August 22, 2003
A hard saying
Jesus said, “I am the living bread which came down from heaven… [the one] who eats this bread will live forever.” Many of his disciples, when they heard it, said, “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?” [Jn 6.60f]
Only a fortnight has passed since our 74th General Convention which was anything but generally conventional, and the propers have stopped preaching and gone to meddling. It’s John-on-Jesus and talking hard, and it’s high time.
So long as John speaks pleasantries about Jesus like Word, or Light, or Good Shepherd, we’re comforted by the biblical remoteness of it all. Great metaphors, but not very contagious.
But then John starts putting Jesus and the daily diet together. Bread, Bread of Life, flesh and blood, food and drink, food-and-drink-without-which we are kaput. Like the English Don at supper who sat, looking at his plate, and said, “This mutton is harder to take than the lamb of God.” Our attention has been got.
This Jesus-according-to-John reminds us that our spirituality, precisely ever so much as his own, finds its God-imagined purpose not only in some neat philosophical concept nor in some otherworldly experience nor even in Anglican orthodoxy or “parallel provinces,” but instead, in the hard-nosed realities of human life. Eating, drinking, working. Making love. Birthing babies. Suffering pain, celebrating joy. Living. Dying. Always in relationship, relationships, relationships, always.
Leave it to Mark Twain, “there’s a considerable amount of human nature in people.”
It’s God’s way in Jesus. God’s Word became flesh, not a book or an idea or even a hymn at the right tempo. God’s Word became flesh and blood, indeed, food and drink, life’s victuals. And we seem not yet to fathom it.
For why else do we celebrate mystery? Merely for the puffery? Why else “feed… by faith, with thanksgiving?” Why “feed” at all? Certainly not only to enhance our spirituality, as noble a goal as that may be, but to enhance our humanity — ours and yours and theirs, together — for there’s the treasure of God’s creation, there’s the goal of his Son’s redemptive cross, and there’s the only holiness worth talking about. The very image of God.
That image became earthy flesh and blood in Jesus and, please don’t forget, in us, as well. It confronts us with race and sex, nationality and politics, and, heaven forbid, even religion — orthodox and unorthodox — and we seem so often horrified by it.
“This is a hard saying; who can listen to it? ”
The covenant we make at our baptism is clear enough. “I will, with God’s help… continue in the breaking of bread…[and] to seek and serve Christ in all persons … [and] to respect the dignity of every human being.”
Mark Twain said it well, on account of “there’s a considerable amount of human nature in people.”
And this is another one that I think is one of the 20 best.
Comment by Marsha — November 11, 2003 @ 9:18 am