Eat Me and Live Forever.

John 6:56-69

August 26, 2018

I.

Jesus says that if we consume his flesh and blood we remain in him and he in us, and we live forever.  It is indeed a difficult saying, even for us.  It requires a lot of interpretation because taken literally it makes no sense.  Even if eating someone’s flesh were possible it would be cannibalism, something the early church was actually charged with by the Romans.  Jews were not allowed even to eat rare meat; the idea of eating human flesh and drinking human blood was abhorrent in the extreme, as it is for us today.

The crowd that once was so excited about the Jesus who produced miraculous bread on the hillside that they wanted to carry him off to Jerusalem and make him king, is dwindling.  But the end of this chapter he is down to a mere 12 people who stick with him.

We know, I think, what this is like, this dwindling.  For Jesus this happens in a few hours in Capernaum; with our churches of what used to be called the “mainline” denominations it has taken 45 years, but many of us know what it’s like to remember when there were lots of people enthusiastic about Christianity, and to look around now and see only a few.  That morning Jesus had been the most popular figure in Galilee!  Now he’s down to just a handful of loyalists.  What happened?

Well, what happens is he keeps talking.  And the more he talks, the more people recoil, shake their heads, shrug, and go off to find some other way to spend their day.  Because what he is saying was considered crazy.  “Eat me and live forever!” is the gist of it.  C. S. Lewis once quipped that Jesus is either who he says he is, or he is mentally ill.  In this story the crowd is coming to the latter conclusion with every word that comes out of Jesus’ mouth.  “This is a hard teaching.  Who can accept it?” is kind of a sanitized version of what they were probably really saying.

This is what always happens when the church is led by the Spirit to pay attention to Jesus’ words.  People say, “Wait a minute, I thought this was a social club!  I thought this was about success and family and patriotism and civic duty!  I thought this was about maintaining the status quo and personal morality and enforcing the laws!  ‘Eat me and live forever?  Turn the other cheek?  Sell all your possessions?  Bless our enemies?  Hate your family?  Be born again?’  These are hard teachings; who can accept them?  Not me.  I’m outa here.  There’s way more fun things I can do on Sunday morning than listen to this nonsense.”

There is in the church this time-bomb called “the gospel.”  The church sails along sometimes for centuries selling out to the wealth and power of culture, feathering its nest in the comfortable center of society, sucking up to governments and commerce until it becomes virtually indistinguishable from the ruling class.  But then, inevitably, someone actually reads the gospels and suggests that maybe we should pay attention to Jesus Christ.  At which point, if the establishment leaders can’t put a lid on it, the whole place blows up.  Someone realizes that Jesus actually doesn’t favor war, or injustice, or inequality, or any of the other atrocities that civic leaders have cynically press-ganged the church into serving. 

II.

And people start to leave.  They want a positive message.  They want to be affirmed.  They want stability.  They want to be uplifted.  They want comfort.  And the story of a man crucified for blasphemy and sedition doesn’t cut it for them.  And if this man says some things that challenge the whole basis of my comfortable, white, suburban existence, “well, gosh, look how late it is, I’ve got a tee-time in 20 minutes!”

This is the way the Lord prunes his church, using the sword of the Word to cut off the dead and fruitless branches.

“Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them,” says Jesus.  “Whoever eats me will live because of me…. the one who eats this bread will live for ever.”

He is talking about the sacramental eating and drinking, which itself represents the way we receive Jesus’ teachings and life.  We receive them by our faithful obedience in keeping his commandments.  We receive them by abiding in him by living the life he gives us to live.  We receive them by this simple act of eating the bread which is the communion in his body and drinking from the cup which is the communion in his life-blood.  By taking in these elements we ingest the words and prayers spoken over them; we take in the story; we take in his life so that now he lives in us.  Now his life is ours.  This is the way Jesus has given us to participate in the life of God, and thereby live forever.  We receive the love and life of God in Jesus Christ, by sharing and giving his life and love to and for others.

