“Jesus said, ‘Those who eat my flesh and drink my
blood abide in me, and I in them.’” John 6:56
The Reverend Luther Zeigler
Emmanuel Church
August 26, 2012
Jesus gets up in the midst of the
synagogue in Capernaum and announces to all gathered: “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood
abide in me, and I in them.” It is hard
to overstate how shocking a statement this was, and is. The words are scandalous, disgusting even. Let’s be honest: they sound as if they are from some
primitive, cannibalistic ritual. And in
context, these words would be especially offensive to a faithful, first-century
Jew, since ancient Jewish law emphatically prohibited (and still does) the drinking
of any kind of blood or the eating of animal flesh while blood is still in it. Moreover, Jesus’ claim to be the “bread of
heaven” sent from the Father challenges the most basic of Jewish beliefs about
the nature of God as an utterly transcendent and “wholly other” being. Surely, God could not take on the form of a
flesh and blood human being. And what
could it possibly mean for such a God to be consumed? I don’t know about you, but I am right there
with the other disciples in saying:
“This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” Talk about understatement.
Most of us, I suspect, are quite at
home with Jesus the Teacher: the wise
rabbi who encourages us to love our neighbor as ourselves; to care for the poor
and needy; to welcome the stranger and show hospitality to the outcast; to seek
justice and promote the dignity of every human being. But we are less comfortable, let’s confess,
with the Jesus we meet in today’s reading, who provokes us with seemingly
outrageous language about eating his flesh and drinking his blood. It sounds crazy.
This is the kind of text we would
really rather ignore. In the early
nineteenth century, Thomas Jefferson famously did just that, by creating his
own versions of the Bible, picking and choosing those texts he liked and
thought were credible, while chucking the rest.
His work, completed late in his life, has come to be known as “the
Jefferson Bible,” but was originally entitled “The Philosophy of Jesus Based On
Extracts from the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.” Jefferson’s method was to take his New
Testament and literally cut out all of those verses that he believed expressed
cogent moral teaching and pasted them into his book, while excising everything
else, including most especially anything that smacked of the miraculous or the
supernatural. Needless to say, Jesus’ invitation
to eat his flesh and drink his blood was deemed to bizarre by Jefferson, and
did not make his cut.
The Jesus that Jefferson preferred,
and perhaps the one that most of us prefer, is Jesus the great Teacher of
Virtue. What Jefferson valued was Jesus’
morality of love and service interpreted in conformity with principles of
reason. For Jefferson, such an ethic does
not require the Trinity or miracles or even the claim that Jesus was uniquely
inspired by God. Jefferson’s Jesus is a
reasonable moralist: “a man of a
benevolent heart and an enthusiastic mind.”
In short, Mr. Jefferson's Jesus, modeled on the ideals of the Enlightenment,
bore a striking resemblance to Jefferson himself.
As
much as I admire Jefferson as a statesmen and political philosopher, when it
comes to biblical interpretation, I think his Bible squeezes the life out of
the Jesus we encounter in the gospels, and reduces to a simple ethical code the
wonder and mystery of God in Christ. The
Church has long taught, and I have come to appreciate over the course of my
life, that we frequently learn the most from those biblical texts we like the
least, if we take the time to wrestle patiently and thoughtfully with
them.
So,
then, let’s grapple with today’s text.
When Jesus says to his fellow Jews that he is the bread of heaven sent
from the Father, and invites them to eat his flesh and drink his blood, he
obviously is not expecting them to cannibalize him then and there in the
temple. That is too simple-minded and
literalistic an interpretation. Rather,
using intentionally dramatic and even offensive language, Jesus is provoking his
listeners to radically re-imagine who God is.
The
Hebrew tradition had generally regarded God as a transcendent being, who gave
His people the Law, the Torah, but who otherwise was an ineffable and distant
mystery. As we heard in today’s first
lesson, King Solomon, following the lead of his father, David, constructed the
temple in Jerusalem as the holy sanctuary where the ark containing the Ten
Commandments would be kept, as a revered memorial of the divine revelation of
the Law to Moses. But, as Solomon
himself admits in his prayer to God:
“even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, much less this
house that I have built.” During the
time of Israel’s great kings, God remained a transcendent and mysterious
reality, separate and apart from His people.
