For the past month we’ve been working through this Bread of Life discourse and you’ve maybe begun to notice that Jesus is pretty repetitive in this chapter. In fact, as it goes on and Jesus meets opposition, he only seems to dig in deeper, pushing harder and harder into the most challenging points of his argument. This is a hallmark of Jesus’ speeches in John’s Gospel, to find a point of soreness and push and push and push until the audience either falls away or comes to a new point of understanding. We’ll really see that when we read the last section of this discourse next week.
But today we have this weird section where Jesus is just digging in on the idea of eating his flesh and drinking his blood. And in all fairness, let’s just admit that the things Jesus is saying here are weird. This language about eating Jesus flesh and drinking his blood are disturbing, the stuff of horror movies. And if you think the language is visceral in English, oh man, the Greek is even stronger. The word for flesh here is sarkos, and it’s the word for like a hunk of meat. There’s something really bodily, really carnal in how this word would have sounded to John’s audience. And the word here for eat is trogo, which means to chew, to crunch, to gnaw on. This is in contrast to earlier in this same passage, where Jesus used phago for to eat, which has a broader range of meaning. So again, there is this very vivid, very visceral word here: chew on my flesh, drink of my blood, those who do these things will live forever.
These words are weird, and the audience for Jesus’ Bread of Life discourse was not the only group in history to have trouble with these words. This language of eating flesh and drinking blood was one of the things Rome held against the early church, accusing them of cannibalism and human sacrifice; of being danger and a menace to polite society. Yet, and this is a bit of an interesting aside but I think it’s relevant, all of this fear-mongering about how Christians will literally eat you did not keep people from being drawn to this Jesus movement. Because Rome’s attempts at fear-mongering couldn’t turn attention from what was really happening in these fledging Acts communities, the poor were being fed, the naked were being clothed, the sick were being cared for, and the lonely were being loved. What people encountered when they gathered around the table of the early Church for this meal of flesh and blood, was a table where there was enough to go around, where the wealthy and the poor came on equal footing, where those who were hungry in all ways, not just physically but spiritually as well, found food.
Today the arguments about the Eucharist being cannibalism are pretty much over, but the church still engages in these weird, esoteric arguments about EXACTLY what Jesus meant by “those who eat my flesh and drink my blood will have eternal life.” There’s the sacramental argument, does the bread and wine LITERALLY become flesh and blood, what the Catholic Church calls transubstantiation, the bread and wine transforming into body and blood. Is it a merely a symbol, staying bread and wine, but reminding us of flesh and blood. Or something in between, both bread and wine AND body and blood, all that the same time, the fancy churchy word here being consubstantiation, con meaning with, both bread and body, both blood and wine, together, completely both, at the same time. If you’re curious where the ELCA falls on this, in the classic Lutheran fashion our church’s answer to which of these three it is, is yes. Which, you may argue, is not an answer to the question at all, to which the church again says, yes. What exactly happens at communion is for our faith tradition not as important as what communion does, and what it does is give us forgiveness and life and salvation. So what does the ELCA believe? We believe Christ is truly present in, with, and under the bread and wine of communion. We believe that this bread and wine has Christ’s word bound to it, and that in this Word and bread and wine we get daily refreshment and strength for the struggles of life, forgiveness of sin, and life, and salvation again and again, as often as we eat and drink. And we believe this is God’s doing and not our own, so that nothing we do can affect God’s promise. Luther wrote in the Large Catechism, “Do you think God cares so much about our faith and conduct that he would permit them to affect his ordinances?” Pardon the masculine pronouns, its Luther, point being it takes a fairly high view of one’s own power and importance in the world to think that God would be hamstrung by something we could do. But which of the fancy Latin terms is it, that the church doesn’t worry about so much. This is the body and blood of Jesus given for us, it is because Jesus said it is, it is life-giving, it’s a gift God wants us to have, and God gives to us over and over again in spite of, and even in fact because of, the fact that we cannot ear or deserve it, and that’s all that really matters. In fact, Luther also said that the times we feel the least worthy are the times communion is the most for us. I think Jesus pushed the crowd so hard into the weirdness of this story so they could get out of their own way and just be fed, just be loved, just be changed by this gift.
