Proper 15
Sunday, August 16, 2009
St. David’s Episcopal Church, DeWitt NY
The Rev. James C. Bresnahan, Interim Rector
“Flesh and Blood”
John 6:51-58
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.” The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, "How can this man give us his flesh to eat?" So 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. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. 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."
"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.”
Those are strong words. Shocking words. Revolting to some.
Cannibalism, I heard someone recently say about them.
So let’s look at these shocking words, how they arose, and what they intended in their focus on flesh.
For more than a few decades now scholars have known that the Gospel of John went through many stages of development. Short sayings and brief stories by Jesus and about Jesus evolved over time into long discourses. Raymond Brown laid out the stages of that development in his book “The Community of the Beloved Disciple.”
The words, “…unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you,” come from the last stage, when the community of the fourth Gospel found it necessary to stress the fleshiness of how God shows up.
Why? Why not be content with the word ‘body, as in “This is my body”? Why go further and make ‘body’ ‘flesh’ and speak so shockingly about eating human flesh?
Our journey toward understanding begins by recognizing that there were multiple forms of Christianity in the first century, as there are multiple forms today. Relations between these different branches were not always harmonious but marked by competition and frequent invective.
The verse of Scripture I am talking about today, “…unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you,” was written to counter the views of a particular sect of Christians and their views. These Christians believed that humankind is trapped within our evil, material world and trapped within disgusting and rotting flesh. But, they say, most don’t realize that that they are trapped. They make the world their home and live to fulfill the desires of their flesh.
Jesus came, this sect of Christians said, to give us a revelation, to illumine our minds for us to know the true God, who did not create this world but is beyond it, who did not make our bodies but our spirits. Through Jesus’ words, they affirmed, we find union and fulfillment in a living relationship with the true God. We learn to turn on back on the world. And, after death, we finally get to escape our rotted flesh and live in the realm of pure spirit beyond this material and fleshy world.
These Christians called themselves Gnostics, meaning ‘knowers.’ Many disdained sex or renounced sex altogther. Sex had to do with bodily desire; God, however, only with spiritual illumination, they believed.
In the stories they told about Jesus, Jesus’ opponents often were often portrayed as merchants, buying and selling the goods of this material world that they have bought into.
The Gnostics made nothing of Jesus’ crucifixion. Crucifixion was what happened to his flesh, not to Jesus who was pure spirit and only appeared housed in a body. His crucifixion, and all that his arms, feet, and entire body did revealed nothing of God, but his words, they gave life. When one grasps that revelation, they believed, one knows like Jesus and does not need Jesus anymore. God is fully in them.
Now for these Gnostic Christians, there was no Eucharist, no meal in which the church fed on Christ, no associating his presence with shared bread and shared wine. No need either to remember anything about the earthly, fleshy Jesus, except to hear and understand his illuminating words.
Well, over time these Gnostic Christians lost out in their struggle with other Christians who did affirm the world as God’s creation and who celebrated how Christ came to us not just in words but in in the flesh and is revealed now in with, and under the form of bread and wine, and sends us out into the world as his servants.
What came to be called orthodox Christianity won out. But the Gnostic legacy has endured in churches where sex is still deemed shameful, priests may not marry, and celibacy is deemed more holy than love-making, or in protestant congregations where Eucharist is rarely celebrated.
“Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” Yes, the community of the Fourth Gospel was taking its stand in this passage against the views of these Gnostic Christians. The community was insisting that Jesus was more than the bearer of a message; he was the fleshy incarnation of it, God as a body, God as flesh, God in this material world, in love with it, living and dying for it.
God present now, where hands of flesh feed hungry mouths, where lips kiss with affection, where bodies are not abused but honored, where surgeons operate to heal, nurses tend to physical care, and all use their bodies and all this material world to the glory of God and the welfare of all God’s people.
We are part of that great orthodox tradition that embraces the world as God’s world. We feed on Christ, the word become flesh. And we pray that God would be glorified and God’s people served by what we do with our bodies of flesh and blood.