Jesus said to them, Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life.
I think even Anglicans, like myself, who are steeped in the Liturgical Tradition, and have become reasonably familiar with hyperbole and metaphor, still find some discomfort in these words of Jesus.
To a whole lot of people, Jesus’ words sound more like something you might expect to read in a Stephen King novel or hear in an episode of Criminal Minds.
If these words make us even slightly uncomfortable after two-thousand years of Eucharistic practice and theology, think how much less comfortable those first century ears must have been.
Yet those words were chosen quite deliberately.
The ancient words we are translating as eat and drink in these passages aren’t just our usual words for eating and drinking. They carry the nuance of literally DEVOURING and GULPING: as if we can’t get enough, fast enough.
My mother used to love to tell everybody the story of how whenever she would attempt to feed me with a bottle, she would have to poke a larger hole in the nipple in order to keep me from screaming. I was always embarrassed by the telling of that story, yet here I am telling it to you on my own. I like to think that I was just a little more enthusiastic about mealtime than some.
What I believe Jesus is trying to tell us in the Gospel of John this weekis that we should consume the Word of God, with voracious enthusiasm! We who claim to be the disciples of Jesus shouldn’t just entertain his ideas, but we should, to use the words of Thomas Cranmer in the 16thcentury, inwardly digest the Word of God with a ravenous appetite, such that we become what we eat.
Unless we have nourished ourselves such that we actually become the Bread of Life for others, we will never really be able to feed a spiritually hungry world.
There’s a haunting story about a beggar who came into a bakery one day and sat down saying, I need bread.
The baker said, You are wise for coming. You have come to the right bakery. Then he pulled down the cookbook and began to tell him all that he knew about bread.ྭ He spoke of flour and wheat, grain and barley. His knowledge of bread was truly remarkable. But the beggar wasn’t smiling, and once again he said, I need bread.
The baker applauded his choice, You are wise, sir. I will show you our bakery.
Down the hallowed halls, he was led to where the dough is prepared, then past the ovens that glistened as though they had been polished. The baker boasted that they had bread for every need, and he smiled proudly, but the beggar said nothing.
Yes, it leaves me speechless too, said the baker.ྭ People come for miles around to hear me speak on the art of bread baking. You are welcome to come any time and go over the great recipes with us, would you like that?
The beggar answered, What I need is bread.
I understand, the baker replied. You know, there are other bakeries in town, but be careful because their bread is not nearly as nourishing as ours. They don’t have our time-honored recipes.
Finally, the beggar turned and walked away. The baker was shocked, Don’t you want bread? The beggar just kept on walking.
The baker shook his head and returned to his kitchen, and mumbled to himself, He must not have wanted any bread.
In the prologue to John’s Gospel, it wasn’t a concept that was with God, it wasn’t a teaching that was with God, it wasn’t the Bible that was with God. It was the Word that was with God, and the Word was God, and the Word became flesh. . . real, palpable, living flesh for the life of the world!
I think what Jesus is saying in this Gospel, is that it should be the aim of our religion to find God not just in ideas, and not just in the Bible, but in all the ways God is enfleshed in the world, and God is most clearly enfleshed in each of us who have consumed him with an overindulging enthusiasm!
Each of us is called to be a loaf of bread and a cup of wine, upon the altar of our daily lives, for all of God’s people out there who desperately need some bread.
People look a little sideways at we Episcopalians because we seem to be so infatuated with the Eucharist. Those people do it every single week and even in the middle of the week, they say. But we know that there is a good reason for our infatuation. Each service of the Holy Eucharist is a kind of PowerPoint presentation, if you will, of how to commune with God’s people outside these walls.
At each service of The Holy Eucharist, we are physically and spiritually joined together by partaking of the one loaf and drinking from the one cup. The Eucharist tells us week after week that it’s ALL ABOUT RELATIONSHIPS. . . it’s all about embracing each other in the FLESH!
In a book entitled, The Church and Loving Human Relationships, the author tells this story:
A local elementary school had just been desegregated. A white mother was extremely anxious because it was her daughter’s first day of school, and now there was this added worry of possible unrest at the school.
The little girl’s mother was so anxious that the ordinary school day seemed extraordinarily long, and when it came time to pick up her daughter, she arrived 30 minutes early. She waited, and she waited until finally the little girl came running out of school.
‘Mommy, Mommy,’ the little girl squealed, ‘guess what?’
‘What, Honey?’ her mother asked, trying to hide the fear in her voice.
Today, the little girl exclaimed, ‘I sat next to a little black girl.’
‘And what happened, honey,’ her mother asked, almost as though she didn’t really want to know.
‘Well,’ the little girl said, ‘we were both so scared that we sat all day holding hands.’
And Jesus said, The bread I give is my flesh for the life of the world.
You and I are called to devour that Bread so we can in turn become that Bread for others. People outside the walls of our churches aren’t as interested in finding the Bread of Life inside the church here like they once were. That is an all too evident statistical fact. If we want them to join us in here, then we need to join them out there. Every Gallup Poll ever taken shows that we live in a spiritually hungry nation. People need bread.
People are afraid, and they need to hold the hand of the very real, living, breathing Christ. We can be that Christ if we just remember that we are what we eat.
Marvelous – as always. Bless you once again, Fr. Bill. Barb
Thanks so much for the kind words, Barb. Just doing what I love to do. . . share the Gospel of Christ!
Very good points. We can be very confident Jesus is speaking metaphorically, as he does throughout the Gospels. Furthermore, nowhere in John or anywhere in the Gospels is it even remotely considered that physically eating something or not affects one’s spiritual state. It is extremely hard to find reason and sense in other denominatioms that ignore all that and somehow interpret that Jesus is being literal.
I wonder too, Jesus was a Jew. He was raised in the ‘sacrifice as worship’ tradition. The Jewish sacrifice was usually consumed. Was he saying I am the new sacrifice. Or is this too literal, too violent?