This is hard for us smart, rational, thinking brains to do. But luckily, God also gave us an amazing guide in how we do this, and that guide is children. Let me tell you a story about how I got a glimpse of the gift of communion. Atonement Lutheran Church is an inner-city congregation in Syracuse, New York. And I’ll also tell you, they are the model for who I think we could grow up to be, because like you all, they had an incredible capacity for chaos. In fact, I think we’ve actually even got a leg up on them in the chaos tolerating department because they would not have handled last week’s mid-worship scene change nearly as well as we did. But anyway, one of the ministries at Atonement was what they called Wednesday Church Night, and it was a meal followed by children’s activities and a worship service. And Wednesday Church Night was chaos incarnate. We’d have one-hundred plus people at the meal, sixty of whom general stayed for worship, thirty to forty of whom were children. The kids would spend most of the worship service in the chapel for Christian education and then would come into the sanctuary during the Passing of the Peace for communion. Once the kids came in, it was all hands on deck for kid wrangling. And as the intern, and as the youngest person on staff, if it wasn’t my turn to preach I was expected to be right in the middle of it. One Wednesday evening I ended up next to one of the regulars, a boy about six. He and his brothers had grown up at Wednesday Church Night, they lived in the apartment complex the church managed and they came to worship every Wednesday, and occasionally on Sundays to snag donuts at coffee hour. So this kid had grown up in church, had grown up taking communion. But for whatever reason, on this particular evening, the words hit him differently. So when my supervisor was saying the Words of Institution, “this is my body, given for you, this is my blood, shed for you,” the kid turns to me and, with all of the volume control of an excited six-year-old, sort of stage whispered to me, loud enough so of course half the congregation could hear him, “is that blood in that cup?” And I, my grown-up, analytical, seminary-trained mind immediately went into overdrive. I started running through everything I’d learned in Confessions class in my head, trying to figure out how to break down that whole explanation about in, with, and under that I just shared with you, how to condense pages and pages of theological scholarship, into language that a six-year-old could understand, that I could whisper to him, without interrupting the service further, in a sentence or two. Oh no, I don’t think small when it comes to theology. All this went through my head in the space of a few seconds, until I decided that saying anything was better than saying nothing at all. So I turned back to him, but by that point the service had moved on to saying the Lord’s Prayer, and he had turned his bulletin into a trumpet and was using it to yell the Lord’s Prayer into his neighbor’s ear as loud as he possibly could, while his neighbor tried to beat him off with his own bulletin. In other words, he’d totally moved on and it was not the best time to try and interrupt him to have a deep theological discussion.
I interrupted the bulletin trumpet fight, but by then it was time for me to go up to assist with distributing communion, holding the cup for intinction was always the intern’s job. So I’m standing there, holding this cup, just dreading this kid coming forward, what kind of a scene could develop. Would he yell, would he scare the other kids, what was going to happen here? My hands were shaking as he got closer. But you know what this little scamp did? My supervisor handed him a piece of the bread, “the body of Christ, given for you.” And I knelt down to lower the cup to his level, “the blood of Christ, shed for you.” This kid held that piece of bread between his grubby little six-year-old fingers and with great flourish dipped the bread in the cup up to his knuckles. Fun fact, I never got sick a day on internship, and I attribute that to the fact that everyone dipped their whole hand in the communion cup, and it was my job to drink it at the end of the service. But anyway, I digress. So, with his fingers still submerged in the wine he looked right up at me, and I swear to you he winked, then he pulled the bread out of the cup, put it in his mouth and chewed with great gusto, saying, “Amen, thank you Jesus.”
This kid didn’t care what happened with the bread and the wine that was body and blood. He didn’t need the deep theological argument; he didn’t need to be convinced or even to believe. Children have an incredible capacity for wonder, everything is new so everything is possible, and that wonder at a God who comes to us in bread and wine, who meets us in the beautiful chaos of community, of places where we can be our whole messy, complicated, dipping our fingers into the knuckles selves, who loves us unconditionally, even as we still have so much to learn, that kid got that. He knew that church was a place where he was fed, both his body and his soul, where he was loved, where he was valued and treasured, and since church was that place, then God was that place as well. If it was blood, then it was blood. What mattered to him was he knew that he was loved. And you are loved too. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment