13 PENTECOST

May my words and my thoughts be acceptable to you, O Lord, my refuge and my redeemer. (Psalm 19:14)

SEASON: 13 PENTECOST
PROPER: 15B
ST. JOHN’S CHURCH
DATE: AUG. 17, 1997

TEXT: John 6:53-59 - “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.

See Also: Proverbs 9:1-6 - “Come eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed. Lay aside immaturity, and live, and walk in the way of insight.”

ISSUE: The passage continues to have an element of being scandalous in the calling for the drinking of ‘blood,’ which was unheard of by the Jews. However, the passage presents the radical shift of the early church toward the acceptance of Jesus Christ in an intimate way. He is the presence of God come among his people, and offered for his people, even in sacrifice. They are welcomed into an intimate relationship with him, and at the same time to be in a mature union with God. The people of God are to be the channels of God’s redeeming grace revealed in Christ.

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The scriptures readings today continue the theme of Jesus Christ as the true bread of life. Emphasis today is upon Jesus the eating, the consumption or gnawing upon Christ and the drinking of his blood. The very concept is difficult for some people, and any number of small children are often disturbed by the concept of drinking of the blood of Jesus in the Eucharist. It is indeed very compelling imagery, if not disturbing imagery. Yet John’s gospel account uses this imagery to convey some radical shift in thinking and appreciation of the focus of the early church’s understanding of Jesus Christ.
Actually Christianity has been based upon some scandalous beliefs from its beginnings. Christmas is scandalous. God comes to the world in human form. For the Jews as well as for many people even today, it is very difficult to accept the image of God in human terms. At the same time the conception of Jesus to an unwed mother had its problems for the early church. What is even further scandalous was the crucifixion of Jesus. If he was truly the Messiah, the Christ, he is totally dishonored by the crucifixion. Crucifixion was a curse. This crucifixion of Christ was foolishness to the Gentiles and scandalous to the Jews. Then the idea that the liturgy was based upon the eating of the flesh and drinking of the blood of the Christ was abhorrent to Jewish religious tradition.
In the Jewish faith you learned from the very beginning that the spilling of human blood was forbidden. You learned this fact early in Genesis in the story of Cain and Abel. The Ten Commandments forbade murder, for it was an outrage to God. Blood for these people was of God. It was deemed to be sacred. Blood was how God gave life. If it drained out of a person, the person died. Even in the cooking of animals for food. The blood of the animal was not consumed. The orthodox had a special ritual of soaking meat in salt water, rinsing and draining until such time as all the blood was removed. The eating of a rare steak would be unheard of and against the law.
In Genesis 9:4, Noah is given instruction after the flood ordeal as to what he can eat among fish, animals, and green plants, but “The one thing you must not eat is meat with blood still in it; I forbid this because the life is in the blood.”
Leviticus Law (17: 10,1214) writes “If an Isrelite or any foreigner living in the community eats meat with blood still in it, the Lord will turn against him and no longer consider him one of his people.”
Even in the New Testament Book of Acts 15:29 early Genitile Christians are told: “Eat no food that has been offered to idols; eat no blood . . .” The taboo hung on at least as it was related to Gentile pagan practices.
Blood of animals was used as an offering in the sacrificial system. Blood offerings were offering to God something that was considered sacred as an atonement for sin. At the Passover, the blood of the lamb was offered remembering that the Angel of Death passed over God’s people, and they were liberated from their bondage. The offering of blood, the sacred, for sin was in belief that God would forgive the pentitent.
Now in the teaching of Jesus as we have it in John’s Gospel account, you have a radical shift of emphasis. What was once considered taboo, the consumption of the sacred, now becomes made available in Christ and through Christ. Jesus’ very being is seen as the incarnation of God. People are invited to consume the sacred, to take it into themselves. Christ is the living bread of God. He is the new manna of heaven he may be consumed fully in order that humanity may be ultimately redeemed by the living sacred presence of God taken into their very being.
