Pentecost 12 B: Meeting the Carnal God
Dear Partner,
I’ll confess that there are times as I read the upcoming texts and prepare this letter to you that I am temtped to think – as, I imagine, many people (and perhaps some in our pews) think – that the Bible has precious little to do with real life. This week was one of those weeks. I mean, here we are, stuck in the middle of this argument between Jesus and the crowd who was following him about bread from heaven and Jesus’ nearly unintelligible and rather grotesque assertions about eating his flesh and drinking his blood.
Biblical scholars, I realize, can show that behind these verses a controversy rages in the early Church about the nature and import of the Lord’s Supper, a controversy which John the evangelist is attempting to settle with his record of Jesus’ discourse about giving his own flesh and blood that the world might live.
But even as I plodded through the work of these scholars, ranging from Augustine and Luther to some of my very own professors and colleagues, there welled up inside of me a mighty complaint. “So what!” I wanted to scream with each new twist in the scholarly debate. “So what!” What does this talk of flesh and blood and heavenly bread and even with the Lord’s Supper really have to do with the ins and outs, the ups and downs, of everyday living? What does it have to do with the things that really matter, our hopes and fears, loves and hates, our living and our dying? What does it have to do with us, here and now, two thousand years later, struggling just to make ends meet?”
When I come to the Biblical text, you see, I don’t come for academic or theological controversies, but rather to find both counsel and comfort in dealing with this life; and, even more, I think, I come to the text for meaning, not meaning in the sense of answering all my questions, but meaning which makes life worth living. And so like the crowd in today’s lesson, I also grow frustrated with Jesus’ abstract words about eating and drinking his body and blood when what we really need is something more concrete, solid, meaningful. “How can this man give us his flesh?” they rightly ask. Or, in other words, “Stop talking nonsense, Jesus. We need something a little better than your empty, abstract, metaphorical promises.”
To this angry demand, Jesus responds by insisting like a petulant child on the point he has already made. “I am telling you the truth,” he says, both to the crowd gathered around him in Capernaum and those gathered in our congregations. “I am telling you the truth: if you do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you will not have life in yourselves. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life…. For my flesh is the real food; my blood is the real drink.”
And then, suddenly, upon hearing these words we realize – the crowd both then and now – we realize that he’s serious. He’s not being metaphorical or speaking abstractly; he really means it. This one, Jesus, would give us his flesh to eat and his blood to drink.
Upon hearing it the crowd in Capernaum shrinks back because what Jesus is speaking about has always been regarded as an abomination by the law and the prophets. And upon hearing it we shrink back because it doesn’t square with our reason, it doesn’t fit our sensibilities, and, if we’re to be honest, it’s just a little gross, sounding closer to cannibalism than it does Christianity. I mean, think about it for a moment. When is the last time you really paid close attention to the words of Jesus we remember at each celebration of the Lord’s Supper?
Martin Copenhaver, one of the Church’s more eloquent preachers and pastors, describes what happened when one of his parishioners did just this. The communion table was draped, as always, in starched linen and set with silver chalices and plates and crystal flagon. The congregation was silent, even somber, as the pastor began carefully to read the words of institution in a solemn tone meant to add dignity to the proceedings. And “On [this] occasion,” he writes, “when I repeated Jesus’ familiar words, ‘This is my body, broken for you; this is my blood, shed for you’ a small girl suddenly said in a loud voice, ‘Ew, yuk!’ The congregation looked horrified,” he continues, “as if someone had splattered blood all over the altar — which, in effect, is just what the litle girl had done with her exclamation.”
For three weeks, now, we have looked at this sixth chapter of The Gospel According to John and have connected it to our faith and, particularly, to the sacraments and they way they create and nourish our faith. But now, here, in the fourth week, we finally encounter the heart of it all. In these verses we begin to recognize just what is at stake for Jesus, just how much we are worth to him. In these verses, he offers to us his very own flesh and blood, the flesh which will be stretched upon the cross for our sake, the blood which will flow freely from his hands, feet, and side, also for our sake.
For three weeks we have read, studied, and struggled to understand what Jesus means by speaking of the bread of life and the food from heaven. Here, now, in this fourth week he makes himself far too plain. In this passage, Jesus gets all too gritty, even base, in his imagery in order to confront us with the claim and promise of the carnal God, the God who becomes incarnate, who takes on flesh, becomes just like us, so that we may one day be like God.
For in Jesus, the Word made flesh, and in the sacraments, the Word given physical, visible form once again, we meet the God who will be satisfied with nothing less than our whole selves. This is why Jesus speaks of giving us his flesh and blood, you see, for “flesh and blood” is a Hebrew idiom which refers to the whole person, hearts, minds, spirit, feelings, hopes, dreams, fears, concerns, everything. In Jesus, you see, the whole of God meets us to love, redeem, and sustain the whole of who we are, good, bad, and ugly.
