“What Is Truth?” (John 18:28-40)

     The next time I stand in this pulpit, it’ll be the new year.  No . . . not that new year, but the new church year, the cosmic year of our Lord Jesus Christ.  Next Sunday is the first Sunday in Advent, when we’ll begin our tense anticipation of the Savior’s coming.  This Sunday is the last of the calendar – Christ the King Sunday – when we sum up Jesus’ life by declaring just who and what he is.  And the lectionary readings explore what it means to be king, to wield power, what it means for humans, and what it means for Christ.  In Samuel, we read the death-bed words of King David, where he admitted that when the spirit of the Lord spoke through him, it was not he who spoke, it was the Lord who spoke through him . . . and what God said was that David ruled in the fear of the Lord, wholly within God’s provenance and will.  And the Psalm appointed for today, Psalm 132, makes it clear that his dynasty is contingent as well, dependent upon the good graces of God.  “If your sons keep my covenant and my decrees that I shall teach them,” God says, “their sons also, forevermore, shall sit on your throne.”  The survival of David’s heirs on the throne is conditioned upon the grace and favor of God.

     Our Gospel reading looks at power as well, both political and theological, and what it means to say Jesus is King.  You will of course recognize it as part of the trial of Jesus by Pilate; many scholars think it’s John’s finest hour as a writer – it’s been studied in literature classes as a model example of dramatic irony.  John has structured the story into seven dramatic scenes, each one taking place on one of two “stages,” either inside Pilate’s headquarters, unclean for the religious authorities, or outside its doors, on the portico.  And the entire story revolves around Pilate moving back and forth between his governor’s headquarters – where Jesus is – and outside, where the religious authorities are, but – ironically – Jesus is not.  Talk about your shuttle diplomacy.

     But first there’s a prologue: the religious leaders – whom John calls “the Jews”  – take Jesus from the chief priest to Pilate’s Roman headquarters, but they themselves don’t enter it, to avoid ritual defilement.  The Passover’s the next day, and if they are ritually unclean, they can’t celebrate it, and so our drama begins with a picture of the religious leaders of the day, clearly bent on destroying Jesus, but unwilling to sully themselves by going into the unclean building.  So you can picture the scene: bearded and resplendent scribes milling around out on the front porch, muttering to one another in the early morning sun, up against stony, impassive columns, their shuffling presence versus silent Roman power . . .

     Scene One: They won’t go in, so Pilate comes out, standing on the porch . . . he surveys them for a few minutes, long enough to let them know who’s in control – and it’s not them, not these hick-country-bumpkin scribes and councilmen – and then he speaks: “What accusation do you bring against this man?”  But the religious authorities don’t really answer him, do they?  They just assure him that Jesus is a criminal, or else why would they have given him over to Pilate?  And note what this does . . . it asserts their authority – implicitly, at least – over and against the Roman overlord . . . it’s like “we’re the Sanhedrin . . . would we have handed you over to them if he wasn’t guilty?  We think not!”

     But Pilate’s having none of it – he’s not governor for nothing – and so he says “why don’t you judge him yourself?”  Why bother the Roman might and authority with your puny little problems?  And here’s where the truth is revealed: “We can’t put him to death,” they say, and by doing this, they reveal their agenda . . . they wanted Jesus dead, but they couldn’t – or wouldn’t  – do it themselves.  Just which one of those – couldn’t or wouldn’t – has been the cause of some debate.  Some think that the Sanhedrin wasn’t allowed to sentence criminals to death, but others think they were currying Roman favor . . . but for whatever reason, it caused Jesus to be executed in the Roman style – by crucifixion – rather than stoning.  And John tells us that this brings to fulfillment prophecies about the way he will die.

     And by interrupting the story with commentary, he’s making a statement right up front about the entire proceedings: all the machinations of the religious authorities, all the maneuvering about by Pilate, the cold-political power play, all are in the service of God’s agenda, not theirs . . .

     Scene two: Pilate goes back inside, where Jesus is, and right away asks him: “Are you the King of the Jews?”  And this serves immediately to show the intertwined political and religious agendas in Palestine, and that Pilate was well aware of the threat Jewish messianic hopes posed to the Roman government.  And so he asks him, straight out – “Are you the King of the Jews?”  And as always in John’s gospel, Jesus answers with another question; “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?” Like “did you come here on your own, or did yo’ mama send you?”  It’s insulting, insinuating, and it points up once again that Pilate may not be as in control as he thinks . . . but Pilate’s reply shows his contempt of the Jewish people “I am not a Jew, am I?”  and he asks him again: what have you done?

     And once again, Jesus doesn’t answer directly, but goes straight to the heart of the matter . . . Pilate’s worried about some rabble-rouser stirring up the peasants, and Jesus tells him the truth: “my kingdom” – and here a better translation might be “kingship” or “reign” – “my rein’s not from this world . . . if it were from this world, then you’d have to worry, my followers would be fighting, there’d be bloodshed . . . but as it is, my kingship is not from here.”  And we’re immediately reminded by these familiar words of Jesus telling his disciples “I am from above . . . not of this world” And so we know his kingship, his rule, his power is from God above.

