Part Four: Eating Jesus [Proper 15B]
The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson
John 6:51-58
Part Four: Eating Jesus
Well, forget the bread. Everyone has lost their appetite.
For a fleeting moment Jesus seemed
like an amazing man. He worked miracles.
He fed the crowd. He waxed
poetically without a script. Had they never followed him across that lake, they
could have held on to that beautiful image forever: five thousand people,
sitting on a grassy hill, eating miraculous food until their bellies were
full. In their heads floated dreams of
his kingly reign – a reign of
health and wealth, security and power.
And Jesus, their miracle man, his compassionate gaze just warmed their
hearts. It was idyllic, perfect.
But they stuck around too
long. After the meal, things devolved
pretty rapidly. First he left them. He rebuffed their advances and slipped away
under the cover of night. Then he
started talking. And things got really
confusing. He claimed to be from
Heaven. He was making them
uncomfortable. And now this. Things are no longer as confusing. Instead they are terribly clear. Now Jesus tells the crowd, “Eat me.”
It can be difficult some two
thousand years later to understand why the crowd was so horrified. Even the staunchest biblical literalists read
this text through an interpretive lens.
No modern readers think Jesus was inviting some depraved zombie
scene. We hear Jesus say, “My flesh is
true food and my blood is true drink” and we hear Holy Communion. That is our language. That is our tradition. Since the earliest days of the Church,
Christians have named the simple bread and simple wine on the altar “Body” and “Blood.”
We hear Jesus say, “Unless you
eat my flesh and drink my blood, you have no life in you” and we
hear Holy Communion. We hear Jesus say, “Those who
eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life” and we hear Holy Communion. We hear Jesus say, “whoever
eats me will live because of me” and, we
don't get queasy, we hear Holy Communion.
And that makes sense to us.
Because later in this very liturgy, I will hand you bread and say, “The Body of
Christ.” And when you receive the chalice, filled with
wine, someone will say to you: “The Blood
of Christ.”
The crowd, however, did not possess
your interpretive lens. They took Jesus
very literally. They took him so
literally, in fact, that before he is even done talking, everybody leaves. No longer is he their chosen king; no longer
is his bread appealing. They cannot get
away fast enough. That is how this
chapter of John's Gospel ends; we'll hear that next week. To the crowd, this was demented. To them, this was morbid. To them, this was cannibalism – not only
an abomination, not only an affront to God, but also really disgusting. We hang around churches; we get the metaphor;
they did not.
A well-known United Church of
Christ pastor, once told this story: “On one such occasion, when I
repeated Jesus' familiar words, "This is my body broken for you. This is
my blood shed for you," a small girl suddenly said in a loud voice,
"Ew, yuk!" The congregation looked horrified, as if someone had splattered
blood all over the altar – which, in
effect, is something like what the little girl had done with her exclamation.”[1]
Eat my flesh; drink my blood. Jesus' language is shocking. It is graphic. The images he uses are tough to take, tough
to hear, tough to imagine. The crowd was
disturbed because they could see the flesh and blood Jesus right before their
eyes. The little girl was disturbed
because she saw the pastor holding the flesh and blood of Jesus right before
her eyes. There is flesh and blood on
the altar. Do we see it? Do we see the flesh and blood of Jesus right
before our eyes?
It is here. Jesus is here. We have a God who gets all wrapped up in our
stuff. The incarnation is not a past
event. The God who came in the flesh and
blood of Jesus, still comes in flesh and blood.
And while we don't think in terms of cannibalism, this is the body and
blood of Jesus. And we are commanded to
eat it, to eat Jesus, to eat his flesh and drink his blood.
We get no comfortable distance from
God. God doesn't do distance. God wants inside of you. To be so close to us that it becomes
impossible to tell where Jesus begins and we end.
I think about this when I place the
body of Christ in your hands. I think
about the way your hands receive the precious body of God. I think about how vulnerable God becomes to
submit to your grip. I think about what
it means to have Jesus on our lips and on our tongues. I wonder if that has the power to change our
words from hurtful to blessing. I think
about what it means to consume the body of Christ. What it means that Jesus is in us, a part of
us, spreading out, living in our cells, becoming our life and our energy.
And at the altar rail I get to
offer a pregnant mother the Body of Christ. And I think about that baby in her
belly. And how Jesus moves through her,
through that earliest human connection, and finds that new life. And how Jesus is already at work.
Jesus gets in us. Jesus holds nothing back. He offers himself. To be consumed. To be absorbed. To live in us. That is what Jesus does: He offers himself to
the world. First in his incarnation. Then in his death. Now in the sacrament of his Body and Blood.
And in some ways all of it is too
mysterious to understand. It is strange
and it is beautiful. Jesus is in us,
filling our bodies, filling our minds, filling our spirits. The Body of Christ making us into the Body of
Christ. We eat Jesus. And we become what we eat.
“Those who eat my flesh and drink my
blood abide in me, and I in them.”
Maybe it's not a metaphor after all.
Maybe it is something like what NT Wright says, “Our feeding
on Jesus...is our prayer for God's own life, made flesh in Jesus, to clothe
itself afresh with us, to get...into our bones and our bloodstreams, our
thinking, our decisions, our leadership.”[2] Maybe that is the truly disturb part: this
isn't cannibalism; this is an invasion.
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