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Some people are under the impression that churches are empty more than usual during August because it's vacation time. But Sue Armentrout is convinced that fewer people go to church during August because of the readings from the Gospel of John. "They just don't make much sense," she says. "My mind glazes over, and I begin to think of the beach or my grandchildren." What do you think? According to John's Gospel, Jesus says, "I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.... I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is real food, and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him." How do you react to language like this? If you were the preacher this morning, what would you say about it? Well, we might begin with what the people who first heard Jesus or read John had to say about it. They were really ticked! In John's Gospel, when Jesus says that he is the bread that comes down from heaven, everyone began to grumble about him, John says. Then, as Jesus begins to get more and more descriptive about it, adding that whoever eats his flesh and drinks his blood has life in him, the crowd begins to have a fierce dispute among themselves. John tells us that Jesus said all this while he was teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum, and that even many of his own disciples said that all this was just too much. They wondered if they could accept it, and many of them turned away and no longer followed Jesus because of what he said. And John says that after Jesus finished saying what he had to say, he made a point of staying away from Jerusalem, because the people were seriously divided about him and because many there were planning to kill him, if they ever got their hands on him. With all this talk about his being the true bread that came down from heaven and about our eating his flesh and drinking his blood, Jesus lost almost all the support he had been able to gather up to that point. If he had been the rector of a parish, the vestry would have been mightily upset. St. Paul says that the Gospel is a scandal to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles, and if the sixth chapter of John is an accurate account of an actual teaching of Jesus during his lifetime, it would be no exaggeration to say that the Jews who listened to Jesus that day would have been absolutely horrified by his language and that the Gentiles who heard it would simply have snickered. The Jews would have been scandalized, in the first place, because for Jesus to claim that his flesh was the bread that came down from heaven amounted to his claiming that God had somehow come to earth in the form of a human being. This, to the righteous of Israel who heard him that day, would be an arrogant assertion - literally arrogant, an arrogation of divinity, an assumption, in their eyes, of something no human being, and certainly not a carpenter's son from Nazareth, had any right to claim. And, in the second place, they would have been scandalized because the Law forbade Jews from consuming blood in any form. The nephesh or "life principle" is in the blood, and it was therefore a sin for a human being, a being filled with this life principle, to consume the blood of other creatures. Such a person would be cut off from his people, said the Law. It was outrageous to speak as John says Jesus spoke. But what about us? How do we latter day Gentiles react to this earthy language which John says Jesus used? Well, Sue Armentrout says that her mind wanders to the beach or to her grandchildren, and I notice that some of us are so inured to it that we just yawn. And I wonder if St. Paul isn't right - that we Gentiles think it's foolish. I wonder if we're not, after all, more than a little embarrassed by such language. Look for a moment at what has happened to it in our liturgy. If we look back to the 1928 Prayer Book, we remember that every time we approached the Eucharistic Table then we prayed that we might "worthily receive the most precious Body and Blood of thy Son Jesus Christ." When we changed the Prayer Book in 1976, we decided to let people continue to pray the same way, if they choose to do so, in Rite I. But in Rite II we pray only that we may receive "this holy Sacrament" - with no reference to the Body and Blood of Christ at this point. And we remember that, in the 1928 book, just as we were about to come forward to receive Holy Communion, the priest, kneeling at the altar, said the following words "in the name of all those who shall receive the Communion": "We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O Merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table. But thou art the same Lord whose property is always to have mercy: Grant us, therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood, and that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us." But in our present Prayer Book, in Rite I, we removed the part about our sinful bodies being made clean by his body and our souls being washed through his most precious blood, and we made the prayer itself only an optional part of the service. And in Rite II, as we will notice by its absence this morning, this Prayer of Humble Access, and its reference to the body and blood of Jesus, has been removed altogether. I wonder why? What prompted these changes? Is it possible that we are, in fact, a little embarrassed by the way Jesus speaks in John's Gospel? Perhaps because we don't want to be charged, as early Christians were charged, with taking it literally? Charged, in effect, with cannibalism. That just wouldn't do in these enlightened days. What I want to suggest is that Jesus' language in this sixth chapter of the Gospel of John is much too important to be taken literally, and I doubt that John's original and early readers ever did so. Instead, what I want to suggest is that the language of John's Jesus is so important, in fact, that it should be taken seriously instead, which is what I believe John wanted his readers to do. John wrote his Gospel about sixty years, or two or three generations, after the Resurrection. By that time the Eucharist was well established as the primary service of public prayer for Christians, and what John is doing here, I think, is offering us his understanding of the meaning of Jesus, and of