The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost Year B, Proper 15
The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost
Year B, Proper 15
Sunday, August 16th, 2009
The Rev. Dr. Katharine C. Black
1 Kings 2:10-12; 3:3-14
Psalm 111
Ephesians 5:15-20
John 6: 51-58
Be filled with the Spirit, giving thanks to God at all times and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. AMEN.
Good advice about how to
live, as is included in the story of Solomon. “Give your servant an
understanding mind, remembering that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of
wisdom.” The first three readings tell people ways to live by wisdom, and then
there’s the Gospel. Jesus says that he is the bread of life and those who eat
his flesh and drink his blood will have life forever. I’m not sure it’s wisdom
it takes to hear and understand that clearly or appealingly.
Let’s hear this Gospel
literally. It’s simply repulsive. If you don’t hear it as disgusting, you’re
not paying attention. “My flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink.” In
the early life of the church, Greeks and Romans heard this literally and didn’t
want to join a group of cannibals. In our day, we are harassed about being
selective and metaphorical about reading the Bible. Let’s read this core text
literally. “My flesh is true food” couldn’t be clearer, nor could “my blood is
true drink.”
When we read the Gospel in
the Episcopal Church, we say “The Gospel of the Lord,” not what is common in
the Roman Catholic Church, “This IS the Word of the Lord.” Early church
scholars, liturgists, and theologians felt that it was a substantial risk to
say aloud the “is.” These felt that if it is possible to say, “A unicorn is a
creature with one horn,” and hear that as a fact of reality, when there are no
real unicorns, then it is too great a risk to include the “is” in the sentence:
“This IS the Gospel.” It makes it a possible metaphor rather than objective fact,
so we say “The Gospel of the Lord” and physically it show, lift it up, thump
the actual words, and leave out the verb “to be” in our proclamation—right
here, we say—The Good News.
Here, then the “is true
food” and “is true drink” sound like factual descriptions of reality, and yet
they simply can’t be. How could Jesus be self-renewing chewy, uncooked flesh
and blood, for real, and feed people over and over without getting eaten away,
devoured, and chewed up? Use real food and drink verbs, and it gets increasingly
repellant or unbelievable.
Have your read a good
novel by a fine German medievalist, Patrick Suskind, called Perfume? It’s about a man at the time of
the French Revolution born with a perfect sense of smell, he can produce any
aroma. He can make the characteristic aroma of someone, and then do a murder
and spread the aroma of that familiar person so that that person is accused and
recognized as the culprit. He produces the odor of sanctity by essentially
melting pure young girls. Part of the drama of the novel is figuring out what
he’s doing, whom he represents, and what a crowd would do to someone they smell
as having the odor of sanctity. It’s a good novel, partly because it’s creepy
and totally believable, and within medieval lore — it fits into many legends of
the time, but has the modern style and readability. I did figure out its core
medieval theology eventually, but for distasteful plot. it can’t be beat. Part of the core of the novel is taking those
words, the words of institution in a particularly literal sense. “Take, eat,
this is my body shed for you.” It makes us really hear literal to mean literal,
rather than in the way we’ve gotten to use literal—“I was so stuffed, I
literally exploded,” meaning, actually, the opposite of literal. When biblical
literalists use the concept of literal, of course, that’s not what they mean.
Not only are they selective, but also this passage is not considered literally,
though Roman Catholic theology does say Eucharistic elements do become literal
flesh and blood…
Instead now, let’s
consider this passage from a religious point of view. In Jewish teaching, blood was always equated
with life, and all life belongs to God. Dietary laws forbid consuming blood
under ANY circumstances, and animals slaughtered for food had to be bled first.
Violation of these laws meant being cut off from the community. Therefore to
speak of drinking human blood, even symbolically, let alone literally, was too
terrible to imagine. Yet is precisely such imagery that Jesus presents here, as
the sole means by which a person can attain eternal life. “Those who eat my
flesh and drink my blood will have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the
last day.” John is pointing to a future event and time when disciples will
receive from God more than they now have, but John is using this exchange
between Jesus and his opponents to address Jewish rejection of the Christian
community in his own day. What Christians mean by eating the Lord’s flesh and
thereby receiving life is incomprehensible. Even more horrifying to Judaism
than eating flesh is the thought of drinking the blood of the Son of Man.
To understand how
repellant to Jews was John’s particular wording is to wonder why John worded
what Jesus says that way. Here are some possibilities. John was there, taped
Jesus, and wrote it down. No. John didn’t record any version of the Last
Supper, so he conflated the Last Supper with this, a reference to the
institution of the Eucharist, but in a way so alien to Jews, that it would
never be heard as a Seder/Last Supper, but only as a truly non –Jewish event.