     But Pilate doesn’t know that, and he doesn’t understand – “So . . . does that mean you’re a king?”  He’s single-minded, only interested in one thing, whether Jesus is a threat to him and his rule or not.  And all this talk about this world and the other are like water over the bridge . . . “so lemme get this straight – are you a king or not?”  And Jesus in effect tells him: You’re the one worried about that . . .  you say that I’m a king . . . I was born for one thing, and that’s what I came into the world to do, to testify – in Greek, to martyr – to the truth. . . . and anyone who belongs to that truth, anyone who is of that truth, listens to my voice, understands what I am saying.

     And Pilate, in his arrogance, in his single-minded pragmatism, wouldn’t know truth if it bit him on the nose, and he doesn’t seem to care, either, and our scene ends with his cynical “What is truth?”  And he turns to go back outside, to the waiting religious authorities.

     And in scene 3, we see his ultimate mastery of the machines of political control and intrigue . . . “I find no case against him,” he says “But!  But . . . you have a custom, that I release someone at Passover – do you want your King?  Do you want me to release the King of the Jews?”  And here he shows his contempt for them, taunting them by calling Jesus their king.  But the religious authorities take the bait – and after all, it gets them what they want as well – they take the bait and choose to release Barabbas, and thus sentence Jesus to die.

     And in that moment, as Pilate is symbolically outside, separated from Jesus, he’s with the religious authorities spiritually as well as physically.  We can see the full irony in the whole situation, as he who scorns the country-bumpkin temple officials,  he who asks in contempt “What am I, a Jew?”  shows that the answer, symbolically at least, is yes.  He indeed is one of the religious authorities as far as the Kingdom of God, he is no different: he does not belong to the truth, does not listen to Jesus’ voice . . . just as he is outside of his own headquarters, he is outside the reign of God, which is from above, not from this world.

     And what is the heart of this difference?  What is the way in which the rule of God, the kingship of Jesus Christ differs from that of the world?  The key is in Pilate’s behavior, in his very pragmatic handling of the whole affair . . . the first question out of his mouth is “Are you the king of the Jews?”  By which he means “Are you a threat to Roman rule?  Will you lead a rebellion, an uprising of the Hebrew people against me?”  For Pilate, king is synonymous with violence, with sedition, with holding onto power by whatever means possible.  As governor of Judea, stand-in for Emperor Tiberius, he knows no other kind of king than what he represents . . . for him, kings scheme and maneuver, put down armed revolts with Imperial shock troops, and order the crucifixion of political prisoners . . . that’s why he concludes that there’s nothing to charge Jesus with.  It’s not out of the goodness of his heart, not the result of some religious conversion . . . Jesus says his reign is not from the world . . . if it were, his followers would be using violence to keep the religious authorities at bay . . . it’s when he hears that, that Pilate knows that Jesus is no threat.

     Pilate’s reign, his kingship, if you will, is based on menace, on violence, and it’s maintained by soldiers with bow and spear and sword, and the threat of Imperial invasion.  Jesus’ kingship, the Kingdom of God, is based on non-retaliation, on non-violence, on the command to Love the Lord your God and your neighbor as yourself.

     Pilate asked “What is truth?” and turned and walked outside, away from truth, away from the king who came to testify to that truth . . . and by that symbolic action, he showed he did not belong to that truth, and he joined the religious authorities, he joined the people who were willing to commit violence – to execute political prisoners, to go to war –  to maintain their power.  Like  Pilate, I think we all make the choice: do we belong to the truth?  Do we hear Jesus’ voice?  Do we serve the violent leaders of the world, who talk about what great Christians they are, what men and women of God, and then use violence to preserve their power?  Do we support them with our votes and political contributions?  Or do we really follow Jesus, the innocent lamb who refused to use violence even to save his own life?  We cannot follow both.

     This is Christ the King Sunday, and it behooves us to remember what that means . . . it’s not Christ the Mighty Warrior King Sunday, not Christ the Lawgiver and dispenser of punishment Sunday . . . neither is it Christ who-bombs innocents to protect the national interests Sunday, or Christ who lies and cheats to stay in power Sunday . . . on the contrary, it’s Christ the King under arrest and interrogation Sunday, Christ the innocent victim Sunday.  It’s Christ the King being held hostage Sunday and Christ the King soon to be beaten and crucified Sunday . . . that’s whose Sunday it is, folks, and that’s the king we follow.

          Anybody who tells you different, who tells you that Christ – who is God after all, who is love, after all – wants us to go use force and violence to preserve our stuff – or even our lives – isn’t talking about any Christ that I know . . . the Christ I know loved the world so much that he came to earth, emptied himself of power, and became a martyr for truth, so that we may be set free.  Amen.

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.