Eating for Life

Sunday, August 20th, 2006
Proper 15 B
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA
John 6:51-58

51 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.” 52The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” 53So 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. 54Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; 55for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. 56Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. 57Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. 58This 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.”

Again with the bread.

I promise the subject will change – so let’s get started.

Over the last three weeks we’ve been moving through the 6th chapter of the Gospel of John, and have been unwrapping, so to speak, John’s telling of Jesus’ presentation of himself as the bread of life. We are drawing towards the end of the chapter, and Jesus is drawing towards the end of his explanation of just what he means when he called himself the “bread of life.”

Today’s passage actually overlaps with last week’s. The lectionary reference actually does that on purpose, to provide some sense of continuity. Though, thinking about it and reviewing the themes and the wording of the passages we’ve been studying over these last weeks, it wouldn’t seem necessary to do that so much for continuity’s sake – but more so for the sake of differentiating one passage from the other.

Three weeks ago, our passage was from the beginning of the chapter, and Jesus performed the miraculous feeding of the five thousand, and from that point on, we’ve been following what seems to be the fallout from the single event. It seems the majority of the chapter has been devoted to a discussion that began when the crowd caught up with Jesus and his followers in Capernaum the day after having fed them, and Jesus’ reply to their request for more bread was an intentional sidestepping of the superficial nature of the question to get to the heart of the matter.

There’s a radio program that comes on late at night on National Public Radio out of Washington University called ‘To The Point’ – every time I hear the title, it reminds me of what Jesus did when people asked him a superficial question – he drilled right through it to the underlying question – the underlying need, want, desire, motive, and answered THAT.

The discussion so far began with a conversation about breakfast, about not having to work so hard to eat and live. That was on the part of the crowd that had just had a taste of the miraculous when Jesus fed them with the five barley loaves and the two fish. Jesus’ reply was to focus on what is truly lasting – the bread of life – provided them by God in HIM, Jesus – his words

“This is the work of God – that you believe in him whom he (God) has sent.” (cf. v. 29)

And the continuation of the conversation is an explanation of what it means to believe in Jesus, what it means to follow Jesus, and what it means to bring him into your life. That was what we were exploring some last Sunday, when we read the passage immediately prior to today’s, where Jesus starts off by telling the folks to whom he was speaking (not just his disciples, but folks from Capernaum and the surrounding towns of Galilee, as well as the usual Pharisees and teachers of the Law – the scholars of the day) that he was “the bread that came down from heaven.” To which the ladies in the back replied “I changed your diaper when you were a baby. I KNOW where YOU came from!” – or something like that (actually, scripture records the people saying “isn’t this Jesus, Joseph’s son whose father and mother we KNOW?” – it seems a little more proper to quote something a little less … REAL … right?

It speaks to the expectations of the people that their responses reflected such a concrete understanding of what and who the Messiah – the savior of Israel – would turn out to be.

Jesus then started to spell out for them who the Messiah was – and what his role was, and what his MISSION was. And in that explanation, we get to the nitty-gritty of the gospel.

In today’s passage, we come to the heart of the conversation between Jesus and the leaders, as well as the crowds, who were so insistently following him. The people were hungry, Jesus gave them food. The people asked for more food, Jesus told them “God has sent you food that will satisfy your hunger for what MATTERS forever”. They ask him to give it to them. He tells them “I am the bread of life. Believe in me and you’ll never hunger for meaning again.”

Then he takes it to that next step. He’s given them the concept, now he’s going for the application. And he gets really REALLY graphic.

“I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you”

Jesus dropped a bomb. He told them they had to eat HIS flesh, and drink HIS blood in order to have the life he’s been telling them about. The “bombness” of the statement is found in the fact that in the Judaism of the day, and still to this day, it was and IS, forbidden to eat the flesh of an animal with it’s blood still in it – check out Genesis 9:4 – that goes back to the days of Noah. Leviticus 3:17 makes it a perpetual statute – in other words, a permanent law – that we must not eat any blood. Likewise in chapter 17, verses 10-14 – the law applies to foreigners as well as the Israelites. We find a similar injunction in Deuteronomy 12:23.

So why is Jesus directly contradicting the laws as they were laid down from the beginning? Why is he flying in the face of specific prohibitions – and taking them a step beyond to speak not of an animal’s blood, but a HUMAN’S FLESH AND BLOOD??? That is cannibalism- and THAT was prohibited as well in Jewish law. It is a practice that was as abhorrent to the Israelites of the day as it is to us today. And yet, here Jesus is, telling these people that that is exactly what they have to do.

Was he telling them to step up with a good sharp knife and have at him? Was he telling them to kill him and carve him up? What was he telling them?

We need to understand the concept of ‘flesh and blood’ a little better in Jewish thought. “Flesh and blood” was a common way of referring to the state of being human. It was a way of saying ‘I am part of the earth’ – in contrast to part of heaven. We’ve all heard the phrase “My own flesh and blood” when someone is referring to a relative – a son or a daughter, brother or sister – I suspect that the phrase originated from somewhere in there.

Jesus is saying this:

1. He is giving the true bread of God from heaven.
2. He is himself that bread of life.
3. Bread by its very nature is to be eaten, therefore, somehow Jesus is to be eaten.

What we need to understand is that Jesus was, in pointing explicitly to his flesh and blood, insisting that the life-giving sustenance which he offered humanity was conveyed not by some timeless thought or intangible spirit unrelated to his particular life, but by his incarnate existence as a concrete historical reality living in their midst.

Christ’s temporal existence was the unique link mediating the eternal life of God to humanity.

To put it in another way, by the very fact that he lived, and breathed, and walked on the earth, God was offering God’s self in the person of Jesus to bring life to us all.

To believe in Jesus is to not only follow his teachings, his lessons, his practices and ethical principles, but it is to believe that he was born, wandered, taught, ate, did everything we do as humans, and yet did not lose in any way the divinity of who he was – the Word of God made flesh – that goes back to why John begins his gospel the way he does – In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.

What does that mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

It means that we need to never lose sight of who we believe in and why. We need to be constantly reminded that ours can be a reasonable faith, and with reason we can go far, but at a certain point, the point of the incarnation, and the resurrection, and the ascension, we part ways with those who rely solely on reason to be their guide in life, and become people of faith.

Faith allows us to hold the claims of our faith close to our hearts and say “Yes, it might seem to be empirically impossible, but that’s okay. I’m not called to have all the knowledge, all the answers, I’m called to believe.”

In his letter to the Corinthians (I Cor. 1:23), Paul calls it the stumbling block to the Jews, and foolishness to the gentiles.

We need to remember what it is we are foolish about, and stand firm on that solid ground.

Let’s pray.