Some people read John as anti-Semitic, while some hold that he was dealing with
a split between Jewish Christians and Jews. Certainly much of John’s Gospel has
done anti-Semitic work, but what John’s intentions were or how it was heard
then by some Jews who were allying themselves with the early Christian
movement, and others who did not, is probably is not knowable.
For us, though, we can
take responsibility for the damage some of this divisive language has done as
being heard as anti-Semitic. More than that, this language was also heard as
cannibalistic. Somewhere T S Eliot is quoted as having said, “Where is the
wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”
Information about Jewish beliefs and practices make this piece of John with its
six times use of “flesh” and eight times use of “eat” hard to hear. It provides
a barrier for Jews to hear, understand, and to be sympathetic to. Knowledge
about biblical literalism makes this passage simply repellant, but where is
some wisdom here? While Jesus was a Jew and steeped in Jewish practices and
sensibilities, John wasn’t necessarily. His Gospel makes a division between how
Jews heard Jesus speak—not as a wisdom rabbi—but rather as someone outside
their community. John was writing during a time of struggle between the
communities, trying to direct the direction of the young movement, away from
Judaism and into something Paul, Peter, and others were shaping. John’s Gospel
was building images of who Jesus was to people who would never meet him or
would ever meet anyone who’d known him. His Gospel is shaped around a series of
“I am” statements and it is my guess that the reality each reveals wisdom more
important than that Jesus is really a good shepherd, the bread of life, the
way, and so on. Hearer/readers were trusted to understand that these were
glimpses of how Jesus appeared in the world as the savior. Neither literal nor
polemic, they showed wisdom even though metaphorical, and demonstrated stronger
truths beyond mere literary devices. As a group of facets, we would be able to
catch a glimpse of something too big to encompass, too complex to understand,
too brilliant to look at, too wonderful to miss, and too true to doubt. The
Gospel writers were both people of faith and also people with a passion to
persuade. They were not writing journalism, but rather works to persuade.
Neither fairness, nor slander was at issue. So much of what the Gospel writers
were doing was in a form directly delivered for personal, present, audience,
hearers, congregations, and crowds. Hundreds and even thousands of years later,
we read and hear differently. We’re not there, and they’re not here, and these
writings — not hearings, for us— have shaped our culture, our hearing, reading,
believing, and the whole conversation and its commentary before we even
hear/read this single paragraph.
Do we understand and even
know that John’s Gospel turned out to be a major force of anti-Semitism? We do.
When John was creating a shadow and a foretaste of the future, did John hope or
expect that Judaism would vanish? I have no idea. What he was sketching was a
vigorous image of how he approached Jesus, the stunning new savior he was
coming to know and wanted to share. We have no trouble in understanding that
John was not writing a preview of James Beard’s Beard on Bread, that this bread’s ingredients were not really flesh
and blood, but without any yeast for it to rise, live, or grow. Knowing the
particular vocabulary of John here was also particularly repellant to Jews,
doesn’t mean in the moment people first heard this paragraph they were
repelled. We don’t know, but we do see how the structuring of the new group in
that language made a sharp division with Judaism.
What though do we
understand about the wisdom John did say? As Daniel Weir said last week, that
this bread, the bread of life is food for us as individuals, as particular
people to fill our own personal needs. We understand too that the bread is to
feed us together, as communities and in communities. This dual use bread of
life is to give us life, energy, hope, and the ability to work to bring about
the reign of God, both just as I am and we are.
Hearing Frances Fosbroke
Cox’s memories of her father Gerry was just such an example of who we’ve been
as a community. Gerry was energetic, searching, and faithful, but he wasn’t
much for change. He was shaped here, to listen and listen, and to consider
changing. While he was being a lawyer, working for the Appalachian Mountain
Club, and being an early encourager and support for the Iona Foundation which
helped support people on pilgrimage to that remarkable Scottish Celtic site, he
didn’t much like the idea of either a new Prayerbook or hymnal— neither was
broken, so why not preserve and encourage the old? At each big new challenge to
the church he’d known, he’d come back here for weeks, and listen here, testing
trying, and incorporating the new into present and traditional practices,
understandings, and liturgies. He’d listen and struggle, and he came to accept
the BCP, the hymnal, eventually the ordination of women as an idea, then in
fact to the diaconate, and then to the priesthood.
Each of us is nurtured
here, but how do we bring the joy of salvation, the living reality of God who
loves us here and now, and gives us energy to work in the world? Individually, just as we are, renewed and
reshaped by the bread we eat here as individuals and as we are fed together.
How though do we do that as a community? We make ourselves visible and
hospitable. We’re going to invite our neighbors to clean up with us in the
fall, and we’re going to ask them what they need. What else? That’s our
present, urgent task together whenever we’re fed and go around together or as
individuals. Jesus will be there to feed, hearten us on the way, and to welcome
us along our path eventually. The living reality Jesus brings us as bread of
life is everlasting and always Good News.
© Katharine C Black, 16
August 2009
