Pentecost 11B
John 6.51-58
August 15/16, 2009
The Gospel of John was written in a time, not unlike our own; when the church was fractured and broken. Brothers and sisters in the faith were fighting, shouting, condemning one another. They were bickering and arguing over who Jesus was and what his life meant and what rituals they should continue and what should change.
“LBW Setting One.”
“No, a contemporary praise band.” (Smile)
Seriously, families were splitting; friends were refusing to speak to each other. It was ugly stuff. So, John took it upon himself to write a Gospel to address once and for all who this Jesus of Nazareth was and where he came from.
It’s funny, really, that when I think of John’s Gospel, I tend to roll my eyes. It’s not my favorite. It’s the Gospel with those L-O-N-G monologues of Jesus’ where he talks about lofty spiritual things that nobody ever comprehends. It’s so blasted hard to understand at times, so distanced from our culture and language. Jesus says such peculiar things like “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.”
I don’t know about you, but I completely get the question, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” All that stuff about real food and true drink when speaking of Jesus’ very own body. Here he goes again!
Except that this time, instead of lofty, spiritual sayings, John uses words that are visceral, worldly, and cannibalistic. He speaks to us of the munching and chewing of flesh. This scene does not consist of a tea and crumpets party, it’s an eating that is animalistic, like lions after a kill; the ripping, tearing, gnawing that comes from a real hunger that demands satisfaction. A hunger that can only be satisfied with a real, a full, meal.
The consuming of flesh is one thing for a lion, but the consumption of human flesh by another human is another matter. It’s the disgusting stuff of desperation: cannibalism.
If any of you saw the movie, “Alive,” about the soccer team stranded in the Andes Mountain after an airplane crash, you saw the desperation that caused the survivors to eat the flesh of their deceased team mates. We wonder when we witness those stories, those instances, what it must be like to feel that sort of hunger. Could we do it? Could, would, we actually participate in cannibalism in order to survive? Would we ever be that desperate? Would we ever know that hunger?
While it seems, far removed, that type of hunger isn’t so distant. While we may never know those extreme circumstances, we do know that hunger. We know the hunger for life and the quest for eternity. Such a hunger lives in our very souls. And we often mistakenly identify it as something else. We often mistake it for a desire for more material possessions. More and better employment opportunities. More satisfying social relationships.
Sometimes the hunger is very, very real. When diagnosed with awful diseases such as cancer, the hunger to live causes us to put large amounts of toxic chemicals into our bodies. When faced with coming home to dark house every night and dinner alone, we settle for unhealthy relationships to give our lives meaning. When faced with feeling insignificant and unworthy, we often set aside spouse and children to concentrate more effort in a meaningless job in order to provide more things so those very people will find us worthy of their love. And the harder we work to satisfy our own hunger, the more we gnawing that hunger becomes.
We in the church are so very blessed. We come together week after week, a hungry assembled body, KNOWING, really knowing that we are about to be fed with the only thing that will ever satisfy our deepest hunger, meet our greatest need. For our hunger for life is a longing for God to be at the center, it’s a need for God to be fully present in the most ordinary and mundane moments of our life. We hunger for a savior who will know our every pain because he himself has faced humiliation, ridicule, mocking, exhaustion, desperation and death.
Not only do we have a savior who makes the promise to be right there in the muck and the mire of life with us, but he promises to be the food that will sustain us and give us life. He promises that for you and you and you and for Jameson. Newly baptized today, she need do nothing else than claim her place at the table of grace and hold out her hand for the food which will see her through her childhood, through learning to ride a bike and falling off hard, through her first heartbreak and those times when she feels like a failure. Her parents have the promise of life giving bread as they wonder what to do with active children, when they think their patience can’t take it another minute, when they drop their children off at college and wonder what to do next.
We come together each week and approach the altar and hold out our hands, not because we deserve to, but because we’re hungry. We’re hungry for life and forgiveness; for grace and for mercy. We’re hungry to know that we are loved and blessed. We gather with other hungry people, because there is no place else; no restaurant, no bar, no self help group, no medication that will satisfy our need other than the ordinary meal of bread and wine offered from the very flesh of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
The Jews to whom Jesus was speaking would have considered this to be sin, drinking blood and eating the flesh of another human being. And certainly we find it a bit disturbing to think of this meal in those terms. The author of John wasn’t the least bit interested in not offending our sensibilities. John was making it quite clear once and for all, that in this meal we do NOT have another symbol reminding us of some swell guy who did really cool things. The Eucharist is not a sign pointing us to a distant God somewhere up in the clouds.
No, this IS God, flesh and blood God, who loves you and me so much that he gave up his own body, his own Son, his own being so that you can I can have the life we so desperately hunger for.
Come, this meal of life is for you, so that you will live forever.
Amen
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