Fr. John Allison
15B.2
Proverbs 9:1-6
Ephesians 5:15-20
John 6:51-58
August 18, 2024
Christ Church, Hudson
We’re on the third week of Jesus’ discourse on bread, which essentially fills all of the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel, and, like last week, we hear some complaints from his listeners. Last week, it was how can this man say he came down from heaven when we know his parents; this week the dispute is on Jesus’ declaration that they must eat his flesh and drink his blood.
As a people whose faith is nourished weekly in the Eucharist, right here at this table, we perhaps cannot appreciate the radical nature of what Jesus proclaims here. Several years ago, actually it would have been nine years ago, three cycles ago in the lectionary, I was in the city, at St. Marks in the Bowery, when I heard this Gospel proclaimed. St. Mark’s worships in the round; the altar table is in the center of the church and the congregation encircles it. All of the action of the liturgy takes place in the middle of this circle and I remember quite clearly a young family who were visiting on this particular Sunday. As the priest was reading the Gospel, “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood you have no life in you . . . Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life . . . My flesh is true food and my blood is true drink,” the repetitive references to eating the flesh and blood of Jesus were clearly puzzling to this family, to the little boy in particular. His face conveyed a mixture of disbelief and horror and I remember his mother silently placing her hand on his shoulder as he looked up to her for some clarification. I remember this scene because this little boy’s confusion and shock begin to capture some of the horror Jesus’ listeners—all Jews who would have observed strict rules prohibiting the consumption of blood in particular, aside from the more general taboo of eating human flesh—perhaps felt. Jesus’ words would have been shocking to say the least—even if understood symbolically rather than literally, it would have been offensive to speak of these things. It’s no wonder then that there is complaining, disbelief. Next week in the verses that follow, we’ll even see that many of his followers turn away from him at this point.
The teaching is difficult and remains so to this day and our efforts to explain what happens to the ordinary bread and wine we offer here at the table during our Eucharistic prayer always fall short. It’s why, as I pointed out two weeks ago, John Calvin, when asked to explain the Eucharist said he’d rather experience than explain it.
What we can say, and what the community to whom John was writing knew as well, is that Christ is present in the bread and wine and that it is in our sharing together of these elements, of his body and blood, that he is revealed. It is through our sharing of his body and blood, of the bread and the wine, that we participate, together, in the life and death and resurrection of Christ.
Thomas Merton, in his book New Seeds of Contemplation, writing about life in Christ says, “The union of the Christian with Christ is not just a similarity of inclination or feeling, mutual consent of minds and wills. It has a more radical, more mysterious and supernatural quality: it is a mystical union in which Christ himself becomes the source and principle of divine life in me.” Or, to quote Paul in his Letter to the Galatians, “I live now no longer I, but Christ lives in me.”
Jesus says, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them.” In Eucharist, in thanksgiving for the flesh and blood of Christ, we become one with him. He lives in us and we in him and in our partaking of this sacrament together, we are made one body. It’s in recognizing this unity with Christ and in Christ, in saying yes, that we have our beginning and our end. It’s in the flesh and blood of Christ that we are a new creation. It’s in his flesh and blood that we are completed.
In our epistle today, Paul says it too in his call for us to live not as unwise people but as wise, to not live for ourselves in drunkenness or debauchery, but to be filled with the spirit and give thanks to God at all times. What he offers in his words to the Ephesians as well as what John offers in our Gospel today is the model not only for what we do when we come together each Sunday but is also a model for how we are called to live, how we are called to love one another as Christ loves us. How we are to live Eucharistically. How we are to live from a place of thanksgiving.
In theological terms our Eucharist, the Holy Communion, is sometimes envisioned as a four-part process: we take the bread and wine, we bless it, we break it, we share it with one another. What we do together every time we gather for Holy Communion is to take the gifts God gives us in creation, represented here in the bread and the wine, and we bless them. God makes them Holy; we recognize them as Christ’s Body and Blood; we recognize them as God’s gift to us and offer our thanks. We break them so that they may be shared among us, offered to all as we recognize that we are one body.
To live Eucharistically is to see that pattern in our lives and live out of gratitude for what God has given us. We take the gifts God has given us and recognize them as holy and offer them, share them, in love. It happens here at the table, and, just as importantly, it happens out there as we are sent out from these walls. It happens when we use the unique gifts God has given each of us to be his hands and his feet in the world. This is the bread Jesus gives for the life of the world. God’s love is shown in Christ and in receiving that love, in saying, yes, we are sent forth to love one another. May our hearts be opened to receive the food God gives us, Christ’s body and blood, and live into the work we are called to do. Amen.