In John’s Gospel, there is no account of Jesus taking the bread and the wine at the last supper and saying , “This is my body, this is my blood. Drink this in remembrance of me.” as you find it in the synoptic accounts. What you have in John is the miraculous feeding of the the 5,000 followed by the discourses on Jesus being the Bread of Life, the Word of what God has to say, the blood to be consumed, made available to all of God’s faithful people. Here you have the fullness of God’s sacred love being made fully available to the world.
Notice the beautiful Old Testament passage this morning from Proverbs 9:1-6. In this passage God’s wisdom or God’s Word has prepared a banquet. Wisdom sends out the servant girls to call from the highest places to the simplest of folk. They are invited to the banquet of well mixed bread and wine. Drinking of the banquet of God’s wisdom will bring them maturity and insight. The early Church is picking up this theme. That in and through Christ and consuming his way a person is entering into the wisdom, the sacredness, the holiness, the very initmate way of God. Obviously for the early church the concept of consuming the flesh and blood of Christ was a radical shift of thinking. But it was the myster, the poetry of the early church and its focus and confident belief that it could be close to, intimate with, abide in the very real and living presence of God.
In a sense, it is like knowing that the Bible is the living word of God. It is like holding up the Bible as a book which is worthy of great respect. Many many people do. But for the Bible to make any difference for people, they have to read it. They have to consume and take into themselves its content and meaning. For the early church it was extraordinarily important that people just not know about Jesus, or that there was a Jesus, who was a good guy. It was important to embrace the living Lord, to consume him, to take him into you and let his sacredness abide in you, and you in him. It meant to appreciate the fullness of the living Christ and live into that mature love and insight that his ministry was one of love and profound sacrifice that people could know the will and the presence of God in their lives.
For people of John’s time who were faced with all kinds of philosophies and morality, it was important to be able to conume, take into yourself in this radical way the trust that God was really, truly, genuinely in and with you and could be a stable part of your being. It is also so very important for our time. Some of us older folks came out of a mindset that life was pretty organized and predictable. We knew cause and effect. Things, life seemed relatively simple and God was the great cause and protector. Today, young people and even us older people are no longer as certain that life is as simple and predictable. It just isn’t. Certainly it is not simple. Life has become in many ways complicated and fast paced. I sit down almost daily in front of a complicated computer that is supposed to help me do everything faster.
At the same time we live in a world where it is hard to know, especially for young people, to know what they can trust and what is lasting. There is great distrust in our culture right now. People are suspect of Government and we don’t have much confidence or trust in politicians. We have been disappointed by sports figures, the sometime bizarre behavior of celebrities, take Prince Philip and Princess Dianna as examples. The stability of the once respected royal throne is diminished. Religious figures are greatly distrusted by recent scandals. And what’s more our children can never be sure whether their father or mother will come home and stay with them. Our families are suffering from great instability. So little is predictable. Young people sometimes die before the old people. Older people once expect this to happen more than young people do today. Youth sees death as chaotic and immediately excludes notions of an eminent God.
What have we that we can depend upon? What is there to be with us in our instability, to give us hope in a world of chaos. What can we trust and have faith in? For many people today these are unanswerable questions. They are the real challenges of our time. If we as Christians are to bring any hope and trust to the world, it must come through our faith. It must come through our feeding upon Christ in the way that makes us united with him, in his love and forgiveness, and in living in that way of servant sacrifice. In the world’s chaos we must be the believers in hope, the believers in love, the believers in God through the consuming of Christ as our Lord. We ourselves are not and do not have all the answers to the uncertainties and the complexities of the world. At best we embrace, absorb, and abide in Jesus Christ the living expression of God and let God’s grace work through and be seen through us so that the mystery of God may be seen to prevail. We ourselves must indeed be faithful enough, so absorbed in Christ and he in us, that we are not afraid to live with the ambiguities of life.