Thus
beginneth the third sermon on the Bread Discourse from the Apostle John. And lo!
Our reading repeateth once again the final verse of last week's passage: “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.” And lo again!
Those self-same Jewish religious authorities, whom John calleth “the
Jews”, that last week responded to
the first sentence—I am the bread come down from heaven—with grumbling, respond to the second sentence, the one about the
eating of his flesh, by disputing amongst themselves. And lo a third
time! That has been a cause of disputing
ever since. Because Christian religious
authorities like to dispute every bit as much as Jewish authorities do. Indeed, next
week we’ll see some of Jesus’ own followers doing some disputing, and of all people, you’d think they’d get it, but no: it's so hard for them that some of
them actually give up the whole thing, they leave off following Jesus
altogether.
But
that’s next week. This week, we look
at the way some theological types reacted—rabbis and scribes and such, people
who were experts in their religion, and they are puzzled, and arguing among
themselves: “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” And once again, we see them grappling with
something outside their frame of reference, outside their normal knowledge
base. And we also see them being quite
literal, which of course carried over to the organized theologians and
theologies. Just how can this man give us his flesh to eat,
anyway?
Well,
of course, Jesus’ comments about eating his flesh were connected by the earliest
theologians to the Lord’s Supper which, after all, Jesus had commanded them to
observe. And in Matthew, Mark and Luke—but
not John—Jesus actually tells the disciples what he means as he
takes the bread and says “this is my body, broken for you.” But in our passage, the religious authorities
had no such teaching from the Christ to guide them, so they were left to
scratch their heads in puzzlement.
But
even with Jesus’ taking the bread and
the wine and demonstrating just how this man can give us his flesh to eat, this
passage remained a contentious one for theologians and other ne’er do wells . .
. Like the earliest commentators, most
relate this passage to Communion, even going so far as to say that this is John’s
version of the institution, which he doesn’t literally include. In the fourth century, John Chrysostom, Archbishop
of Constantinople, wrote that as is “characteristic of those who greatly love,”
Christ “brought his body down to our level, namely, that we might be one with
Him as the body is joined with the head.” The literal reality of this coming-down
of love means we can do more than just “look upon” him. Rather, those Christ feeds can “fix their
teeth in His flesh and to be commingled with Him.”
Although
most folks associated this passage with Communion, there was at least one theologian—a fellow named Martin
Luther, you may have heard of him—who denied it, and with gusto. He thought that Jesus’ use of the
flesh-eating metaphor in this passage was a way of jarring us into thinking
creatively about that whole incarnation thing.
He wrote that those who hear this are “to investigate what He was
driving at with this peculiar speech. What could He mean? Is one man to devour
the other? Surely this cannot be the meaning. Then let them deliberate and
reflect on the matter, and ask what He did
mean.” According to Luther, we shouldn’t
read the words as “my flesh,” with
the emphasis on flesh, but as “my flesh,” as in Jesus’ flesh is not like ordinary flesh. And with characteristic, Luther-ian
rambunctiousness, he preached that this
flesh is not “the sort of flesh from
which red sausages are made,” nor is it “flesh such as purchased in a butcher
shop or is devoured by wolves and dogs,” nor “veal or beef found in cow barns.” Good to know.
Maybe
wanting to shock them into thinking explains why he doesn’t answer their
questions straight out, he doesn’t roll his eyes and say “no, you idiots, it's
a metaphor.” Instead he doubles down, he continues to hammer it home: “. . . unless
you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in
you” and “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I
will raise them up on the last day . . .” And finally, reading it with Luther’s
emphasis “my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink.”
Zowie. Talk about rubbing it in. I can imagine the religious authorities’
heads almost exploding at that. But John’s
congregation, the outcast Jews who heard his gospel read aloud in each other’s
homes, would have had no trouble understanding the metaphor. They
would have remembered the first chapter, where John said that Jesus is the Word
made flesh who dwelt among us. So? you
say, what does that have to do with
eating his flesh? Well, they also would have recalled that a common
thing that happened at the commissioning of prophets was that they ate the
scroll, they ingested the word of
God, and it thus becoming a part of them.
So perhaps John’s audience
would have viewed this in part as a
call to prophesy, a call to proclaim the Word, which Jesus embodied and which
they were asked to eat. And of course, because
you are what you eat, does that imply that they became the Word as well?
Well. Jesus says that his flesh is the bread of life, not the bread of prophecy, and
those who eat it, will live, and eternally, at that . . . thus, the ante is about as high as it
gets: it’s life itself. But what does eternal
life look like? What is its shape, it's warp and its woof? By what is it characterized? He gives us a
hint when he speaks of abiding, and
this is what advances his argument beyond where we ended up last week: “Those
who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.” They
abide in me and I in them . . . This
life, that is in some way eternal, is characterized by a mutual
abiding, a mutual indwelling. Those who eat of Jesus’ flesh and drink of
his blood abide in him, and he abides in them.
What
is this abiding, anyway? What does it mean to abide? Well, on the simplest level, of course, it means
to dwell, to have one’s abode.
But it also has the sense of staying,
of remaining. The last line of the film The Big Lebowski is “The Dude abides,”
implying that the main character—the Dude—is steady, sturdy, immovable . . . that he abides implies that he sticks with it,
come what may. Another sense of the word is of waiting, of patience. Another is
tolerance . . . When someone says I cannot abide
that, they mean that they can’t tolerate it . . .
And
I think Jesus means it in all of
these senses . . . When disciples—and that’s us!—abide in him, it is an
indwelling, for sure, but it is also secure, stable . . . Our abiding in Christ
implies a tolerance on our part of
things we don’t understand—and there are a lot
of those things in Christ as well as
life—as well as things that go against our world view . . . When we truly abide
in Jesus, we are patient, we wait
upon God, and what does Isaiah say? “Those who wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount
up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and
not faint.”
But
there’s another side to this, of course: Jesus said “those who eat my flesh and
drink my blood abide in me and I in
them.” Jesus abides in us, within us,
as we go abut our business, as we go abut our daily lives. And he is stable, he is patient with us and
tolerant of all our foibles, he is in it for the long run . . . His
love permeates us and fills us with its presence. John Chrysostom had it right: in Jesus, the
love of God comes down and fills us if we ingest the Word of God, if we let it
. . .
But
how do we do that, how do we eat of
his flesh and drink of his blood? Well,
our ancestors in the faith knew that to deepen our walk, to strengthen our
journey, spiritual practices are essential . . . Prayer . . . contemplation . . . immersion in Scripture,
the Word written . . . Meditating upon the presence of Christ in everything and
every person we meet . . . Although it is God who does the filling, these
practices open us up to it, they empty a place in us so that it can be filled
by God.
There’s
one more thing I want to talk about, and it's looming over this entire portion
of John’s Gospel . . . We often talk about the incarnation as in the past, as
over and done with. It began in that
stable, surrounded with God’s creation, with sheep and cows and doves, and it
ended when the disciples watched Jesus ascend on a cloud. But it is clear from these verses—and that
other great metaphor, where Jesus likens this abiding to a vine and branches—it
is clear that the incarnation never ended, that it is happening even as we
speak. Jesus is here, among us, abiding
in you—in Betty and Bill and Brad and Dot—and in me. Wherever else
Jesus is, he is here, abiding, embodied, incarnate,
in us. Amen.
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