Sermon at The Church of the Holy Apostles, New York City,
August 20, 2006, The Eleventh Sunday of Pentecost: Year B
by The Reverend Peter R. Carey
Proverbs 9: 1 - 6
Psalm 147
Ephesians 5: 15 - 20
John 6: 53 - 59
 

     In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

     I was born into an Irish-American family and that meant, in the 1930s at least, into a family that didn’t understand very much about food. What we ate wasn’t bad, but it was quite plain and repetitious and rather bland.

     Things didn’t improve for me when I went away to college in the 50’s. College dining halls weren’t known in those days--and probably still aren’t--for their fine cuisine. When I entered the Dominican Order, in 1959, things in the food department continued to remain pretty bleak. The women who prepared the meals for the Dominican fathers and brothers were Dominican sisters, most of whom, like me, came from Irish-American backgrounds.

     Then in 1969 I was sent to Rome to begin my postgraduate studies and after I’d been in Europe for a while I said to myself, “Wow! So this is what all the fuss is about! This is what food is!” And after that discovery, believe me, I never turned back.

     My journey toward real food parallels my journey toward St. John’s gospel. When I was a young student of theology and scripture, I used to say that I didn’t much like John’s gospel. It was too rich for my blood. It was too “mystical” somehow and I knew I didn’t have a mystical bone in my body. It was too poetic and metaphorical and too full of mumbo jumbo. Give me the old plain-speaking synoptics-- Matthew, Mark, and Luke--any day.

     But in later years, especially after I began to have to preach on John’s gospel, I grew first to respect it and then to love it.

     This is not to say that I have ever found John the Evangelist easy going. I haven’t and he isn’t, but I have found him worth the effort. Well worth the effort. I have found him to be nutritious and even delicious food for the soul.

     When comparing John’s gospel to the other three, it is often pointed out that the synoptics focus more on telling the story of Jesus’ life in a more or less chronological way and less on explaining the significance of our Lord’s life and death and resurrection. John, on the other hand, digs deeply into the meaning of Jesus’ life and death and doesn’t seem to care as much about chronology. This is what makes the synopics easier going than John and this is what makes John sound so different from the synoptics.

     But this is obviously an over simplification. There is plenty of chronology in John, just as there is plenty of theology in the synoptics.

     This morning’s reading from the Gospel of John is an excellent example of Johannine theology: challenging, difficult to understand, deep, rich, and satisfying.

     In today’s gospel passage Jesus says: “Truly truly I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.”

     When you first hear that passage, it is troubling. It may even sound like Jesus is talking about some kind of cannibalism. “Eat my flesh. Drink my blood.”

     Well, not really. It is in the verses that precede today’s reading that Jesus first makes the claim that his disciples must “eat his flesh”: “The bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh,” he says.

     Jesus’ listeners who heard him make this claim did not suppose that he was proposing cannibalism. There is no hint of that in the gospel. They knew that he was speaking in some way figuratively. What shocked them was Jesus’ claim that he was the bread of heaven, that he came down from heaven, just as in times past manna had come down from heaven to feed the Jews on their journey to the promised land. “Your ancestors ate and died, but the one who eats this bread will live forever.”

     This is what scandalizes the Jews and so they ask, “How can this be?” They think he’s too big for his britches, if not downright blasphemous. Isn’t he just Joseph and Mary’s kid from Nazareth? Precocious, maybe, but, hay, this going too far!

     But Jesus doesn’t back down. He repeats and presses his claim even more. “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.”

     So, if we are not to think that these verses are a call to cannibalism, we are still left with the problem of understanding what Jesus meant by “eat my flesh” and to understand why Jesus in this gospel says that in order to have eternal life we need to eat his flesh and to drink his blood.

     To understand the meaning of “flesh” in John’s theology, we need to turn to the opening words of his gospel: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God..... And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.”

     The Word was made flesh.

     The Greek word for “flesh” chosen by John is sarx and it means the fullness of humanity. If John had wanted to say that the Word of God took on a human body, he would have used the word soma. But sarx is not just a body, but everything that makes a human being human--memory and intelligence and emotion, human weakness and human strength, like altruism and love and courage and fear and discouragement and joy and pain and pleasure--everything that goes into making us human. It was in that deep sense that God Incarnate became flesh and blood.

     So when John says that the Word was made flesh, he is saying that God became truly and fully and completely human. And when Jesus says, “The one who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I in him” he is saying that the act of eating his flesh puts us into contact with Christ on the deepest and fullest level of our being.

     So deeply and so fully that the those who eat his flesh and drink his blood can be said to abide in him, and he in them. And when two people abide in each other, dwell intimately with each other, are in profound relationship with each other they share with each other.

     Thus, when we eat Christ’s flesh and drink his blood in the blessed bread and wine of the Eucharist we come into contact with him on the deepest possible level of our existence.

     As we eat the bread and drink the wine of the Eucharist, Christ himself becomes a part of us. His body becomes a part of our bodies, his blood a part of our blood. And we become a part of Christ in such a way that we share in his life and in his holiness.

     On this level of mysterious but real interconnectedness Christ shares his gifts with us. He give us eternal life now in the present and resurrection in the life of the world to come. “He
who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day.”

     Only Jesus Christ can offer such gifts to those who come to him in this way because only God in Christ, has them to offer.

     In our culture we are bombarded all the time by advertise- ments for things that are supposed to meet our deepest needs. But they all fall short. No new car, no miracle diet, no trip to Paris, no big bank account, no swanky address can ultimately satisfy us. They all fall short. “O God you have created us for yourself,” said St. Augustine, “and our hearts are restless, until they find their rest in you.”

     In the Eucharist we find our rest in Christ. We come to him just as we are. Human, weak, afraid. And he recognizes us and speaks to us by name because he is one of us. To him all hearts are open, all desires known, and from him no secrets are hid. He feeds us with spiritual food in the Sacrament of his Body and Blood. He sends us then into the world in peace. And on the last day, he will raise us up.

     Amen.

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