The reading
John 6:51-58
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.” The Jews then disputed among themselves,
saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” So 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, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is
true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood
abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live
because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. This is the
bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and
they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever.”
The message
So after 3 weeks of reading these scripture verses from John
6 about Jesus identifying himself as the bread of life and then talking about
something else (the youth gathering and pulpit exchange with Prince of Peace in
Cambria Heights), I am actually going to talk about the gospel reading this
week.
John’s Gospel, his telling of the story of Jesus life, death
and resurrection for the forgiveness of our sins, is the last of the 4 Gospels
and is rather different from Mark, Luke and Matthew. The first 3 are narratives,
they are basically a timeline and story.
They describe the places Jesus went as well as the things that Jesus said
and did. John is organized based on 7
signs of power or miracles. Each act is followed by a discourse or long
conversation Jesus has in which he explains the deeper significance of what
happened, of what the sign reveals about God’s power and love for each of
us. In today’s reading, the sign of
power is Jesus feeding of a great crowd with a few fish and a couple of loaves
of bread and the discourse is about Jesus as the bread of life.
After Jesus feeds the crowd, some of them figure out what
happened and they follow Jesus to see more. They track him down and expect
magic. I get the sense that they are telling Jesus “feeding all of those people
was pretty good but show us the best you can do, and if it impresses us, we
will believe you are from God and we will follow you”. The crowd wants another sign, Instead Jesus
tells them “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.” The people are taken back by this language
and get uncomfortable (like many of us probably are). Since Jesus is right
there in front of them, they do not have to figure out what he means, they just
ask him “How can you give us your flesh to eat?” Instead of backing down, saying It’s just a
metaphor or figure of speech or explaining his choice of words, Jesus is even
more aggressive and clear, he answers them by saying “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”. This is not what the crowd expected. They
anticipated a great sign of power, something even more miraculous then feeding
thousands of people with a little bread and fish. What they got instead was
Jesus telling them the way to everlasting life.
In some ways this is like meeting your partner, the true love of your
life, for a quick lunch at the local diner and they ask you to marry them, you
expect a decent meal and you get a life changing, joyful moment.
Unfortunately though, the way to eternal life involves
eating Jesus’ flesh and drinking his blood.
In this case, the way does not seem easy, it seems downright nasty. This
stuff about eating flesh and drinking blood sounded as creepy and bizarre then
as it does now. In fact, verses like
these led some opponents and enemies of the early church to accuse them of
being cannibals and performing rituals that involved human sacrifice or the
drinking of human blood. I mentioned this
a few weeks, but it bears repeating, often when I read these verses, I think of
blood sucking Vampires and brain eating Zombies. This is not the most comfortable part of the
bible for us to talk about (trust me, every 3 years when these bread of life readings
come up for 4 or 5 weeks in a row, most pastors that follow this shared list of
readings are complaining (the whining usually starts sometime in May and goes
through September). Many pastors talk about the other bible texts from the Old
Testament or Paul’s letters or doing a summer series about something else.
Of course, when we are given only 6 or 7 discourses in
John’s Gospel, its hard to just ignore one of them, especially since this one
about the bread of life comes after the feeding of the crowd, one of only two
miracles in all four Gospels (the other one is Jesus resurrection). Plus when Jesus says you need to do this to
inherit eternal life, we ought to pay attention. Before we have a blood drive
and put Jesus steaks on the BBQ, we need to look a little deeper about what
Jesus means. I hate to say but this is
one reading I have a hard time dealing with.
I am going to try and share how I understand all this talk of flesh and
blood.
(Late Saturday night I decided I did not think the end of my sermon was good or correct so I changed it on Sunday morning, I will
try to write what I said here)
The first question we need to ask is “if the bread of life
is talking about Holy Communion or something else?" Scholars, priests and teachers in the Roman
Catholic Church argue that John 6 is clearly a communion text. Luther and many others from different
Christian faith traditions have argued otherwise. In John 6 Jesus uses the word for flesh, in
all the references to communion Jesus uses the word for body. There is no ritual or invitation to share in
John 6 and the timing is off. This conversation about the bread of life happens
at least a year before Jesus celebrates the first Communion with his disciples
on the night in which he was betrayed.
Perhaps the biggest problem with thinking about this conversation about
the bread of life as Holy Communion is that Jesus tells the crowd that to
inherit eternal life, to be part of God’s promises and kingdom, they must eat
his flesh and drink his blood. Now, as important as Holy Communion is to us,
and as much as it is a time when we mysteriously encounter the presence of the
Risen Christ, the act of receiving communion alone is not how we inherit
eternal life.
In some ways, it helps make sense of the bread of life by
asking the question, “what is the way we inherit eternal life”. That is
accomplished by God grace, God’s gift of faith, and through Jesus Death and
resurrection for the forgiveness of our sins. That is the message of the God’s
revelation to us, through the scriptures, though Jesus words and actions, and
through our experiences. That means
whatever Jesus is talking about when he refers to eating his flesh and drinking
his blood, must point to those things. It
must be a way of Jesus telling the crowd that to part of God’s kingdom they
need be joined to him, to be one with him. There are many examples in John when
people misunderstand Jesus by thinking he is talking about physical things when
he is really talking about Spiritual things, for instance when Jesus tells
Nicodemus “you must be born again”, Nicodemus asks “how can I enter my mother’s
womb and be born a second time”. In that sense, by eating and drinking, Jesus
may be simply reminding the people that to inherit eternal life, We must be
connected to him.
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