More Bread

"More Bread"

John 6:51-58
August 16, 2009

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.” The Jews then
disputed among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” So
Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, 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, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food
and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me,
and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so
whoever eats me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from
heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this
bread will live forever.”

A couple of weeks ago, I did something I rarely do, and that is actually cook—well, I
mean I throw things in the microwave or heat pizza up in the oven, but I don’t usually
actually cook, you know, like from a recipe. I found a cookbook in a discount bin that
gave a recipe for one of my favorite Indonesian foods, rendeng, something I remember
fondly from my days of living overseas. I truly can still see Amat in my mind’s eye, who
was our servant when I was a kid, I can see her in my mind’s eye, cooking rendeng on
the stove, and it taking hours to get it just right, because you have to cook this mixture
of meat and spices down until it is almost bone dry, because Indonesians would often
pack it away for long trips, pack it away in a banana leaf with a generous amount of
rice—it was the perfect meal for a long trip on a crowded bus. I have had it since I left
Indonesia, at various restaurants, and it’s always a hit or a miss—mostly misses—no
one cooked it like Amat, and it’s never quite the way I remember it. So, finally, I tried to
make it, and we bought $30 dollars worth of meat, and I cut and chopped and
simmered, and stirred for three or four hours, according to the precise recipe in that
cheap cookbook—and it just turned out awful. Well, not awful, but not really all that
good. When I was in Chicago this past weekend, I found another cookbook with
another recipe for it—but with a completely different main ingredient—not chopped
onions, but coconut shavings—but I just was unwilling to spend $40 for a cookbook, so
I tried to take a picture of the recipe in the book with my camera phone, which is
probably not ethical, so don’t follow my lead on something like that. I’m going to try
again, sometime, when I can afford to possibly throw away $30 worth of meat, and full
evening of cooking, something that doesn’t’ come naturally. I am not going to give up
my quest for the perfect rendeng, despite all the challenges ahead, like my lack of
cooking skills, and actually finding a recipe that will replicate Amat’s delicious dish.

And, of course, getting the recipe right is so important—any good cook will tell you that
you once you find a good recipe, the right recipe for chocolate chip cookies, or the
perfect Irish stew, or whatever, you’ve got keep that recipe, safeguard it, put it
somewhere so that you don’t lose it, so that you can replicate that great experience
again. Food is such a gift from God, isn’t it, a truth that the recent movie Julia and Julie
reminded me of when I saw it last week, the one about Julia Childs, and the woman who
decided to cook all the recipes from her classic book on French cooking. Julia Childs
spent years perfecting those recipes for an American audience, and that is why that
cookbook has stood the test of time—someone bothered to make sure that the recipes
actually worked.

Food matters, and not just because it keeps us literally alive—it is just simply one of the
great joys in life. And even in the Bible, one cannot escaped its importance—again,
not simply because it is the fuel for the human engine, but because of what it
symbolizes, because it is a sign and symbol of a deeper reality, a spiritual reality. That
is why you have the elaborate and detailed food laws of the Old Testament, still lived
out in some Jewish communities through the kosher laws, and that is why you have the
central event of the Christian community being a meal, a meal that Jesus had with his
disciples, replicated over and over again in Christian communities for two thousand
years. We also know that the earliest eucharists, the earliest Lord’s Suppers, were
actual meals—not the symbolic act we go through here on the first Sunday of the
month, but an actual meal in which people gathered to eat together, for dinner. Here,
in John, where there is no Lord’s Supper, not enactment of a meal on that night before
Jesus was killed, only a washing of the disciples’ feet, you have Jesus speaking over
and over again about himself being food itself, being the bread of life, and that those
who believe in him will never grow thirsty, never go hungry, words found the front of
your bulletin and from an earliest passage in John 6.

Here, in our text today, Jesus’ words become even more radical, pushing the very edge
of Jewish sensibilities—and not Jewish sensibilities, but our own—“unless you eat of
this flesh, drink of this blood, you have no life in you,” Jesus says to the authorities who
are outraged by this obviously metaphorical invitation. Of course, Jesus is not literally
offering his very flesh for them to eat, and I think they know that—they know he is
speaking metaphorically, but the metaphor itself galls them, offends them—even if this
Jesus is speaking symbolically, the arrogance of such an invitation, especially knowing
the Jewish prohibition against cannibalism, against drinking blood. And there is a
deeper irony here, a historical one, and that is that Christians were often accused of
cannibalism themselves, because of their reputation for this important feast they often
conducted in private. It was said by Christianity’s earliest enemies that Christians “ate
their god” and that they did, indeed, practice cannibalism, of some sort. Of course, that
is not true, and it was very typical of the way that one faith group would smear another
group—something we Christians would later do to our pagan competitors when we
became the majority in Roman culture—but its telling that that the rumor had been
floating around about these Christians and their mysterious meal, done in private. One
could even argue that John, which is the last Gospel written, was trying to have Jesus
explain the meal to others, to the Jewish contemporaries of his day, but also to the
earliest pagan critics as well. The outrage and disgust of the Jews in this passage are
probably indicative of what Christians experienced when they tried, in vain, perhaps, to
explain the meaning of this meal, this invitation to partake, to consume, the host of that
meal, this Jesus of Nazareth.

