We Are What We Eat

Sunday, August 18, 2024 – Gospel John 6:51-58, also Proverbs 9:1-6, Psalm 34:9-14, Ephesians 5:15-20

Swami Vivekananda was an Indian Hindu monk and religious teacher, born in 1863 who introduced Hinduism and yoga to the West. He traveled to the United States in 1893 and spoke at a huge event in Chicago called the Parliament of the World’s Religions where he was considered a very impressive speaker.

Vivekenanda often told a story about a lion cub raised by sheep that was based on a story of his guru, Ramakrishna, that instead used a tiger cub and goats. The original version of the story goes something like this:

Once a tigress attacked a flock of goats. As she sprang on her prey, she gave birth to a cub and died. The cub grew up in the company of the goats. The goats ate grass and the cub followed their example. They bleated; the cub bleated too. Gradually it grew to be a big tiger. One day another tiger attacked the same flock. It was amazed to see the grass-eating tiger. Running after it, the wild tiger at last seized it, whereupon the grass-eating tiger began to bleat. The wild tiger dragged it to the water and said: ‘Look at your face in the water. It is just like mine. Here is a little meat. Eat it.’ Saying this, it thrust some meat into its mouth. But the grass-eating tiger would not swallow it and began to bleat again. Gradually, however, it got the taste for blood and came to relish the meat. Then the wild tiger said: ‘Now you see there is no difference between you and me. Come along and follow me into the forest.’”

We’ve all heard the saying, “you are what you eat.” That certainly seems to be true in the case of this tiger. He ate grass like the goats, came to believe he was a goat, and then acted like a goat. He had to be shown his true nature and fed his true food before he knew himself to be a powerful tiger again.

What is our true nature? And what is our true food?

I believe we can understand that when Jesus speaks of himself as the Bread of Life or the Bread of Heaven he’s telling us as much about our true nature as he is about his own nature. He’s also telling us about our true food. In fact, we can see in this text both heavenly, or cosmic, and earthy truths about both.

I mentioned recently that John, in the first several verses of his gospel, connects the human, earthly Jesus with the cosmic principle that the Greeks called the Logos or the Word. And everything that John writes about the Logos had already been written in the Hebrew tradition about God’s Wisdom. In our first reading from Proverbs, we see that Wisdom is personified as a woman, and the Greek word in the bible for Wisdom is Sophia.

So, John directly connects Jesus as Christ or Logos to the cosmic or heavenly Wisdom of God. He’s telling us that what was happening in Jesus has cosmic as well as earthly dimensions.

At the same time, John’s community had already begun to practice the eucharist, and so our reading today establishes the meaning of the elements of the bread and wine used in that ritual. As Bruce Epperly writes,

The gospel reading presents a eucharistic vision of life. Jesus is the bread of life. Those who share in this bread share in eternity in the present moment. They can enjoy good bread and the best life has to offer, but true enjoyment comes from sharing in the divine bread – receiving nourishment to sustain our spirits now and forevermore…We share in God’s bread so we can provide whole-person nourishment for those around us.”

If we look for the deepest and most life-giving truths about what is written in today’s texts, we can begin to see first that Christ as both the bread of heaven and the bread at the table directly connects our everyday material life with God’s divine life and then puts that life right here in even the most mundane things.

Richard Rohr is one of the best voices in Christianity today. He’s a Catholic priest in Albuquerque, NM. Lutherans, like Catholics, believe in the real presence of Christ in the elements of the eucharist. In a post title “Real Presence” Father Richard writes that

The bread and the wine together are stand-ins for the very elements of the universe, which also enjoy and communicate the incarnate presence. Why did we resist this message so much? Authentically eucharistic churches should have been the first to recognize the corporate, universal, and physical nature of the ‘Christification’ of matter…A true believer is eating what he or she is afraid to see and afraid to accept: The universe is the Body of God, both in its essence and in its suffering.”

Second, we can see that the true nature of the everyday world is that it is filled with the incarnated presence of God in Christ. As Father Richard writes in his book The Universal Christ,

When Jesus spoke the words ‘This is my Body,’ I believe he was speaking not just about the bread right in front of him, but about the whole universe, about every thing that is physical, material, and yet also spirit-filled.”

When John connects God as incarnate in the human Jesus to the cosmic principles of the Word and Wisdom, he’s telling us that the entire cosmos is an incarnation of God.

Third, we can see that when we eat the elements of the bread and the wine we take this body of Christ, this incarnate presence of God in the world, into ourselves as our true food. In fact, eating that true food can show us our true nature: that we are one with Christ and one with God.

This is what Jesus means when later in John he says, “As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.” When we eat of the body and blood of Jesus, the incarnate God lives within us, and we can thereby live God’s divine life through our earthly lives.

Again, Fr. Richard writes beautifully about how hard it is to grasp this scandalous idea, and how it’s something that just needs to be chewed and embodied. He writes,

The Eucharist offers one focused moment of truth, showing that the Christ and this ordinary bit of elemental bread are one, and therefore the spiritual and the material can apparently coexist. Struggle with that, resist it, fall in love with it, eat it. You can’t just think about it rationally in your mind. Spiritual things are known in a whole-body way. You know them with your body, heart, soul, and mind all operating together. In this mysterious sacrament of Eucharist, you eat the bread; it becomes one with you; you become one with all those around you who are the same Body of Christ.”

Once the tiger cub ate his true food, the teacher tiger showed him his true nature saying, “Now you see there is no difference between you and me.” After telling this story, Vivekananda used to say, “there can be no fear if the guru’s grace descends on one. He will let you know who you are and what your real nature is.”

Are we open to letting this table and these elements show us our real nature?

Will we only see a wafer made of wheat and water and a cup with the fermented juice of crushed grapes, and walk away unchanged? Or will we see the elements as sacred, as alive with Christ’s presence? Will we get the truth that when we see Christ as alive there, we can see him alive in everything, and he can be alive in us, too? Will we see that he is our true nature, that he is our true food?