John 6:53-59

Let us Pray,

Living host, call us together,

call us to eat and drink with you.

Grant that by your body and your blood

we may be drawn to each other and to you.  Amen.

( from the

New Zealand

Prayer book)

Today’s Gospel lesson is a continuation of last weeks reading.  If I thought I could get away from Jesus as the Bread of life last week it comes back to me again today.  This time there is no getting around preaching on eating the flesh and blood of Jesus.  These are the words that, when read literally, are as disturbing today as they would have been when spoken.  It smacks of ritual cannibalism.  These words were shocking to the Jewish people when said in the synagogue and can still cause trouble for us today.  There are people I know who have such difficulty with this and the imagery that it brings up that they are driven away from Eucharistic churches.  So how do I deal with John’s Gospel being so explicit “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.” ?  It is tempting to just say that it is a metaphor and leave it at that.  It is a metaphor but it is also more.  The words were meant to be shocking in Jesus’ and John’s day and they should be shocking today.  For the Jewish people referring to the “flesh and blood” meant to refer to the entire being.  They are a challenge and they also are a promise.  “This 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.”

For me this passage points to the demand that we cannot pick and choose which part of Jesus we will honor and accept.  We are being demanded to pick the whole of Jesus. In the Book “Confronted by God, The essential Verna Dozier” she writes, “We pay so much attend to what I think is a caricature of Jesus as gently, meek, and mild.  Every Age paints Jesus to its own purposes and uses and we’ve never looked at the real Jesus.  Jesus was not crucified because he was so sweet and gentle, but because he went to the very heart of the way people lived and he threatened it.  Those parables are very disturbing.  Not only the tables in the temple were turned upside down, but the way people lived and believed was turned upside down.  He threatened the values we hold dear, such as the right to have more than others.  There is something unholy about equality”

 It is this disturbing Jesus that ultimately we are asked to accept. The Jesus who challenged the institutions and threw the money changers out of the temple. The Jesus who washed the feat of his disciples. The Jesus who demanded that we love one another, and finally the Jesus who ultimately sacrificed his very life for all of the people.  We are also promised in John’s Gospel that we will be supported and nourished when we embrace Christ and follow his examples.  This promise is that we don’t have to worry about scarcity.  It is promising us that unlike the manna that was given in the wilderness the sustenance that comes form Jesus and the bread of life will always feed and nourish us if we accept the whole of Jesus. What does it mean to me when I say we have to accept the whole Jesus?

Verna Dozier said, “The biblical vision is that you go beyond justice.  You consider what it is a person needs… “we live out of fear of scarcity.  We never live out of a promise of abundance and so we lose a part of the joy of living, and that’s a form of insanity.  We are always afraid that tomorrow there won’t be anything left and we a so busy looking for tomorrow that we don’t enjoy today.  It’s the old parable of the children in the wilderness.  God said, I’ll give you manna for the day” but some people couldn’t resist the temptation of hiding some for tomorrow.  We live out of a fear of not having enough.  Even if I get all that I need and you get all that you need, it still wouldn’t be enough for me.  The result is there’s not enough to go around and that basic concept dominates our economic system.”

Jesus in this lesson promises us more than just enough.  He promises everlasting life.   This passage is the closest we come in John’s Gospel to the institution of the Eucharist.  In John we do not have the story of Jesus sitting down with his disciples and instituting the new Passover meal.  In John’s Gospel we have Jesus teaching in the synagogue, in a very public setting, making a very challenging demand that we need to accept the whole of Jesus. 

This week I have had the hymn “I am the bread of life”, that we sung at the 10:00 service last week stuck in my head.  I found myself singing it on my way to work and it crept into every quiet moment during the week.  In some ways the very intrusiveness that the hymn had for me this week is what we are being asked to do, to let Jesus into every moment of our lives.  For some reason, unlike when I get an advertising jingle stuck in my mind, this ever-present hymn did not annoy me.  For some reason it calmed me and sustained me.  This Bread of life nourished me all week.  That is why, ultimately I come to church on Sunday and why I belong to a Eucharistic church.

For me it is the Eucharist that nourishes me all week.  When I take communion it is more that just a piece of bread and a sip of wine.  For me it provides a real sense of nourishment that allows be to go out into the world and challenge, in my own ways, injustice.  To try and make decisions that will help rather than hurt our hurting world.  To try and bring to earth what Verna Dozier refers to of the Dream of God, a dream that we are not yet living.  The dream of God is why our incarnate Lord,  Jesus came to earth.  He came down to try and get us to live that dream. Verna Dozier writes “By his example, he charged us to love every creature – not to condemn, not to deny, not to dismiss.  Every human creature is a child of God and loved by God.  That defines the threat [to our way of living]”  I believe that our challenge is to live our lives and to make our decisions based on the abundance of life and not the scarcity of life.  It is not easy.  Trying to live the “Dream of God” on earth is a challenge and a struggle.  But for me and I suspect for many of you it is the Eucharist that reminds me that I will be fed, and indeed does, in a very real way sustain me for the week as we try to bring the Dream of God to earth.  “This 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.”