Once again into the breach of John
Chapter Six, dear friends. And once again, this week’s reading includes a
substantial chunk of last week’s. This mirrors John’s infamous habit of
structuring Jesus’ speeches so they are repetitive, but for the lectionary’s
own reasons: when we’re working our way through an important passage like this,
on a weekly basis, it’s good to remind ourselves of where we left off last time. And where that is is Jesus’ startling
statement that “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in
them.”
And today, 2000 years—give or take a
few—after the resurrection it’s hard to understand the full impact of this
statement, just how offensive it was to Jewish ears. After all, we know that he’s not
advocating that we rip off a hunk of gristle and stuff in our mouth, then wash
it down with a goblet of O-positive—ah . . . 33 AD, a very good year. We get that he was speaking
figuratively, not literally . . . metaphorically, not actually. But back in the
day, wow. This was some hard stuff to get your head around. Seven times it says
we are to eat him.
And four of those occasions also refer to the drinking of his blood. Our life
depends on it!
And not only is it just gross, it’s ritually offensive too. As
Bruce Malina and Richard Rohrbaugh remind us, God explicitly tells Noah (and
thus, humans) not to eat blood: “Every living thing shall be food for you; and
just as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything. Only, you shall not
eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood.” They go on to point out that
blood—and fat—is ritually dedicated to God: “the prohibitions of fat and blood
… single out those organs ... that serve as the seat of life. Life is from God
alone and belongs to God alone. To ingest fat or blood is to strive to be like
God.”
So, the crowd listening to Jesus would
hear his words, "eat my flesh and drink my blood," as blasphemy, as
an abomination, as inciting his followers to try to become like God. And we know how that turned out
once before … that little episode with Adam and Eve and the snake? Would Jesus’
followers, and the onlooking religious authorities, assume Jesus was trying to
get them to repeat the original sin? I think that might be . . .
And then, after he describes what many
would see as cannibalism
(in fact, some of the locals accused first-century Christians of just that), he
disses Moses, one
of the heroes of Judaism: “This is the bread that came down from heaven, not
like that which your ancestors ate, and they died.” And to top it all off, as
he often did, he said these radical things in the Capernaum synagogue, the
local center of the Jewish faith.
It was even too much for his own followers, whom I
picture standing around like polled oxen with dazed looks on their faces: “This
teaching is difficult . . . who can accept it?” And they set about muttering
and complaining about it. And because Jesus is, well, Jesus, he knows what they’re
saying, but does he soften the teaching? Does he come out with “It’s okay . . .
I don’t mean that literally .
. .”? Of course not . . . Jesus isn’t there to comfort anybody, but to make them think, to get them off their
keisters . . . he’s there to afflict the comfortable, to pull them out of their
comfortable little theological boxes. Does this offend you? Does it shake up your little
comfortable world? Would it help any if you could literally see me taken back
up into heaven? Would you believe then?
And of course, we know this is no idle
threat, don’t we? They will
see him ascending back to where he was before. Right after they see him nailed
to a cross and hung up to die . . . and would that offend them? In point of fact, it’s the spirit that gives life,
y’all, the spirit.
All that stuff about eating sacrificial flesh and blood, that it’s reserved for
God, it’s just ritual poppycock. It’s only my
flesh and my blood
that gives life . . . it’s why I say that nobody can come to me unless granted
by God, who we all know is spirit.
No wonder a lot of his disciples up and
leave his company, and don’t travel around with him anymore. And when he asks
the twelve—his innermost, hard-core followers—if they don’t want to leave as well, Peter sounds
more than a little
plaintive, more than a tad
lost: “Lord, where else are we going to go? You have the words of eternal life
. . . We know that
much, even though we may not understand all the ins and outs . . .”
And in fact, they are hard to understand, even
for us 21st century types, who have a couple millennia’s worth of theology and
Biblical studies to draw on. Just exactly what is it supposed to mean? How literally are we to take it? My old
friends in the Baptist and other evangelical denominations tend to take it as
simply a memorial—do this in remembrance
of me—without any indwelling of Christ. On the other side are
transubstantialists—like Episcopalians and Roman Catholics—who believe that
when blessed by a priest, bread and wine are transformed
into Christ’s actual body and Christ’s actual blood.
We Presbyterians take a predictably
middle road, saying little about whether or not Christ is the bread and wine—or
Christ is in them,
as the Lutherans would have it. We prefer to follow Papa John Calvin when he
opined that we’re “lifted up” to be with him in a special way, not as a symbolic, but real foretaste of the
Messianic banquet at the end of time.
But you know what? I think that the
reality—if we can even approach
it with words—is a lot closer to the Catholic or Lutheran end of things than we
sometimes like to think. After all, doesn’t John himself say in that
magnificent prologue that all things came into being through Christ and that not one thing came into being
without him? Without the Word—who both was with God and was God--nothing came into
being, and we usually read that in a facultative sense, as nothing came into
being without Christ’s help, or without his creative action, but it can also be
read as without Christ’s presence. Like saying, no Snickers Bar has come into
being without peanuts or a chewy caramel center.
And that’s how mystics read it—without
Christ inside, without that divine spark, not one thing came into being. Every
rock, every tree, every person, every flower, all of creation contains what Aldous Huxley
calls “a divine Reality substantial to the the world of things and lives and
minds,” and what we
call simply Christ. Paul put it this way: In Christ all things hold together,
and Teilhard de Chardin knew it from experience, he experienced it, and it fueled his love affair
with matter.
As modern-day mystics James Finley and
Cynthia Bourgeault say, there have been two incarnations: the original at the
creation of the universe—God as Christ incarnate in all created things—and in
and as Jesus of Nazareth, born of Mary and Joseph, laid in a manger on a cold
Bethlehem night.
Do you see the special grace, the good news in all of this?
Not only does Christ the Divine pervade all reality, he pervades us. And not only is he in us, but he’s in our friends
and neighbors as well, so that Jesus wan’t just whistling Dixie when he said
whatever you’ve done to the least of these you’ve done to me, he could have
said just as well “whatever you’ve done to anything
you’ve done to me.”
So eat heartily of life, my brothers and
sisters, and drink deep . . . for that’s what Christ literally is, life: all that nurtures and
strengthens us. And if you want to see Christ, look at the birds of the air,
the fish of the sea and mountains and oceans deep. If you want to see Christ,
you don’t have to come to church to do it, all you have to do is look around
and see that he’s everywhere, in the stone with which we build and dust motes
dancing on the summer air. Everywhere,
in the atoms and quarks and gluons and muons of all matter, and in the biggest
stars and whirling planets, galaxies and black holes. If you want to see
Christ, you don’t have to say ten Hail Mary’s or sing Amazing Grace til you pass
out from the heat. No. If you want to see Christ, just turn and look in your
neighbor’s eyes. Amen.
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