"Take and Eat"

For the last five weeks our Gospel readings have come from the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John, a very long and repetitive discourse by Jesus on the topic of bread.

For week after week now we have heard Jesus saying essentially the same thing – that he is the bread of life, the living bread that comes down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will not perish, but have everlasting life.

We have heard these words so often, they have become so familiar to us, that they have lost much of the shock value they had for Jesus’ earliest disciples.

We hear today that some of those who followed Jesus were so offended by these statements that they left, walking away from the one who has promised them eternal life.

Part of the disagreement seems to be a tension between the importance of the flesh versus the spirit. “It is the spirit that gives life,” Jesus tells his followers. “The flesh is useless. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.”

If we take just this segment of Jesus’ teaching about bread it seems as if Jesus is negating the flesh, that his emphasis, and the emphasis of the Eucharist for us, is on the spirit and the next life, not the material concerns of this one.

But when Jesus says that the flesh is useless he is not degrading our bodies. After all, in Jesus God takes on flesh, inhabits a very human body. Jesus gives his flesh for the life of the world.

In his ministry, Jesus never ignores the needs of the flesh. In fact, the people to whom he is speaking in today’s reading are the very ones he fed with real bread in the feeding of the 5,000. That miracle begins the sixth chapter of John’s gospel, and Jesus’ teaching about bread that we have heard the last month are interpretations of that event.

In that miraculous feeding, Jesus shows his concern for the physical needs of those who have come to hear him teach. He cares about their bodies; he sees that they are hungry; he gives them food to eat.

But once those physical needs are met, Jesus know that they have other hungers, that their spirits also crave nourishment. Flesh and spirit belong together, and only when both are nourished is true life possible.

Without the Spirit the flesh is useless. The feeding of the 5,000 is just another meal without Jesus’ life –giving words, words that nourish the spirit and call us to belief.

But those words are grounded in the fleshly reality of the miracle that preceded them.

Jesus feeds his followers with bread and with the Word of God, nourishment for both body and spirit.

In the same way, our worship each week is divided into two equal parts – we listen to and are nourished by the Word of God; and we gather around the table to eat the bread of life, the Word made flesh, bread that sustains our bodies and our spirits.

That tension between flesh and spirit that we hear Jesus speak of in today’s reading still exists.

Although Jesus seems most concerned that his followers understand the spiritual aspect of his words and deeds, I think today we are most likely to focus on the spiritual at the expense of the physical.

How often have you heard someone say that they are not religious, but they are spiritual, as if the realm of the spirit is what is important. But spirituality that is not grounded in life, in the material, physical, bodily aspects of life devolves into nothing.

Religion that is not concerned about the flesh, and about the material world has no lasting value.

Too often we take Jesus’ statement that “the flesh is useless” out of context, and forget Jesus’ real concerns for the world, for healing people’s bodies, for feeding them, for easing both their physical and spiritual pains.

Sister Loretta, a Catholic nun in Pat Conroy’s novel, The Great Santini, has this other-worldly view of Jesus. She is horrified that some of her students are not showing the proper respect for the Eucharist.

“What has shocked me,” she says, shaking her head with repugnance, “and I mean literally shocked me, was when I saw certain members of this class actually chewing the host like it was a Hershey bar or something.

“Let me ask all of you one question. Would you like someone chewing on you?”

“No, Sister,” the class replied.

“Of course you wouldn’t,” she said. “Neither does Jesus. The host is supposed to dissolve on the tongue. It should melt slowly and you should think about the Lord being present on your tongue.

“You want Him to stay present on your tongue as long as you can. You do not want to hurry Him along by crudely chewing Him up and sending Him quickly to your stomach.

“The proper way to receive communion is to let your mouth fill up with saliva and let the saliva slowly and beautifully melt the body of the Lord and then let Him repose in your soul, in the temple of the Holy Ghost.”

It is hard to imagine Sister Loretta’s Jesus as living flesh and blood, as someone who fed the hungry, healed the sick, touched the outcast. It is hard to imagine her Jesus as someone who cares about the body, about physical life on earth.

