Sunday, August 23, 2009

Eating. A Difficult Teaching.

Text: John 6:51-69

Let’s be perfectly clear. As if that were possible.

We would like to be clear about doctrine. How does salvation work, for example? We would like to be clear about morality. What is good behavior and what is not? We would like to be clear about ethics. What is just? We would like to be clear about the future. What will happen to us and when? We struggle, sometimes, to make sense of things. We would like to understand how things work. In light of what we would like, today’s Gospel reading is difficult. That’s what many of the disciples thought. “This teaching is difficult. Who can accept it?” they said.

Over the past few weeks we’ve heard a lot about bread from our friend John, the Gospel writer. This whole section of the Gospel of John, chapter six, is called the Bread of Life Discourse. It starts with a story of how the stomachs of 5000 people were filled with just five loaves of barley bread. It ends today, with a teaching about bread and flesh that most disciples can not stomach.

It is not clear exactly what John is trying to do here. It has been unclear from the very beginning. If you find it confusing, you are not alone. The earliest church thinkers did not agree how to interpret what John wrote about what Jesus said. Some thought that Jesus meant that the bread he is talking about—the bread of life—means his teachings. For those thinkers, this discourse has a lot to do with believing, and in particular believing the right thing. For them, when Jesus says “whoever believes has eternal life”—that is the key message. But others thought that Jesus was clearly speaking about the Eucharist. For those thinkers, this passage is John’s equivalent of the Last Supper story in the other Gospels (there is no Last Supper scene in John). For them, when Jesus says “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you will not live”—that is the point. And some, of course, say both interpretations are right. Or wrong.

Either way, it is hard not to be moved by what Jesus says. Both the power of belief and the power of the sacrament of the Eucharist have moved people of faith for millennia. But while the believing section has been relatively easy to swallow, the bread and flesh part has not. At least intellectually, if not liturgically. For many people this passage is the make-or-break part of Christianity. For some it is the most difficult and creepy part of Christian teachings and practice. For others, it is the most powerful and nourishing part.

Nonetheless, there is no way to get around this eating-flesh scene. People do try. In the Reformation, 500 years ago, Martin Luther had a famous debate with another reformer named Zwingli over whether Jesus was really, truly, in the bread. Zwingli was squeamish about it. He said that Jesus did not really mean what he said. In the Eucharist, which is what they were discussing, Jesus was in heaven and the bread was here on earth. It was just bread. Folks were not really eating Jesus. Luther, as usual, interpreted things in an earthy and common way. I am the bread, says Jesus. This is my body, says Jesus. Flesh. It may not be understandable, Luther said, but it is certainly clear.

Christian churches choose sides more or less with either Zwingli or Luther. Lutherans and others say, when distributing the bread, “the body of Christ, given for you,” or similar words. But not all churches do. At a church nearby, the people complained that the body and blood talk made them feel “deeply alienated” and therefore when they shared the bread, they said “because you are, I am.” You can think what you like about that. But in any case, what Jesus said makes people squeamish. It always has and it still does.

Theology has been called the endeavor of “faith seeking understanding.” And liturgy means “the work of the people.” There is a nice balance in Christian life between faithful thinking and faithful doing. There is no requirement by Jesus that we understand all about our faith. There is a requirement that we do some things, like share in the Lord’s Supper. And to gather together. And to pray. And to serve others. Sometimes our understanding leads us to do those things but just as often, if not more often, doing those things leads to an understanding.

The danger of all of us who long for clarity and certainty is that we ignore the squeamish and icky and mysterious parts of the teachings of Jesus and substitute in their place an intellectualized version of him. A colleague of mine wrote that sometimes we imprison “Christ inside our minds, turning him over and over like a rock in a tumbler until he is polished and smooth, pleasing and easy to believe in.” But Jesus is not so easy.

There is a lot of talk by Jesus about food. (Some people conclude that therefore Jesus must have been a Lutheran.) Eating, for all it is so commonplace, is mysterious. Eating merges things together that are otherwise separate. It does this in a social way, as when Jesus insists on eating with the wrong sort of people. Or as it does when we all gather to eat with one another here at Faith and become more connected. Or as it does in Faith Kitchen, when eating reconciles people—even if temporarily—people who are otherwise unfriendly.

But eating also merges things in a more physical and animal way. Things we eat become part of us. Those vegetables become us. That chicken becomes us. These mushrooms become us. It is a little creepy. Eating takes parts of other living things and creatures and makes them into parts of us. If it were not so necessary for life, it, too, might make us squeamish.

John’s understanding is that the power and effect of Jesus is that Jesus and we are somehow intertwined. In the words of Jesus as quoted by John, Jesus abides in us and we abide in him. This mutual abiding-in appears all over John, and it appears in this chapter. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them, Jesus says. We may not understand how this all works—Luther said to leave that all to the philosophers—we may not understand how it works, but we can see immediately how it is something like eating. Eating makes things be a part of us. And eating something together makes us part of something. Eating does away with distinctions that otherwise seem so clear and permanent. Eating, to say the obvious, is organic. In the real world, things are less separate than we usually imagine, and things become parts of other things.

It is not just that eating is a metaphor for Jesus and us. Jesus does say in this passage, “my flesh is really food and my blood is really drink” And he says elsewhere that we must eat and drink bread and wine which he says is his body and blood. But as far as understanding goes, these words are better than other words might be. They are a way to explain what is going on. It is not enough to believe something about Jesus. You have to devour him. To join in him in some way, which way we are not required to figure out exactly what. To have Jesus not only in our thoughts, but in our brains, our body, our being.

This discourse in John starts with the feeding of 5000 people with just a little bit of bread. Yet each of them were filled with, it says, as much as they wanted. They were satisfied. Jesus, especially in John, promises abundance. The people who stayed with Jesus by the end of this passage longed for that rich and satisfying life.

The ones who stayed were the twelve, meaning the twelve disciples. This is the first time in John that the disciples are described this way, as a band of twelve followers. The disciples were the ones who stayed in spite of Jesus’ difficult teaching. The rest went away. The disciples stayed not because they had the strongest stomachs. Not because they were the cleverest and most understanding thinkers. The ones who continued to follow Jesus were not the ones who understood things most clearly. They were the ones who had the strongest need for life. They were the ones who had the greatest hunger.

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