The God who comes for our whole selves. In one sense, this sums up all of John’s testimony to Christ. For throughout the Fourth Gospel we have encountered some of the most familiar images describing the relationship of Jesus and those who believe in him: Jesus is the shepherd and we are the sheep; he is the vine and we are the branches; he abides in God and we abide in him. “In this passage, however,” as Copenhaver continues, ‘language is pressed to the limits to express the indissoluble union and inextricable participation of one life in another. For those who receive Jesus, the whole Jesus, his life clings to their bones and courses through their veins. He can no more be taken from the believer’s life than last Tuesday’s breakfast can by plucked from one’s body.”
This is the promise which God makes to us in the Sacraments: to be one with us and for us forever, to stick with us and even in us no matter what.
So perhaps the task this week, Dear Partner, is to tell our hearers in language as vivid as we can muster that each and every time we celebrate the Lord’s Supper God comes to us once again to offer us a promise made so concrete and solid so that we can touch and feel, taste and eat it. For, here, again, in these common physical elements, we have God’s promise that God not only cares about our births and deaths, our marriages and our jobs, our successes and our failures, but that God has also joined God’s own self to them and to us through Christ, the Word made flesh and given for us.
So tell them all this, Dear Partner, and then invite them to come. Come to eat and drink this promise. Come prepared to meet the God who meets us exactly where we are. Come to receive the real food of Christ’s own body, the real drink of Christ’s own blood, that we might have support in living in this so very real and difficult world. Come, finally, to meet the God who offers us, not just meaning, but life itself, life in Christ both now and forever.
Thank you for your work and your words, Dear Partner, and blessings on your proclamation of this living Word.
Yours in Christ,
David
Until recently,and for ten years, I was a weekend chaplain for a regional trauma center in SW OH. Every-other-weekend my shift ended with just the right amount of time to attend my church. My ‘Ew, yuk!’ was ofter the casualties of the city and highways, with an occasional patient with massive burns.
I was made whole in the sacrament in a manner that enabled me to bring healing and wholeness another day to patients, staff and families. Families came to the ER because the call said “You’re loved one was taken to the trauma center by helicopter” and little else. Often the fear and wonder if life or death would greet them was on their face when I met them. I came as a bearer of the promise. As I had received, so I gave. Promises kept.
Two unfortunate typos distract from the stellar content. “intextricable” needs to lose that first “t” and “obimanation” should be “abomination.”
That’s what comes of rushing! Thanks for catching those, Mark.
As always, such wonderful and thought provoking points you make. “In these verses we begin to recognize just what is at stake for Jesus, just how much we are worth to him.” Often we overlook this point completely and yet it is a touchstone of our faith. Thank you David for again giving such wise words a home. You are continually an inspiration.
This week is Pentecost 15 B, not 12 B as listed in the title.
Proper 15, Ordinary 20, 12th Sunday after Pentecost. Totally weird system of counting.
Yeah! What’s up with that?!?
I didn’t grow up in a liturgical tradition, but have come to love the RCL …
Not that I’m complaining … 🙂
BTW, love the reflection … Thank you David!
I study my Bible and sermon resources, scratching for a cleat to come up with a relevant sermon. This week, as often, your words have given me the “ping”, the peg from which my forming words and our United Methodist congregation’s worship will hang. Like reading a good poet, “that’s” what I mean to say, but you’ve said it concisely and well. Thank you. Know there are those like me that thank God for you!
A three year old child listened to the words, heard them and understood what the familiar words were telling her. Wow!! How many of us hear these words again and again without understanding, without hearing? A child listened, heard, understood and responded with the truth in her mind…ew yuk! These words are difficult to hear and more difficult to grasp the true meaning.
This was brought home to me years ago when I took a guest to church with me, someone who was un-churched, who came away from the worship service with the same response as the three year old child. He said it was gross, cannibalistic. He hadn’t heard these words before, he had no background with the church’s teachings to understand the true meaning of the words.
His response shook me up. I was raised in the church, the words were/are so familiar to me that they provoked no response within me at all. Acceptance without thinking, doing something because it’s something we just “do” as a family is worse than this child’s loud response. Instead of the congregation looking at her in horror, I wish they looked at her in amazement for shaking them up! Amazement that a child had an emotional response to words she’d heard many times. If only we’d all have a response like this. If only we’d all get “shaken up”.
Thank you so much for your words of wisdom and truth, you inspire many with your thoughts put into words.
