Proper 16 (B) – John 6: 56-69

“This teaching is difficult, who can accept it?”

This past Wednesday, we left our Bible study with more questions than answers after we spent some time talking about our readings for today, and especially after we spent some time talking about our Gospel. This is our fifth week in John’s chapter 6, and it does not get any easier, does it? After the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and bread, Jesus presents himself as the bread that comes down from heaven, and he invites his disciples to “eat his flesh” and “drink his blood” so they may find true life in him. This is indeed a difficult teaching, so difficult that, in spite of the great miracle Jesus has just accomplished, a lot of disciples will turn their back on him after this discourse. For us, who have grown up in a “Sacramental Church” where we celebrate the Eucharist every Sunday, it may be a little easier to think about this matter. There is a lot the disciples couldn’t understand in Jesus’s teaching at the time he taught because he taught about realities that were still to come after his death and Resurrection, and with the birth of the church. Still, Christians today are still divided about the Eucharist, some celebrate it everyday, some only occasionally, some never, insisting on the symbolic aspect of it all, and even in the Episcopal Church, we would have a tendency to say: We don’t really eat his flesh, and we don’t really drink his blood. Or do we?

Well, it seems that Jesus’s first hearers may have paid more attention to Jesus’s words because they didn’t take them symbolically, they took them quite literally and they sound quite literal if we are honest. Actually the word Jesus uses isn’t even the word “to eat” but the word “to gnaw”, which has quite carnivorous connotations. And so, many commentaries I read about this passage underscore how Jesus’s listeners could have been shocked, grossed out even, by the rawness of it all. It has connotations of cannibalism, and for the religion of the Jews where you wouldn’t even eat an animal that hasn’t been emptied of his blood to the last drop, this was a revolting image. You’d never eat an animal’s blood, drinking human blood forget about it. Blood was life and it was utterly sacred. Only pagans would do that. Disgusting and sacrilege. For us I guess, well, maybe we don’t think so much about it anymore when we have communion every Sunday, but if we start thinking about it, as we are invited to do with this cycle of readings, this is indeed a difficult teaching, and who can accept it? It’s difficult to understand with our minds, but it’s also, and mainly, hard to accept for educated, sophisticated minds. All the people, yesterday like today, come to hear Jesus for a piece of wisdom, a piece of edification, they want to know how to make it right with God, how to live pious lives to get to heaven and Jesus throws at them raw images of eating his body and blood as the only path to eternal life.

Eternal life. It all comes down to this though.

As I’ve just observed we had many questions this week at Bible study, and as I try to keep scores of all the questions we share about together, I realize it all comes down to that: Eternal life indeed: Will I go to heaven or is it just for everybody else? Can a non Christian go to heavens? And what about Christians who don’t attend the Episcopal Church? Will my gay neighbor go to heaven? Can this politician I hate go to heaven? Won’t my dog go to heaven, who is so much nicer? Will this little chick that was suffocated by a snake go to heaven? Aren’t alligators too cruel to get to heaven? Many questions and a single longing in the end: Eternal life. Eternal life: Is it really true, is it for everyone and everything? How do we get there?To which Jesus responds to all and once for all, a few verses before our passage today (John 6:51): I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.

Eating his flesh and drinking is blood is our only option. So how can we understand it? And accept it? Because indeed if we want eternal life, there are no other options and Peter, if he hasn’t understood anything else, has understood that at least: Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.Eat my flesh, Drink my blood: Maybe those words are disgusting, revolting, incomprehensible, or maybe they are so full of light and love that they fly straight over our heads. They are so common and evident that we don’t get it because we would never expect so much simplicity. Because giving your flesh and blood as food and drink that’s what every living being does for their offspring: from placenta to milk to the sweat of their hard work, parents all over the world and from every culture and religion, good parents and bad parents, they all have that in common that they give their bodies for the life of their infants, and so do all the animals and other living things, included those animals we think are useless, stupid or cruel, chickens, snakes and gators included: They give up some of their bodies, they share their cells, their blood, their food for their little ones. And that’s the only way a new life is born into the world. Far from trying to gross out people with cannibals and vampires, Jesus is talking about what parenthood is all about and how he is the true parent, like those who brought us into natural life through their own self sacrifice, Jesus will bring us into eternal life through his own unique sacrifice. And we find here again a theme that is very dear to John’s Gospel: We have indeed to be born again (John 3)

Julian of Norwich wrote in her Divine Revelations: Our true mother, Jesus, he who is all love, bears us into joy and eternal life; blessed may he be! (…) The mother can give her child her milk to suck, but our dear mother Jesus can feed us with himself, and he does so most generously and most tenderly with the holy sacrament which is the precious food of life itself… This fair, lovely word “mother,” it is so sweet and so tender it [is most truly] said of him… To the nature of motherhood belong tender love, wisdom and knowledge… The birth of our body is only low, humble, and modest compared to the birth of our soul… [and] it is [Jesus] who does it…

In the sacrament of the Eucharist, we make visible, accessible, “taste-ble”, this on going reality of Jesus giving himself so we can receive eternal life. But it’s hard to accept isn’t it? It’s hard to accept not so much because it’s hard to understand but it’s humbling. There is nothing we can do to find eternal life, nothing to accomplish, we only need to keep quiet…like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child [being] content. (Psalm 131)

And so I said jokingly on Wednesday that I would come back on Sunday to answer all your questions. Well, since all your questions come down to eternal life, who gets it and how, well this is probably my answer for you: I guess parents don’t wait for their children to be smart or pretty to see if it’s worth feeding them, that would be quite awful and it’s impossible anyway, parents don’t wait and can’t wait for their children to be able to recognize and acknowledge them to give them life and to feed them, and so does the Risen Christ. He does not wait for people to be able to recite their creed to speak to their hearts and feeds them with life and love they just have to receive. In John’s Gospel Jesus says: And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all to myself (John 12:32) And yes, this very likely includes our gay friends, the politicians we don’t like, the little chick that was killed by the snake and maybe even the snake who killed the little chick. The Risen Christ brings into his life the whole world, the only way not to receive this life would be for a smart and ill willed creature to turn away knowing perfectly what they are doing. But about that, we’ll debate another day.