August 10, 2006
Diet
Pentecost 10/14B Jn 6.37-51,60
Jesus said, “I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh… Many of his disciples, when they heard it, said, ‘This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?’”
Hardly a month has passed since our 75th General Convention which was anything but generally conventional. The appointed Sunday propers, like the old country parson when he got wound up, 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 in a world not all that long on metaphors, not altogether 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. When this happens, it’s then and there that our attention has been got, and we’ve been had. We’re like the English Don at supper who sat staring at his plate, and said, “This mutton is harder to take than the lamb of God.”
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. And what is this Good News all about? Relationships, relationships, relationships.
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 do we really fathom it?
For why else is there church? Why else is there this gathering? Why else are we called out? Why else do we celebrate mystery? Merely for the puffery? Why else “feed on him 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 is the treasure of God’s creation, there is the goal of his Son’s redemptive cross, and there is the only holiness worth talking about. The very image, the very imagination 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 bears repeating, for he said it well that “there is a considerable amount of human nature in people.”
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