I’d like to share something I just posted on my Facebook page:
Looking at Sunday’s Gospel reading where Jesus gives us his flesh and blood as the true bread from heaven (Jn 6:51-58) and thinking about my sermon on this text, I was inspired with a new mealtime prayer – changing a famous first line and bringing back the little-known second line. “Come Lord Jesus, be our meal. Let us show your love is real. Blessed be God who is our bread. May all the world be clothed and fed. Amen.” What do you think? (New hashtag: #BeOurMeal)
Actually, I just changed it. Now it’s “Help us show…” rather than “Let us show…”
Thanks, Kurt, with attribution that may just become the ending to our message!
David,
Your insights on wholeness tell the Good News in our everyday lives. I appreciate your candor.
Here is a reflection on the text that reflects on the flesh & blood imagery
Corpus Christi
Speaking of the Church anorexic
undernourished by dogma
and fast food sound bites
from ‘What Would Jesus Do’
campaigns.
Her diet of rice wafers
and shot glasses of grape juice,
speak of fasting,
betraying the Feast.
She walks from the table
and pious words of forgiveness
without pondering the mystics,
the mystery, the peace.
Imagine a large table
full of faces forgotten
of bad, good, indifferent
and all in-between.
Imagine the Host,
Christ, the Jew, oft forgotten
sharing his very self
with the greatest and least
at the large table
deep in a forest
a banquet of plenty
surrounded by beasts.
Where no one goes hungry,
where no one is rejected,
where everyone is satiated
and become what they eat.
Plants and animals,
all of creation
at this universal table,
abiding in the One
who gives his flesh, the true food;
who gives his blood, the true drink;
and new life, now, forever,
for all on the brink.
Kenn Storck ‘A Poem a Sunday’ – written August 11,
http://pastorkennsstudy.blogspot.com/
Thank you. This helped me a lot. I am willing to believe that God loves me that much, that God is that connected to me through Christ. That’s worth sharing.
One author, whose name I need more time to research, said something like, “Come to the table to receive what you are. Then go into the world to be what you have received.” I’m looking at the continuing incarnational aspects of this chapter, with the Body of Christ (believers) being the realized activity of Jesus in our communities. Saying that bread and wine are the body and blood of Christ to be received seems to me only the first half of the story, which we continue to write with our daily lives. My congregation has a tradition of not offering communion to children until proper instruction and/or confirmation occurs. But I see a desire for community in their eyes and hear it in their voices when they ask why they cannot receive. Today is Wednesday, and these thoughts remain very fluid.
That’s attributed to St. Augustine. Thanks for calling it to mind.
Saint Augustine said, “Believe what you see. See what you believe and become what you are, the Body of Christ.”
David,
Thank you. As always, you provide insight and new avenues of thinking. I admire Martin Copenhaver’s work and appreciate you for bringing it in here! I’ve often thought of this text as an “ew, yuck,” kind of text, as well as the “so what?” that you mention. Thanks for putting meaning to it through your research and articulate words! It strikes me that this kind of thinking might be what Wisdom is talking about in the Proverbs reading for Sunday–that we might lay aside immaturity and live, walking in the way of insight. Thanks again!
David, have you avoided the concept of Christ’s ‘Real Presence’ in the Bread and Wine because it evokes another “So what!”? If so, I agree Eucharistic abstractions are best avoided in the pulpit, but it seems the text this week is inviting a sacramental perspective? Also, I’m probably not the only clerical fan of your commentary that wouldn’t mind hearing some ‘inside baseball’ from you on this complex but crucial subject!
starting to feel like I’m getting “wheat belly”
I think you hit on the head what’s stood out for me – that God is the “living Father,” making all things new and doing living things like entering the world through Jesus Christ, and continues to be living today through the sacrament and through the activity of the Holy Spirit. In the meal, we come to see, feel, taste, that God is “all in” for us and our only response is to be “all in” for God. You write like I’d like to preach, David. Thank you once again.
Thanks David, I too was plodding wearily through some of the acres of learned exegeses with hardly a glimmer of any inspiration, at least as far as my sermon tomorrow is concerned. You have provided a catalyst to trigger enough of a reaction to string some seemingly unconnected threads together.
Thanks, David. I always enjoy reading your blog each week (prior to preaching on Sunday). I, also, like the Lectionary Readings: God, being pleased, with Solomon’s words (prayer request); and Christ, the Word, becoming Incarnate. The two do go together: word and deed (enfleshed).
Thanks, David. You’ve helped in ways that I’ll be unpacking for some time. I only wish you’d been around for the Confirmand in Copenhaver’s story who left the church because the faith he was offered was a mystery not to be explored.
And I kinda like “intextricable”. It helps explain any text message that falls victim to auto correct.