Commentary Based on the NRSV – Year B, (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox), p 464, 1993.

[2]   John 6:29

You the Man! (2 Sam 11:26-27; 12:1-14)

     In part one of our mini-series Bored of the King David rises to power, defeating all who comes before him – including Mad King Saul – and after defeating various “ites” – the Moabites, the Ammonites and the Amalekites, to name but a few – he’s taking a well-earned rest in his cedar-paneled house, when he gets the bright idea to build one for God, who has none of it, knowing that David wants to corral the Almighty for his own kingly agenda.  But then God turns right around and lays an unconditional covenant on him, a better covenant than anybody in Israel has ever seen, that promises that David’s house – get it?  House of cedar . . . house of David, as in dynasty? – that David’s house will be a sure one, that God won’t take it away from David like God did the aforementioned Saul.

     In part two, we see David – that sure-house prediction going to his head – lusting after Bathsheba, raping her and engaging in an hilariously inept cover-up, trying to get her husband Uriah to be with his wife, so they could plausibly claim that the baby – did I forget to mention there was a baby? – so they could plausibly claim that the baby was Uriah’s, at least to Israelites who couldn’t count.  But than, Uriah – foreigner though he is – is more obedient to the Torah than David, and he won’t go down to “wash his feet,” if you know what I mean, and so the King just has him killed.  And there’s another elaborate cover-up – this one involving code words and secret messages.

     And now we’re in a bare, cell-like room, and settles on Bathsheba, beautiful even in sackcloth and ashes, and the light from a window illuminates her tear-stained face, and we know she is in mourning, and after the mandatory number of mourning-days, David sends a henchman to gather her, and then the royal ceremony and bingo, it’s finished, we can see that it’s all over, that David has gotten his way, as, might I remind the audience, the king always does . . . the deed is done, the king is married, all legal-like, and nobody will be the wiser, nobody will question the king doing kingly deeds, especially since his army is winning, especially since he’s beaten all the neighbors.  And as the camera lingers on David’s smug face, we cut to a flashback where David tells his chief flunky Joab “the sword devours now one and now another . . . Do not let the matter trouble you . . .” And subtitles give a literal translation “Do not let it be evil in your eyes . . .”

     But there’s problem with all of this, one great big fly in the ointment . . . “but the thing that David did is evil in God’s eyes” . . . and it’s a turning point in the narrative, a hinge upon which the story hangs . . . up until now, it’s pretty-much been all David, all the time . . . David sent for Bathsheba and took her and lay with her, he sent for Joab who sent for Uriah and finally he sent for Bathsheba, who became his wife . . . David’s done the sending, and the taking, as kings are wont to do, but now all of a sudden the tables are turned . . . the thing David did was evil in God’s eyes, and now it’s God who’s doing the sending, and it’s God who will do the taking.

     Specifically, God sends for his mouthpiece, and we can see ol’ Nathan as he walks toward the camera, looking like he’s right out of Central Casting – which he probably is, he looks like the Una-bomber on the Adkins diet – and he tells the king a story . . . “There was this rich man and this poor man, see, and  the rich man had many sheep and many cattle, but the poor man had only one, measly, little lamb . . .”  And anyone hearing this can figure out who the measly little lamb is, and notice that she’s a commodity.  A possession.  A thing to be stolen from her husband.  Indeed, Bathsheba’s put on par with a sheep.

     Anyway, Nathan continues to lay it on thick – and here’s where it gets kind of funny.  “This lamb grew up with this poor guy’s children, it ate with them, drank with them, and lay in his bosom.  She was like a daughter to him.”  Get it?  Daughter?  Bath-sheba, daughter of sheba?  And the rich man, faced with an unexpected visitor, doesn’t want to slaughter one of his own multitude of sheep or cattle, so he takes the poor man’s only, beloved lamb.  And we can see the poor man, tears running down his cheek, as the lamb is torn, bleating weakly, from his arms.

     Immediately David is incensed – “As the lord lives,” he says, “This man must die,” and ironically pronounces the sentence prescribed by Torah – “he shall restore the lamb fourfold,  because he did this thing,  and because he had no pity.” And Nathan springs his trap: “You are the man!” and the full force of David’s guilt comes crashing down upon him. “You are the man.”

     For the first time David realizes that all the time, and all the effort God put into him, all the good he’s done for the Lord, aren’t going to get him out of his punishment, and as if God had read his mind, God says through Nathan, “Look what I’ve done for you: I appointed you ruler and delivered you from Saul’s hand.  I gave you Saul’s house, and Saul’s wives, and the house of Israel and the house of Judah.  And look how you repay me – you’ve killed Uriah and taken his wife as your own!”

     And then, judgment: Because David betrayed Uriah by the sword, the sword would never leave his house.  Never would there be peace in David’s family.  Violence would mark all that they did.  Because David took Uriah’s wife, God would take David’s wives and give them to another, who will lie with them openly, for all to see.  And though David did his deeds in secret, probably for national security reasons, God would do his “before all Israel, before the sun.”

     At last, David acknowledges his actions: “I have sinned before the Lord.” And Nathan delivers one last judgment: “The Lord has put away your sin – you will not die.  But because you have scorned me, the child born to you shall surely die.” And the word we translate as “put away” is pass over, as in “pass over” the houses where the blood of the lamb is smeared, and so we immediately get the allusion to the freeing of the Israelites from Pharaoh’s clutches . . . we’re meant to associate the two, to see the Israelites’ freedom from slavery and David’s freedom from sin as cut from the same cloth . . .