But what is Jesus inviting them—and us—to do, in this startling invitation to eat of his
flesh, drink of his blood? Well, I think what Christ in this text is inviting us to intimacy,
an intimacy with God, with Christ that begins in the here and now, in this world, and
which simply go forwards into the next world. The writer of John always has Jesus
speaking of eternal life, something you don’t find in the other three Gospels, but Jesus
is never simply talking about the world to come, but an eternal life that begins in the
here and now—not in some distant future, or even near future, when we pass from this
world into the next, when we die and go back into the arms of God. In John’s Gospel,
the eternal begins now, not later—and it begins with our decision to be radically
intimate with the One who calls us to consume him, to become one with him, in ways
that are so radical that it seems repugnant to us, as it did to those earliest listeners of
this text, who couldn’t imagine becoming that intimate with God who was always
understood as other, as “not them”, as distant and mysterious and simply not like us.
Even the mystery religions of the day, the ones that did encourage an intimate
encounter of God or the gods, even those religions often saw that intimacy as a task to
be completed, a knowledge to be fought for, a prize to be won, rather than a gift simply
given by a God who wants intimacy with us.

And beyond the radical-ness exemplified in the invitation to eat and drink of Jesus’ own
flesh, there is the even more startling invitation to be one with this God who loves us,
this God who is willing to do anything for us, even to taste death, to experience pain, to
journey with us into that most painful and scary and beautiful moment, and yet who also
relishes the good moments, the moments like the wedding at Cana, this God who can
know joy, and love. You know, all this talk about drinking his blood, eating his flesh, as
macabre as it may be for some, probably for most of us, all of it is about asking us to
choose to be as intimate with God as God wishes to be with us. This is a God who is
profoundly and deeply NOT OTHER, not distant, not far away, but as close to us as the
air we breathe in, and the food we to take in, both of which we need in order to survive.
We are not asked to simply “believe and do”, to just put Jesus’ ethical teachings into
play, though if we did, it might make for a much better world, and we are not asked to
simply believe 10 impossible things before breakfast. No, we are asked to become one
with the God who has made us and loved us, and will never let us go—and to start the
eternal in this moment, this second. We do this by paying as much attention to our
souls, to our spirits, as we do outer world, to the mundane world we drive in, and eat in,
and sleep in. This world matters, of course, and our human relationships matter, they
matter incredibly, but our relationship to the One who has created us, and wants
relationship with us, this relationship matters just as much—that relationship is the stuff
of eternity, an eternity that always begins here and now.

Now, you would think that this intimacy would be something everyone wanted, everyone
desired—this deep relationship with God, but not always, of course. I think it can be
kind of overwhelming, a little off-putting, a little too invasive for some people, this idea
of God being as close to them as the air they breathe, and the food they eat. In verse
66 of this chapter, we find that after this invitation by Jesus to eat of his flesh and drink
of his blood, people begin leaving in droves. It was too much for them—maybe it was
the metaphor, the literalness that was a turn off to some, but I don’t think so—these
folks get metaphor like we do, and they knew what they were being invited to, which
was relationship with the God who knows them and wants to be known by them.
Friedrich Nietzsche once complained that what he found so repulsive about Christianity
was this idea of God who was a snoop, who was overtly invasive, who wanted into the
human soul who seemed to know no bounds [this is found in either The Gay Science or
The Antichrist, I think]—this God seemed to have no boundaries, and demanded too
much intimacy from us. Now, I think Nietzsche was wrong, that this was a boundary less
God, but his experience points out the reality that some of us really don’t want to be
known—we would prefer to remain a mystery to others, to ourselves, and certainly to
God. Surely, so much of our hearts and souls are a mystery, and they will always be,
but in the end we are asked not to be a stranger to ourselves, to each other, and to
God. God, indeed, asks us to be intimate with each other, to gamble on each other, to
let go of the secrets, and the lies, so that we can be real with each other. Nietzsche
may have hated that kind of intimacy, and we may hate it, at different moments in our
lives, but to be intimate with another, with ourselves, with God, is to tell the truth, to
show each other our wounds and to trust that in the sharing a bridge can be crossed
between each other. So, it is with God, when we take up the invitation to relationship,
and intimacy, to feast at the table of the Christ, to feast, as macabre as the metaphor
itself, on the Christ himself. We are asked to trust God with the light and shadow in our
souls, and in our hearts, believing that in knowing each other we can and will begin
eternity in the here and now. What God wants is us, us, and I think our work in this
world is to return that desire, to want God as much as God wants us. Amen.