With her view of an ethereal Jesus slowly dissolving on the tongue and then reposing in the soul, Sister Loretta runs the danger of a faith that no longer serves the world God has created.

Compare her Jesus to the one described by John Updike in his short story, The Music School. Updike’s character reflects on the long tradition, held so dearly by Sister Loretta, that the communion wafer should be held in the mouth and allowed to melt, that to touch it with your teeth would somehow be blasphemous.

But then he notes that Jesus did not say, “Take and melt this in your mouth, but take and eat.”

The important word is eat, and to dissolve that word is to dilute the meaning of the Eucharist.

In fact, Updike’s character thinks, bakeries that make communion hosts should be instructed to prepare a thicker, tougher wafer – a host so substantial that it must be chewed.

That is the kind of bread Jesus is – tough and substantial. Bread that must be chewed. Bread that offers eternal life, but that does not negate the life we live now. Bread that satisfies both our hunger for the world and our hunger for God, food that both nourishes and nurtures us.

The psalmist tells us to taste and see that the Lord is good. We do that by entering into the world, a place that was made for us to commune with God, a place where we are to live as God’s co-creators.

The world is the host, Updike says. It must be chewed.

In just a few minutes we will come to this altar with ordinary bread and wine, fruits of the earth God has created. And we will hear the words of Jesus, “Take and eat. This is my body and blood, given for you.”

And through this most ordinary and natural of human actions – eating and drinking – this ordinary bread and wine, this body and blood, will be transformed and become part of us, will feed us in both body and spirit.

When you come to the altar today, I invite you not to let the bread slowly dissolve on your tongue, but to chew it with gusto and enthusiasm. Feel it tough and substantial between your teeth.

Feel the richness and fullness of the wine as it courses down your throat, and know that this bread and wine, this body and blood of Christ, is now part of you, nourishing your body and sustaining your spirit as you go out into God’s world.

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Readings

1 Kings 8:22-30, 41-43

Solomon stood before the altar of the Lord in the presence of all the assembly of Israel, and spread out his hands to heaven. He said, “O Lord, God of Israel, there is no God like you in heaven above or on earth beneath, keeping covenant and steadfast love for your servants who walk before you with all their heart, the covenant that you kept for your servant my father David as you declared to him; you promised with your mouth and have this day fulfilled with your hand. Therefore, O Lord, God of Israel, keep for your servant my father David that which you promised him, saying, ‘There shall never fail you a successor before me to sit on the throne of Israel, if only your children look to their way, to walk before me as you have walked before me.’ Therefore, O God of Israel, let your word be confirmed, which you promised to your servant my father David. But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, much less this house that I have built! Regard your servant’s prayer and his plea, O Lord my God, heeding the cry and the prayer that your servant prays to you today; that your eyes may be open night and day toward this house, the place of which you said, ‘My name shall be there,’ that you may heed the prayer that your servant prays toward this place. Hear the plea of your servant and of your people Israel when they pray toward this place; O hear in heaven your dwelling place; heed and forgive. Likewise when a foreigner, who is not of your people Israel, comes from a distant land because of your name—for they shall hear of your great name, your mighty hand, and your outstretched arm—when a foreigner comes and prays toward this house, then hear in heaven your dwelling place, and do according to all that the foreigner calls to you, so that all the peoples of the earth may know your name and fear you, as do your people Israel, and so that they may know that your name has been invoked on this house that I have built.”

Ephesians 6:10-20

John 6:56-69

Jesus said, “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.” He said these things while he was teaching in the synagogue at Capernaum. When many of his disciples heard it, they said, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” But Jesus, being aware that his disciples were complaining about it, said to them, “Does this offend you? Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before? It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. But among you there are some who do not believe.” For Jesus knew from the first who were the ones that did not believe, and who was the one that would betray him. And he said, “For this reason I have told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted by the Father.” Because of this many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him. So Jesus asked the twelve, “Do you also wish to go away?” Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.”

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