In
his teaching today, Jesus is saying something radically new about God: namely, that God chooses not merely to reveal
himself in the Law, and within the sacred walls of the Temple, but that God now
chooses to inhabit the flesh and blood of humanity in the person of Jesus. Jesus is revealing himself as the
Incarnation: God become human. Love embodied. God as simultaneously both transcendent and
immanent. Yes, it is paradoxical. Yes, it is hard to fathom. But, at bottom, what the Incarnation
signifies is that God’s love for us is so profound that the Creator of the
Universe freely takes on our frail human form as an act of utter solidarity
with us.
But
there is more: it is not just that God
has chosen to take on the human form of Jesus.
Jesus is also telling us that our relationship to God is now
changed. God wants not merely to be “understood”
and “obeyed” through the Law, as the prophets had long taught; God now wants to
abide with us, and wants us to abide in Him.
God wants more than a relationship of Mosaic faithfulness, or Solomonic
righteousness, or Jeffersonian rectitude. He wants a relationship of mutual and
deeply personal love. And so, the
invitation to share his body and blood, through what has become the great
sacrament of the Eucharist, is an invitation to participate in a meal that is the
mystery of God’s solidarity with us, His love for us. So, when Jesus asks his followers to share
the bread and wine of the Eucharist, what he’s saying is: take my whole life, and with it, nourish your
bodies, your lives, your souls.
Let
me illustrate my point with two examples, one pedestrian and one much more sublime. First the pedestrian: I love baseball. And I like to share my love of our national
pastime with friends. While I am not always successful at engendering a love
for the game in others, I have found that the best approach is not just to hand
my friend a copy of the Official Rules of Baseball along with a scorebook. Yes, these documents in some sense contain
all you need to know to play the game, but a true and authentic appreciation
for baseball is best had by completely immersing one’s body and soul in the
game. You need to go to Fenway, hear the
roar of the crowd and the crack of the bat, smell the freshly cut infield
grass, feel the leather of the ball and glove, watch the graceful movements of
skilled players throwing and catching and pitching and hitting, and yes, you
need to eat the hotdogs and drink the beer.
Mr. Jefferson may think it enough to read the rules and contemplate the
principles of the game, but I submit (and I’m betting that Jesus is with me on
this one) that you need to completely ingest the game with all your senses before
you can claim to know it and love it.
Perhaps today’s gospel is suggesting that knowing and loving God is
something like this.
The second example is much more serious
and poignant. Three summers ago, two
young brothers in their early twenties – Stone and Holt Weeks – were tragically
killed in an automobile accident as they were returning from Rice University,
where they were both students, to their parents' home in Rockville. Stone was 24 and had been a student at the
high school where I served as chaplain, although he graduated from the school
before I arrived and I didn’t know him well.
His brother, Holt, was 21 and a graduate of Walter Johnson High School
in Bethesda. Stone and Holt were the
only children of Linton and Jan Weeks, who worshipped at my home parish, St.
Columba's, where both Stone and Holt had been acolytes and enthusiastic leaders
of the youth ministry. They were, by all
accounts, wonderful young men.
I was privileged to be one of several
priests to officiate at a memorial service for these two young men held that
summer at Washington’s National Cathedral.
Thousands of friends and family were on hand. We celebrated the lives of Stone and Holt, we
heard wonderful and funny stories about their childhood, we sang their favorite
songs, we recalled their gifts and talents, we prayed for their souls, and,
perhaps hardest of all, we grieved with their parents over the loss of their
only children.
There was much that was beautiful and
memorable about that memorial service, but the single most powerful moment came
not in the eulogies, as eloquent as they were; or the music, as beautiful as it
was; or the sermon, as graceful as it was.
The most powerful moment was when we silently transitioned from the
liturgy of the word to the liturgy of the Eucharist.
With thousands of mourners filling
nearly every seat in the Cathedral, we lived out the sacrament of the Eucharist
the way we always do, the way Christians have for thousands of years, in churches
throughout this world. We quietly
greeted one another with hugs, kisses, and compassionate glances in the
exchange of God's peace, and then we gathered around the table with the bread
and the cup and re-enacted our central story:
The story of a God who loves us so much that He will not have us suffer
this world's evils alone; the story of a God who takes all of our pain,
anguish, grief, worries and fears upon himself; the story of a God whose broken
body has become the bread that feeds us; the story of a God who does not let
death have the last word, but who overcomes it; the story of a God who promises
to deliver us from this broken world, to wipe away every tear, and to make all
things new.
Where words and reason failed us on
that Sunday, the mystery of sharing the bread and the cup held us up, held us
together, and gave us hope. With all
respect, this is the Jesus that Mr. Jefferson, in all his wisdom, just did not
get.
Amen.
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