     And everything happens as God says: David’s house is torn by strife and violence.  His son Amnon rapes his sister Tamar – rape ran in the family – and Absalom kills Amnon for it.  Absalom lay with his fathers wives – before all Israel, under the sun – before being killed himself.  But before it all, the first thing to come true was the death of Bathsheba’s child, the death of rape’s fruit.  And as the boy weakens, as he fights for life, David prostrates himself before the Lord.  He fasts and prays and pleads with God to save his son.  But to no avail – the child is doomed.  And as the closing credits roll, the camera pulls, back, back until David is revealed to be alone in the realization of the enormity of what he has done.

     The story of Nathan’s oracle, and its aftermath, highlights the bald, inescapable fact that what we do has consequences.  Walter Brueggemmann likens the story to Chappaquidick – one night of pleasure, a fleeting plunge over a bridge, and a career is broken.  After Ted Kennedy drove over that bridge, he never got near the presidency again.  And so it was for David – a fleeting night of lust spun things out of control, and led to more murder, more rape, and the deaths of innocents  within his own family.

    And so it is with our own sin – the more we try to forget it, the more we try to keep it secret, the easier it is to spin out of control, and affect lives beyond our own.  They don’t have to be spectacular sins, like adultery or murder, either.  Have you ever noticed how a single, little lie can branch out so that, pretty soon, you’re telling more and more, just to counteract the effect of the first?  Just so it seems like you never told a lie in the first place?   Pretty soon, you’re asking yourself  “Now, what did I tell Bob?  What did I tell Wanda – was it what I told Bob?”  And on and on and on.

     Sin has consequences, not just for the sinner but often for others innocent of the deed.  We are all enmeshed in a web of relationships – in a church, in a family, in a community – and what we do affects every other member of that group, whether we like it or not, whether we believe it or not.  In the West, where individualism has been taken to pathological heights, many of us have forgotten this.  We do what is good for us to do, and to heck with everyone else . . . and our culture, of course, creates this, it magnifies it and multiplies it thousands of times . . . people who think “me first” make the best consumers, they buy the most stuff, “You deserve a steak today,” “Be all that you can be” “You’ve got a life to live . . .”  Our selfishness is created in us – or at least greatly magnified and encouraged – by the society in which we are embedded.

     And this brings us back to our original question – what happened to David?  How did he get to be this way?  Why are many kings and presidents and CEOs corrupt?  Could it be – in part – the nature of the beast, the beast by which they find themselves embraced?  Look at all the Corporate scandals – Enron, Tyco, WorldCom – the people at the top, with the power, surrounded by lawyers and PR flacks and yes-men, you can almost interchange them, you can almost exchange Ken Lay with Sam Waskal, Bernie Ebbers with Dennis Kozlowski, it’s like each of them are cogs in the machine . . .  the CEO of Boeing or IBM or Intel lays off thousands of people, ships their jobs overseas, and they can’t put food on the table, and if the CEO didn’t do it the board would replace him, it’s the nature of the beast, the nature of the economic beast . . .

     And David, caught in a full-court press of sycophants, people ready to tell him what he wants to hear, people completely willing to do whatever he wants, dependent on advisors with their own agendas, and with responsibilities, mouths to feed, embedded in a system that won’t let him go . . . and pretty soon you start believing the press, start thinking you can do anything.  You do something bad – you commit a little adultery, take a little graft, bilk the people out of their retirement money – and you cover it up, you can’t do anything else, you’re trapped . . .

     But there’s another character in this morality play, another actor, and it’s Nathan, a godly, prophetic man who literally flies in the face of the system.  Because if David was in a sense created by court, created by the powers-that-be, he also embodied them.  He was the House, the Senate, the Supreme Court and the President, all rolled into one.  He was the man! And when Nathan said that, when he said to David “You the Man!” he walked on dangerous ground.  He was telling a king he’d acted disgracefully.  He was telling a king he’d dishonored his God.

     And look how he does it . . .he doesn’t do it directly, he doesn’t confront him directly . . . he tells a story, a parable, not unlike that other prophet that we sing about every Sunday.  He tells him a story, a fable if you like, and it’s powerful, it convicts David of his sin . . . words, thin and fragile, lost on the wind as soon as they are uttered, yet strong enough to bring the powerful to their knees . . . and Nathan is a model for us.  What we have to offer is the Word, in all its ephemeral beauty . . . what we have to stand up to fallen creation with is the Good News, the Word confronting the world.  The Word spoken, the Word heard, the Word lived by the Word incarnate himself, Jesus Christ.

     And that’s the grace here, folks – you remember last week I promised you grace – the grace is the Word of God, incarnate in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  We have the words of eternal life, and they are words that can shake us out of our enthrallment to the world, our enslavement to the powers of death.   Look what happened to David . . . he was confronted by the Word, and he repented . . . he was able, for the first time in a long time, to admit his bondage to sin.  The word of God freed him from bondage to evil, it gave him the means to throw off the yoke.  And of course, it gives us that power as well . . . we have the words of eternal life, life that starts right now, right here, not some pie-in-the-sky by-and-by.  We may not believe it, we may not feel it, it may not look like it, but we have the means to resist the world and its death-giving ways.  And if that ain’t grace, I don’t know what is.  Amen.