Digested By God

Proper 15B: John 6:51-58 St. Paul’s, Smithfield; 8/19/2018

Jim Melnyk: “Digested by God”

“Jesus said, ‘I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh’” (John 6:51).  Not counting the story of the feeding of the multitude, this is the third Sunday in a row that the Gospel of John focuses on Jesus as Living Bread – and we still have one more Sunday to go after today.  Perhaps we can infer from all of this the power of the imagery for the early followers of Jesus.  Living Bread from heaven – something beyond the food of angels consumed by Moses and his people in the wilderness – a food which is given for the world – a food which brings to us the nourishment of eternal life.

Last week Linda Armstrong did a great job differentiating between the bread which we need – and hopefully always have – for the day, and the Living Bread that is Jesus.  We pray a lot about that bread which nourishes us day-to-day, don’t we?  “Give us this day our daily bread.”  Linda spoke about how the bread which we eat enters our bodies, gets broken down to the cellular level, and then fills every bit of us – nourishing us and giving us the energy we need to live.

In the late fourth to early fifth centuries St. Augustine gave us a reverse take on what happens with the bread we receive in the Holy Eucharist: “Normally,” he writes, “we eat bread and digest it and it becomes part of our body.”  That part of his take is just as Linda reminded us last week. The difference, however, between our daily bread and the bread of Holy Eucharist is how “this meal” – the Holy Eucharist – how “this meal digests us and makes us part of the body of Christ.”  As one modern day writer puts it, “That’s a strange sort of wisdom, befitting a God strange enough to take [on human] flesh and say ‘eat me’” (Jayson Byassee, Sojourners Online: Preaching the Word, 8/19/2018). 

Imagine the body of Christ taken into our bodies each Sunday and transforming us at a cellular level – transforming us at the very heart of our being – so that we, gathered together in this place, become the very body of Christ.  That’s what Augustine means when he writes about how this holy meal – this feast of the body and blood of Christ – digests us.”

That said, “In John 6, Jesus makes Communion, and our relationship with God, shockingly physical” (Sojourners Online: Preaching the Word, 8/19/2018).  The Jesus we meet in John’s Gospel tells us, “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in them” (6:56).  Those words of Jesus were so shockingly physical that opponents of the early Church charged Jesus followers with practicing ritual cannibalism.  Of course that sounds silly to our twenty-first century ears – but on the other hand, many of us struggle with the literal words attributed to Jesus in this chapter of John’s Gospel.  Think about it – Jesus doesn’t say, “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood in a metaphorical sense will abide in me.”  Jesus doesn’t give us that out.

Over the nearly thirty years of my priesthood a whole lot of people have asked me, “We Episcopalians don’t really believe the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ, do we?”  My response is always the same – yes we do – at least on some mystical level we cannot clearly define.  Episcopalians call it “Real Presence,” and we leave it at that.  In some way – beyond logic and reason, some might say – we believe Christ to be fully and actually present in this holy sacrament.  Jesus does indeed feed us with his body and blood – and in taking into ourselves the Real Presence of Christ in this sacrament – we take into ourselves the fullness of the Risen Christ, and we become even more fully the body of Christ in and for this world.  “But how can this be?” we ask. 

In the late fourteenth century a woman known to us as Saint Julian of Norwich wrote a book detailing a series of visions about Christ that she experienced while she was near death.  Some of her writings dealt with the sacrament of the body and blood of Christ.  Julian offered an analogy about the Holy Eucharist.  “A mother feeds her child with her milk,” wrote Julian, “but our beloved mother Jesus feeds us with himself.  In tender courtesy he gives us the Blessed Sacrament, the most treasured food of life” (Enfolded in Love: Daily Readings with Julian of Norwich, 36).  As the mother-child bond is nurtured and finds strength through the act of feeding, so too is the God-human bond nurtured and strengthened through an act of feeding – the act of Jesus giving to us his body and blood as holy food.

This special bond – this closeness – is what Jesus means when he uses the word “abide.”  Abide.  To live.  To remain. To trust unwaveringly.  Jesus is telling us, “If you eat my flesh and drink my blood you will abide – you will live – you will remain – you will find the strength to trust in me unwaveringly – and I, in turn, will abide in you.”  There is a mutual indwelling of God and the believer that takes place whenever we come forward to the Holy Table and receive the body and blood of Christ.

So, we might ask what this “abiding in Christ, and Christ abiding in us” looks like.  The most obvious answer is it looks like Christ – it looks like Christ alive in us and living through us.  That’s heavy stuff.  But we see it shining through one another from time to time, don’t we?  Sometimes we actually catch a glimpse, or a glimmer, of Christ in the life of another: In the way a person reaches out to welcome or help someone; in the way we show love toward one another and the stranger among us.  Hopefully we can catch a glimmer of Christ even in the face of someone who is lost, hungry, or hopeless – someone who shows us the face of the suffering Jesus.  Sometimes we may even catch a glimpse of Christ looking back at us in our bathroom mirror.

Abiding in Christ is explained more fully later in John’s Gospel.  In the fifteenth chapter Jesus tells us that that abiding in him means that we bear fruit – which, of course, is a metaphor for life in Christ.  “Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit” (15:5).  Paul, in his letter to the Galatians, tells us that the fruit of the Spirit – meaning the fruit of abiding in Christ – is “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” (5:22).  It is hard to abide in Christ if we embrace the antithesis of that fruit.

Abiding in Christ also means we keep his commandments (John 15:9-10).  In John 15 that means loving one another as Jesus has loved us – even to the point of being willing to lay down one’s life for one’s friends (15:12-13).  Ultimately, Jesus tells us that we are to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength; and we are to love our neighbor as we long to be loved ourselves.

As we come to the Holy Table and partake in the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ we experience communion with him.  We become empowered to bear fruit worthy of Christ’s name and keep his commandment to love.  And so we might ask ourselves, “What do [we] most long for – what is [our] deepest desire? When [we] come to receive Holy Communion, [we might] offer that prayer, that intention to God. For it is in the sacrament of the body and blood of Christ that we can know the most profound moment of encounter with God” (Br. Geoffrey Tristram, Brother, Give Us A Word, 8/14/2018). 

The last verse of our hymn insert reads, “Blessed is the table we gather around, ample and anchored on peaceable ground, center and sign of the Bread we have found, blessed is the table we gather around” (Michael Hudson, “Blessed is the Hunger”, Songs for the Cycle, 2004).  And most certainly, blessed are those who bring their hunger for God to that Holy Table.