Flesh

Scripture: The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 20), A.D. 2015 B

Sermon:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

When the Church was young, Christians were often accused of cannibalism, and it was precisely because of passages like these.

For four weeks now, we have gathered to hear Jesus preach to us about bread. First He fed the 5,000 using only a few loaves and fish. Then He explained that the true bread from Heaven was not the manna in the wilderness, but the living bread come down to give life to the world. And when the fascinated crowds asked Him to give them this bread that they might never hunger again, He proclaimed: “ I am the living bread 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.”

Wait, what? Did He just say flesh? You can almost hear those around Him rear back a bit. But Jesus doesn’t stop there; He ploughs right on ahead: “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 … The one who eats this bread will live forever.”

As a child I had a friend who could not bear the word flesh. It was far too visceral for him, and he recoiled when he heard it, as if someone had run their nails down a chalkboard. He would’ve hated this reading. In our Gospel this morning, Jesus uses the word flesh no less than half a dozen times—and while some gentler translations try to render the word as “body,” that’s simply not accurate. The Greek word is sarx, flesh, meat. Moreover, He talks about drinking blood no less than four times in three lines. Drinking blood!

No wonder the people listening to Him are scandalized. No wonder they’re confused. The people of God in the Old Testament were forbidden to imbibe blood of any kind, for the blood was held to be life itself. And it should go without saying that to eat human flesh was pure abomination to Gentiles and Jews alike. What does He mean by all this? What is Jesus trying to tell us here?

Those of us raised in Christian communities cannot help but turn immediately to Holy Communion, to the Eucharist at the Lord’s Table, when Jesus holds up the bread of the Passover and proclaims, “This is my Body!” then lifts high the Cup of Redemption and promises, “This is my Blood!” And we are given these promises anew every Sunday when, as He commanded us, we “do this in remembrance” of Him. But of course the people in our Gospel story this morning are completely unaware of all this. As yet there is no Last Supper, no Holy Sacrament, to make sense of what Jesus is saying.

He does offer some explanation toward the end of the passage. “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.” To eat Jesus’ flesh and drink Jesus’ blood is to abide in Him, to be one with Him, just as the Son of God is One with God the Father.

The flesh of Jesus makes real for us His Incarnation, when God chose to enter Creation as a Child, as a helpless baby, within the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mother. From the moment that Mary uttered her famous assent to the will of God—from the moment that she agreed to be His chosen Mother in this world—God became one with us, with all of mankind. He leapt down from Heaven to earth, from archons and angels to the mud and the blood. He truly is Immanuel, God-With-Us, as rightly we celebrate each glorious Christmas Day.

The blood of Jesus, then, makes real for us his sacrifice, his coming death on the Cross, when He will quite literally pour out his life for the world. So often, I fear, we look upon the Cross as an instrument of human sacrifice offered up to God. But that’s clearly not what Jesus is talking about here. Here He is talking about how God has come down from Heaven to give over his life for the world. On the Cross God sacrifices Himself to us! He dies that we might share his own life—that we might live off of Him, eat his flesh, drink his blood.

It’s a little unsettling, I know. That word, flesh, is just as visceral today as it was 2,000 years ago. And when we take the host into our mouths, that little crisp of wheat which is indeed the promised Body of Christ, our very teeth remind us of the violence, not that God poured out upon us, but that we inflicted upon God. Yet consider this: to separate body from blood, in the Bible, is understood as death. That makes sense, doesn’t it? We’d find it rather difficult to live without blood in our body. Yet when we gather for Communion, when we eat the flesh and drink the blood of Jesus Christ here at his Table, the Body and Blood of Jesus are reunited in us. He lives again, in us. Christ is resurrected, here and now, in us, in our flesh.

This is what it means to abide in Jesus. This is what it means to be one with our Lord even as He and the Father are One. Holy Communion is nothing less than the Annunciation and Christmas and Good Friday and Easter all rolled into one! It is the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection of Jesus, His entire life, given over to us, offered fully and freely to us, that we might take and eat and know the depths of God’s love for us. And when we partake of Jesus as the true bread from Heaven, come down to give life to the world, it’s not simply that He becomes part of us—it’s that we become part of Him, part of his Body, part of his story.

God was born for you, lived for you, suffered and died and rose for you, and He abides with us even now, just as He promised, in this bread that is his Body and this wine that is his Blood. Come now, taste and see that the Lord is good.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.