This is our confession of faith.  It is words and actions, beginning with the eating and the drinking, and then extended into the works of compassion and justice, peace, love, and forgiveness, the humility and generosity that characterize the life of God flowing through us into the world in imitation of the One who empties himself, giving his life for the life of the world.

Even when it is carefully explained and even when people do understand it more than literally, it is still alienating.  They would still have walked away because the deeper meaning, that it is his teachings and life that we take on, is at least as demanding and counter-cultural.  Indeed, the more we understand him the more difficult his message becomes because it is about taking up a cross, our own cross, and following him.  It is about discipleship that costs us our soul, our life, our all, in the words of one classic hymn.  Maybe the crowd does not dwindle because they don’t understand; maybe they understood all too well what Jesus demands of them, and realized they wanted no part of it.

III.

This is the pruning of the church.  But fruit trees get pruned for a reason.  It is for growth.  It is to focus and direct the energy of the trees — so they may produce more and better fruit. 

When people drift away from him and even the disciples grumble that this teaching is too weird and too hard and not what they signed up for, Jesus says, “Does this offend you?  Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before?  It is the Spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless.  The words that I have spoken to you are Spirit and life.”

The proof will be in his resurrection and ascension into the fullness of time.  This is the key to that wild and breathtaking promise that “the one who eats this bread will live forever.”  Whoever takes in and becomes and expresses Jesus’ body and blood, his teachings and life, whoever loves him and keeps his commandments will never die.  Jesus repeats this brash and outlandish claim several times in this gospel. 

Obviously, trusting in Jesus does not mean there will not come a time when our physical organism gives out.  Such changes are an integral part of the greater dance of life in God’s creation in which we are always exchanging energy and essences and matter and life with each other.  Individuals give their life to and for others, all the time, and the individual that you have decided is “you” participates in this.  

One of the things we come to realize in Christ is that life is way bigger than us; it is vaster than the little particular individual manifestations we identify with for an absurdly brief time.  Jesus calls us to awaken to a life infinitely larger than what we imagine is temporarily contained by our carbon-based bodies.  Just as he is within everything and everyone, so in him we also become conscious of being within everything and everyone.  This indeed is the meaning of ascension; it is an expansion into everywhere.  

The Lord Jesus becomes incarnate by a “descent” from the everywhere of God’s infinite Presence, and then after his death he is resurrected and “ascends” back into that Presence.  When we identify with him and receive him into ourselves in trust and obedience we also realize our own true nature in this vastness of God’s Light.  Jesus refers to this as being raised up “on the last day,” a phrase he uses 3 times in this chapter.  The last day being the fulness of time realized in him, eternity.  

When Jesus asks the remaining 12 confused disciples if they also want to leave him, it is Peter who gets it.  “Lord, to whom can we go?” he says.  “You have the words of eternal life.  We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.”  The words of the Word who became flesh to dwell among us, following and obeying them, being conformed and informed by those words, expressing them in our own lives, that is what delivers us to eternal life.  That is how we live forever.  Not in ourselves or these temporary configurations, but with and in him and in God.

IV.

The gospel says the disappointed and confused crowd “turned back” from Jesus.  The word used means back to the past.  They refused to allow Jesus to draw them forward into a new way of thinking and acting; they revert back to the familiar, the comfortable, the predictable, the secure.  They go back to the way things were before Jesus’ crazy talk about eating him and living forever.  They want to go back to when it was all about everybody having bread.  Maybe they live in nostalgia for how great it was just that morning when the whole town was ready to make Jesus king!

The story gives us a choice.  We can come ahead into eternal life with and in Jesus Christ, or we can turn back and stay in what we know.  We can embrace hope, or sink into nostalgia.  We can ascend to life, or stay mired in death.

He has the words of eternal life.  There is no place else to go.  He is the living bread that feeds the world.  It is his life, which we ingest in the sacrament and which informs us in the words of his teachings, which we express in our love for the world in his name.  For whoever trusts in him will not perish, but live forever.

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