The Wolf You Feed.

John 6:51-58

August 19, 2018

I.

We are what eat.  Indeed, we are what we feed in ourselves.  If we force our bodies to subsist on a diet of junk food — fast food burgers, sugary drinks, greasy fried potatoes — the 5 food groups of college; fat, salt, sugar, caffeine, and alcohol — then what we are feeding is our ego-centric, self-gratifying, self-righteous consumer selves.  On this diet our bodies become addled, obese, clogged, thick, and finally diseased and dysfunctional.

The same goes for what we figuratively ingest in terms of words and images.  If it’s pornography and violence, if it’s paranoid and hysterical lies that feed our fears and anxieties, if it’s stories that feed our resentments, stoke our egos, and encourage us to be competitors and enemies of each other — then we end up with constricted, calcified, congested, blind, and paralyzed souls that are incapable of seeing or hearing the truth of God’s love revealed in Jesus.  We live in an echo-chamber or hall of mirrors reflecting back to us our own fears and desires.

We can fatten ourselves with the counterfeit contentment of consumerism, addicted to our own self-preservation and to our own present pleasure, hoarding goods produced by other people’s labor, and ever needing to protect and defend our private stash, while always making it bigger.  Indeed, such measurement is how we define “success” in our culture.  The more you have the better you are doing.

But this approach will lead to inevitable extinction because neither the earth nor its Creator can tolerate such a destructive and out-of-control form of life.  We know from nature that such organisms may thrive for a short time but they do not survive in the end.  We also know this from Scripture, where we find several consuming, colonizing empires successfully gobbling up vast territories with great violence… all of which collapse from the weight of their own greed and destructiveness.  The Book of Revelation is the blow-by-blow account of the ultimate fate of such ways of thinking and acting.    

In our bodies, such unrestricted growth and consumption is called cancer.  One cell decides to be an ego-centric, selfish individualist, and spread its malign influence to others.  We know what happens to bodies with cancer left untreated.  And then when the body the cancer has conquered inevitably dies, so does the cancer.  Cancer is the essence of death.

The same foul spirit, the spirit of greed, lust, gluttony, consumption, out-of-control growth, and careless waste is the enemy Jesus comes to neutralize.  That was the message of Satan in the temptation stories in the other gospels.  Satan appeals to the human mania for getting, taking, hoarding, gaining, winning, keeping, consuming, and controlling.  Jesus proves who he is by not caving in to that temptation.  

That’s why Jesus’ discourse on the Bread of Life is so important.  The Lord radically contrasts our addiction to literal bread, the bread we eat and consume, which stands for wealth and power, with his message of self-emptying love.  His answer to those who were so impressed by his bread-making that they want to sweep him off and make him king, is that it’s not about the bread, it is about the love that produces, gives, and shares the bread.

II.

Jesus is about giving.  His life is a pouring out, a self-emptying.  His life is about forgiveness and generosity.  His life is about not holding on to things, but letting them go in love and freedom.  His life is about celebrating in joy and wonder the undivided diversity that is God’s creation.

To make his point, Jesus takes the bread and wine rituals which are at the heart of Israelite faith going all the way back to Abraham, and he connects them to his own self-offering for the life of the world on the cross.  By his word, he makes bread and the wine to be the way we participate in him, and thus in God, and then, as him, we find ourselves going forth in self-offering as well.  Just as the literal, physical nutrients in the bread and the wine actually and physically become the flesh of our bodies, so the Presence of God in Christ is also spiritually, ritually transferred to us, or more precisely fed and thereby awakened in us, when we consume them in the Sacrament.

Jesus says, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven.  Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”  Jesus refers here to his crucifixion which will happen a year later practically to the day.  The bread also is a way of talking about his teaching, his words.  His crucifixion is an embodiment, an enacting, a representation of his words in which he does with his own body what he has been saying for 3 years.  And his words and actions in his ministry are an expression in advance of the ultimate offering of himself he will make on the cross.

