Not As Difficult

Text: John 6:51-69

There is a magical realism in the Gospel of John. It makes John both the most-loved and the least-liked of the four Gospels. Things happen in this Gospel that happen nowhere else. The most magical stories of Jesus are in John. The conversion of water to wine. The raising of his friend Lazarus from the dead. These are works of divinity. But also in John, Jesus is the most earthy and human. He is annoyed at his mother at the wedding at Cana, and he weeps before the tomb of Lazarus. John is full of seemingly opposing pairs: divine and human, light and dark, body and spirit, concrete and figurative.

What, then, are we to make of today’s passage about eating flesh and drinking blood? What is this? Is it metaphorical or literal? Is it magic or real? This teaching is difficult, so say the disciples, and two thousand years of Christians after them agree. Can we dismiss it—as often has been done—as fantastical? Just another one of those over-the-top things that Jesus says. In the category of turning the other cheek, loving your enemies, giving away all your money. Can we, as we sometimes do with the other difficult sayings of Jesus, domesticate it and change the subject?

There are a lot of weird things about Christianity, and this is one of the weirdest. On hearing this teaching, many of the followers of Jesus left him. “They no longer went about with him,” John writes. Only the twelve were left. His followers went from thousands surrounding him at the beginning of the chapter, wanting to make him king, to just a dozen. Yet for Christians in our day, eating flesh and drinking blood is central. The body of Christ, given for you, we say. The blood of Christ shed for you.

Martin Luther said of this passage that Jesus could not mean it literally. Surely he does not mean, Luther said, that one man should devour another. That seems right. Jesus does not follow this speech up with an offer to take a bite out of him right then and there. Luther also said that the passage was not about the Eucharist, about Holy Communion. We’ll talk in a minute about how, in spite of Luther’s opinion, it might have been.

But perhaps Luther was right. There is no mention of a meal here, no Lord’s Supper. The story does not take place before the crucifixion (as in the other Gospels), but rather after the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand. The emphasis here is on life, and the life-giving properties of food and drink. What Jesus asks us to remember here is not the presence of Jesus in our midst, as in the Last Supper, but instead the provision of manna in the wilderness—the original bread from heaven—and that God provided nourishment for God’s people. In some way the physical body of Jesus is like that.

We are creatures that eat. We cannot create our own energy or substance. We steal them from other things—plants and other animals. As a consequence, we need to eat or we die. Eating and drinking are not optional. To compare our need for Jesus to our need for food is to say that Jesus is essential for human life.

Since we are creatures that eat, we are not our own. That is, what we eat becomes us, and we become in some small part what we eat. Its substance is our substance. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them, Jesus says (here and elsewhere). There is a kind of biology science going on here. In spite of John’s interest in the divine side of Jesus, Jesus nourishes us—according to this passage—not primarily in a spiritual way but in a physical way. How that works, it does not say.

The church—people, followers of Jesus—tries to make these theoretical words of Jesus practical. That is, if we are to follow Jesus about eating flesh and drinking blood, without actually gnawing—the earthy word that Jesus uses here—on his limbs, we must learn a way to do this that is physical, mundane, and convenient.

Which brings us to Holy Communion. In spite of Luther, the Eucharist is a possible way to interpret these words. And it may have been how the readers of John saw it. Because by the time John was written, followers of Jesus had been sharing the Lord’s Supper for decades. Using the words we use every Sunday—called the words of institution—that come from Paul, who wrote his letters long before John wrote his story of Jesus.

When we eat the body and blood of Christ in Holy Communion, we honor and obey the words of Jesus spoken both at the Last Supper and here in John. We eat bread and wine. How this becomes body and blood, no one can say. Or at least, no Lutherans can say. There has long been a theological debate about this, but Luther said we should leave all that to the philosophers. It is interesting but neither urgent nor important. “This is my body” Jesus said; and Luther said that was all we need to know.

Luther also said that the bread and wine as body and blood of Christ was essential nourishment, needed daily (“given,” he said, “as a daily pasture and sustenance”) to get the strength to fight the devil. It is food. God gives us this food of Jesus to sustain us.

Our worries about this strange thing that is happening with body and blood and bread and wine turn out to be unfounded in practice. At least in practice among Christians. We do not judge it theologically but instead from our own experience. There is something physical going on and something mystical. We feel it when we share Holy Communion. Something of the flesh and something of the spirit. In our experience, the sacrament is effective. That is, it has a real effect.

We come forward to the altar, we kneel, we eat bread—hearing the words “the body of Christ given for you”—and we drink wine—hearing the words “the blood of Christ shed for you”—and we return, some to quiet prayer, and eventually sent out thankfully into the world—“go in peace, serve the Lord.”

None of us has to do this. None of us has to be here. We are here because we know that we need to be nourished and because we have found ourselves nourished here. The sacrament works for us.

The difficulty imagined by the disciples (and by us) turns out to be exaggerated. The uneasiness that we feel regarding these words in John is in fact not carried over into its effect in the Lord’s Supper. We might feel Holy Communion to be powerful, mysterious, comforting. But the weirdness that people sometimes find in it, though understandable, is at odds with our own personal experiences. Many of the followers of Jesus left after Jesus spoke these words. But twelve did not. We are heirs of those twelve who did not.

Christianity is based on the conviction that God became incarnate—literally, made into meat, into flesh—in the person of Jesus. We share with Jesus flesh and blood, life and spirit. Our whole self hungers for food in order to live. When we eat the body and blood, the bread and wine, it is as real as hunger is, and as magical as life is.