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.