this Thanksgiving feast, for our lives. What John's Jesus is saying is that we are what we eat. He is saying that that which we spend our lives consuming is what we ourselves become. As I've already mentioned, the words "flesh" and "blood" had particular meanings at the time John wrote his Gospel. "Flesh" referred to humanity, or humanness. For Jesus to say that one must eat the flesh of the Son of Man was to say that if one is truly to know God, he must accept the fact that, in Jesus, the life of the divine has become flesh, truly human, dwelling among us. If you want God and life, John insists, then look at the man Jesus and abide in him, consume him into your own life. And "blood" meant life, so to consume the blood of Jesus is to make Jesus' very life your life. If you want the life of God for your own, then take Jesus seriously. Really take him into your own life, so intimately that it is as if you consume him, making his way your way, making his death your death, making his life your life. Jesus' way of speaking in the Gospel of John is, as I say, much too important to be taken literally. It's so important that it should, instead, be taken seriously. But if, either in John's Gospel or in any of the others, Jesus embarrasses or amuses us by the way he speaks, this divine One who lived among us as one of us absolutely horrifies us by what he does. What is it Jesus does? He chooses. He chooses to forego much of what we think important in life. He chooses to forego all those things we ever wanted. He chooses to forego success. He chooses to forego physical health, jogging, knowledge, wealth, power, fame, being Number One, being popular, being righteous. He chooses to forego all these things, and others, and exchanges them all for a Cross. This was the ultimate scandal of Jesus, the real scandal to Jews and the real foolishness to us, a contradiction and a stumbling block. It is scandalous enough to say that the God of all creation would condescend to become the food and drink of the very mortals he created. It is utterly absurd to imagine that this all-powerful and righteous One would also permit himself to be tortured and killed in the most humiliating form of execution by the very people he came to feed. But that is precisely the Good News we preach - a scandal, a wrong-headed foolishness, an assertion that life that really matters is found in giving up one's life for a cross, a contradiction. Or is it, rather, a mystery - that God loves the world so much that he gave his one and only Son, who, though he was himself of the very nature of God, did not count equality with God something to be grasped, but humbled himself and made himself nothing, becoming in his very nature a slave. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death, even death on a Cross - for our sake, because he loves us, because he wants us to know the righteousness of God which such sacrificial, loving humility is. It's foolishness and a scandal, a mystery. But there it is. "My flesh is real food. My blood is real drink. My choice of the Cross over all I ever wanted is real life." We are what we eat. What we consume into our lives is what we become. If it's the life of Christ we want, then Christ himself is real food for those who want him. The eucharistic way of saying this is that when we eat the flesh and drink the blood of Christ we take Christ into our lives. The baptismal way of saying it is that in baptism we are buried with Christ in his death. Surely no one takes this literally. Surely no one believes that we enter some kind of time machine and return to lie with him in that grave outside Jerusalem 2,000 years ago. But what we take seriously is that in going down into the baptismal water we are immersed in the sacrificial death of Christ in order that we might be raised to share in his resurrected life, saying "no" to our lives without him and saying "yes" to the life he has prepared for us. Both ways of speaking are the language of intimacy. If anything speaks of intimacy with Christ more powerfully than eating his flesh and drinking his blood, perhaps it is the language of getting down into Jesus' grave with him, there to share his death to all we ever wanted in order that we might also indeed share with him the life of the enduring bread of heaven, which can be ours as well when we exchange those things that seem so important in this world for the life of Jesus and become like him, as St. Paul says - people who, with Jesus' help, forego the wealth that corrodes for the wealth of being generous to one another; people who, with Jesus' help, forego the power that corrupts for the power of living only in ways that build each other up; people who forgive one another as God in Christ has forgiven us; people who live in love as Christ loved us and gave himself up on our behalf, an offering and sacrifice whose fragrance is pleasing to God. Is this a scandal? Is it foolishness? Or is it Good News? Whatever else it is, it's a choice, a choice available, as Jesus says, to whoever trusts him. And I suspect that whenever we approach the Eucharistic Table, this foretaste of the heavenly banquet, as we do again this morning, I suspect that we approach the heavenly banquet much as Irene Copeland Brenton approached Andrew Wyeth's painting "Christina's World" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I suspect that we approach it as mysterious possibility. Ms. Brenton, who is seventy-four years old, suffers from Alzheimer's. Life truly has become a mystery for her, which is maybe to say that she sees more clearly now than she used to. For when Ms. Brenton, along with other Alzheimer's patients, was taken last year to the museum, she spent quite a bit of time looking longingly at the figure lying in the field at the bottom of Wyeth's painting. "She seemed to identify deeply with the thin young woman in the dress, her left hand reaching out toward the farmhouse. 'You can't see her face,' Ms. Brenton said, 'but looking at her you get the feeling she's happy, because you know she's going to get to the house. I'd like to go into that house, too,' she added." (New York Times, October 20, 2005) An invitation to just such a mysterious possibility is, I think, what all of us patients receive from Jesus in John's Gospel. In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. |