So, the crucifixion is not an interruption of Jesus’ career as a teacher and healer, it is not something that was politically inevitable but not a necessary part of his work, as some today are suggesting.  It is the fulfillment of what he is always about because he clearly sees himself in the roles described in the Hebrew Scriptures: the Passover Lamb, the Atonement sacrifice, and the Servant of God who suffers on behalf of the people.  

Yes, he gives his life to us in his teachings and his healing and liberating ministry.  Following him and obeying him is an essential element of participating in him.  This aspect, discipleship, has often been neglected by the church, to its shame.  But all these things lead up to, anticipate, and reflect in advance his ultimate giving of his life when he is lifted up on the cross and in his resurrection.

Because he comes not just to talk to us, but to do something for and to us.  He doesn’t say “think about this in remembrance of me,” he says “do this in remembrance of me.”  

Which means that the place where this all comes together is at his Table, because that is where his word becomes flesh again and again, first in the bread, and then through the bread in us.  The Sacrament is how his word becomes our flesh, and this does happen quite literally, and even in a sense physically by the quality of our discipleship.

III.

So he establishes this link of identification between the literal bread of the Sacrament, the figurative “bread” of his teachings, and the “bread” of his own body, his own flesh, broken on the cross.  To participate in one is to participate in the others, and it is the only way to do so.  To eat the bread is to follow his word enacted on the cross.  

We participate in the literal bread by breaking it and eating it.  The Greek word used is not the usual word for eat, it is more visceral and physical, more like “chew” or as some commentators translate it, “munch.”  It focuses on the act of teeth grinding and saliva dissolving the substance of the bread in your mouth.  

We are prone to overly spiritualize it until it’s barely recognizable as actually eating anything.  Some ministers don’t even like the word “eat;” it’s too gross, I guess, so they say “partake.”  Jesus wants us to experience him as the bread that we bless, break, and put in our mouths and chew on like the real food it is.  He wants us to sense the texture, the taste.  He wants us to be present to this act.  The fact that it is something we do with our bodies is important to him.  

The bread is still material bread and that is the way we have to take it because we are material beings and so is the One who became flesh to dwell among us.  A symbol points beyond itself to something else, but this Sacrament — because he says so and we trust him, and because we repeat his words over the elements — is the way to remember him and participate in him and receive his life.

A DNA test of course will reveal that the bread is still wheat and hasn’t in any physical way become human flesh… until we eat it.  Then it does literally become human flesh, ours.  It gets transubstantiated in us.  Especially as this bread, over which we have spoken the words of institution and the invocation of the Spirit, empowers and nourishes Christ-in-us so we may continue his mission in his name.  His work becomes ours.  We are his body in the world.  We carry his life, or blood.

That means that, in feeding his Presence in us, we live into his mission and ministry.  It means that now we are the ones through whom the love of God pours into the world.  It means we are the ones emptying ourselves for others.  It means we are the ones embodying his forgiveness, generosity, healing, acceptance, compassion, welcome, goodness, shalom, justice, and joy.

IV.

I am reminded of this often retold Native American story.  A grandfather is talking with his grandson and he says there are two wolves inside of us which are always at battle.  One is a good wolf which represents things like kindness, humility, peace, and love.  The other is a bad wolf, which represents things like anger, greed, resentment, lies, fear, hatred, and ego.  The grandson stops and thinks about it for a second then he looks up at his grandfather and says, “Grandfather, which one wins?”  The grandfather quietly replies, “The one you feed.”

The Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper is about feeding the “good wolf” in us, which is Christ; and we feed Christ with Christ.  We receive his life to live his life.  We receive his body to become his body.  The way to awaken and realize his saving Presence within us, is to receive him, to eat his body and drink his blood, represented in the bread and the cup.  We know that is what we are doing because we know and feel and see its truth in our actions.

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