Sermon on eating His flesh and drinking His blood

Sermon. 23 August 2015. St Michael and All Angels, Little Ilford. 

Trinity 12

John 6.56-69

There's a slogan going round the internet. Maybe you've seen it. It says this: 'To my children: Never make fun of helping me with computer stuff. I taught you how to use a spoon.'

No doubt the primary intent is to say in a humorous way that family members need to be patient with each other (which is a good message). But it's also a good reminder that if we are here today, we are here because someone fed us first. (And it's lovely that we have infants among us, the demonstrate this.) Indeed, if we eat today, it is because someone taught us how to eat. So, before we have our sophisticated dinner parties with any amount of cutlery, before we were taught how to eat, we all gurgled and munched and gnawed and sucked and swallowed and spat food out. All of us.

I realise this isn't really news. But it may be something we're not used to reflecting on. In particular, we may think these words are not proper for a sermon. It's very hard to avoid this thought at one level of consciousness or another: Gd is Spirit, pure Spirit, and so must relate first or mostly to our spirits, or, as people say today, our 'spirituality'. The religious bits of us. Not really with our bodies, with all their primitive ways and needs.

And I think today's gospel tells us it is not like that.

We're are now at the end of our excursus into chapter 6 of John's Gospel. Jesus as the bread of life. Last week we would have had the most shocking statement in this section, and maybe the whole Bible. (We didn't have it in fact, because we swerved away to mark the Blessed Virgin Mary.) I mean Jesus has just said: 'Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life within you.' And what may be even harder to hear is that some say the Greek is better translated 'gobble on' or 'munch' on the flesh of Jesus. As I say, primitive, bodily stuff.

Now, it has to be worth saying that we don't know what Jesus meant! 

It's very natural for us to think Jesus is referring to the eucharist. And we know that Christianity does not take the eucharist to be literally an act of cannibalism. But John never actually makes the connection with the eucharist (and when it comes to the Last Supper, John concentrates of foot-washing; food barely gets a mention.) So it might be something else, some sort of mystical finding nourishment in Jesus and his words and example, perhaps. We are never going to be able to pin down the meaning of Jesus in John.

But it is clear that Jesus teaching that we are to eat his flesh was difficult for people to accept. They may not have liked his language. They may have thought it sounds to much like cannibalism. They may have been especially offended by talk of drinking Jesus' blood, as Gd in the Hebrew Scriptures forbids the consumption of blood, any blood.

Whatever Jesus and/or John originally meant, we are where we are, and we do honour the eucharist. Week by week, and indeed more than that, we eat together. And that is what most Christians do, throughout the world, and from early days. So we cannot help but make some links between what Jesus is saying here, and what we do. And I think this is to the good.

There are many ways of celebrating the eucharist. It can be very simple. It can be very ornate and involved. You can say every word. You can chant every word. But the element that is always there is that it is about us as a Christian community doing something together, including doing that most primitive of things, eating. So we are obeying Jesus (for elsewhere in the gospels of course he does tell us to 'do this in remembrance of me'). More than thinking with our heads, or even feeling with our hearts certain things about Jesus, we do something. We may not be in the habit of speaking about obeying Jesus, but it's not always wrong! And it is as our bodies that we obey. Because indeed we are our bodies. They are not some mere 'instrument' for our souls. Christian tradition does indeed at times talk about our bodies and souls and can give the impression they are two distinct things. But they are really two ways of thinking of the same thing.

And something else, people who study human behaviour tend to say that meals form community. I think we can see why. If you want to differentiate between classes or castes, an effective way is to refuse to eat with those you think are beneath you. If you want to bring people together, and say that at heart we are all equal, we are all of equal worth, you share a meal. If you want to mark some life-event as one family or community, you share food. And that is what we do, at a eucharist. We may think it's not really a meal, as we usually only eat one morsal and drink one sip. But it is still a meal. We have, as bodies, to take, eat, swallow, do exactly what we do when we have a big meal (although admittedly normally without a spoon).

So we (here, quite concretly, St Michael and All Angels) are formed by our eucharistic meals together week after week. Every time we celebrate the eucharist we are combining obedience to Jesus with our commitment to one another. And that is a powerful combination. It is not cannibalism. It is not magic. It is not the only thing we as Christians have to do. But it's worth considering that it may be our obedience to Jesus, which we act out in our bodies, and our commitment to each other, as equal in Gd's sight, so that we share what we have, may actually make our faith, rather than the other way round. 

Amen.