Flesh, Blood, and Spirit

Sunday, August 25, 2024 – John 6:51-58, also Proverbs 9:1-6, Psalm 34:9-14, Ephesians 5:15-20

In the early to mid-1800s, large groups of people left their Eastern and Midwestern homes to migrate west to California and Oregon looking for opportunity. They’d arrive in Independence, Missouri and form wagon trains of multiple families to travel together. Almost all then took the Oregon Trail through Idaho’s Snake River Plain.

People with cows, mules, and horses would travel with oxen pulling their wagons carrying food, water, and all their worldly possessions. Most were unprepared for the hardships they met as they traveled over the Western mountains.

In the early 1840s, a man named Lansford Hastings published a book called The Emigrants’ Guide to Oregon and California where he described an alternate route west. Hastings had traveled his own route, but not with wagons. Yet he and a supplies outpost proprietor named Jim Bridger still worked together to convince travelers with heavy wagons to go by this new route.

In 1846, one particular group of 87 migrants tragically decided to follow Hastings’ and Bridger’s advice. They encountered so many obstacles and delays that they got stuck in the Sierra Nevada mountains in the dead of winter where they quickly ran out of food. Only 48 of them survived, due in part to the fact that they resorted to eating the human flesh of some of their deceased companions. The Donner Party is known to this day because of these horrific circumstances.

Cannibalism is a deeply ingrained taboo in the human psyche. We find just as nauseating the idea of drinking blood, and recoil when we see Dracula and his fellow vampires doing it. Though I guess the “Twilight” series from some years back shows us our fascination with it as well. But it’s no wonder that Jesus’ disciples grumbled and resisted his claim that they must eat his flesh and drink his blood. It was gross, against their beliefs, and just weird.

We’ve been hearing the word “weird” a lot these days, so I had to laugh when I read pastor Andrew Weaver write that he often begins his first communion classes with the question, “Isn’t it weird to talk about eating Jesus’ body and drinking his blood?” Clearly, he believes it wise to address the elephant in the room right off the bat.

In this passage of our gospel text, Jesus is preaching at the synagogue in Capernaum, teaching many of the same people that he fed with the multiplied fishes and loaves. They’d been following him around the Sea of Galilee ever since that miraculous sign.

Now keep in mind that John’s gospel was written several decades after Jesus’ death, and so John crafts his text to make certain theological points. He’s not a reporter who was on the scene just stating the facts as they happened. He’s a theologian who is taking existing material about Jesus in the Mark, Matthew, and Luke narratives, and writing back into those stories the beliefs that John’s community had come to adopt about the impact Jesus had on their lives.

In this chapter of John, after having fed the people with earthly bread, Jesus is now leading them to deeper truths. He reminds them that eating earthly bread still leads to death, just like eating the manna in the desert. He teaches that real life is only experienced when we hold matter or flesh and spirit together.

It’s not enough just to eat the loaves but not know the spiritual truths that Jesus reveals. And it’s not enough just to embrace the spiritual truths without eating the bread, the flesh and blood life of Jesus.

But I think there’s another idea that we can discover here. If John is writing back into the past what he knows from the present, then he knows that we cannot embrace resurrection glory without facing crucifixion pain. And the truth about crucifixion is that it was understood in Jesus’ time as shameful. The Messiah, the Savior of the World, the Holy One of God, died a criminal’s death, alone and abandoned.

That’s not what’s supposed to happen to Messiahs.

So, in this passage, when Jesus speaks of eating his flesh and his blood, I think he’s not just pointing to his eternal, resurrection life but also to his earthly death. He’s pointing to his mangled body on the cross and he insists that we take in that reality. This is what Luther called the “theology of the cross.” Jesus is asking us to be willing to really see and digest the suffering of this world and his own sacrificial death and not push back against it because it’s too difficult a teaching.

We might hear him saying, “Does my shameful suffering and the suffering of the world offend you? Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before?” In other words, “are you only willing to see the glory?”

Jesus is telling us that we can’t just have the pleasing glory of the ascension to the spiritual realms without being willing to take in the nauseating mangled body and the shame of the cross. But how do we hold them together? He gives us that answer too. We hold it all together by “abiding in” him.

Father Richard Rohr reminds us in his book The Universal Christ that the apostle Paul describes a similar idea of interrelatedness through his use of the phrase “in Christ” or, in Greek, en Christo.

En Christo,” he writes, “seems to be Paul’s code word for the gracious, participatory experience of salvation, the path that he so urgently wanted to share with the world.”

Rohr says that being “in Christ” is our core identity, meaning that “humanity has never been separate from God – unless and except by its own negative choice.” All we can do is accept that truth, to believe in it, to trust it. All of us, according to Rohr, are “living inside of a cosmic identity, already in place, that is driving and guiding us forward.”

Paul, writes Rohr,

seemed to understand that the lone individual was far too small, insecure, and short-lived to bear either the ‘weight of glory’ or the ‘burden of sin.’ Only the whole could carry such a cosmic mystery of constant loss and renewal.” This means that “When your isolated ‘I’ turns into a connected ‘we,’ you have moved from Jesus to Christ. We no longer have to carry the burden of being a perfect ‘I’ because we are saved ‘in Christ,’ and as Christ.”

And we come to that reality – of being in Christ – not by our own choice or decision, but because the way in to that reality is granted to us by God.

We don’t choose it. We can’t make it happen. God just gives it! And our response to that gift of life is to serve the Lord. How do we serve the Lord? To borrow a title from Elizabeth Gilbert, we eat, we pray, and we love.