13th Sunday after Pentecost, Year B

Ray Temmerman

The focus for this morning's sermon is taken from our Gospel reading: John 6:56-69

Let's take a short journey back to last Sunday, with parts of the quote from Thomas Merton:

Christ lives and acts in people by faith and by the sacraments of faith. The greatest of all the sacraments, the crown of the whole Christian life on earth, is the Blessed Eucharist, in which Christ not only gives us grace but actually gives us Himself. The Blessed Eucharist contains Christ Himself, and is the chief means by which Christ mystically unites the faithful to Himself in one Body."

The Gospel today, as also last Sunday, is set in the context of a rabbinical teaching in the synagogue.  In addition to being a marvelous teaching, it shows us how profoundly Jewish Jesus is.

You will recall that, earlier in this chapter, Jesus fed the multitudes with a few loaves of bread and a few fish.  Having done so, there remained a physically visible sign of 12 baskets of bread being left over.  As a result, the people began to think he might be the prophet Moses had spoken of.

The chapter then moves on to a scene in a synagogue.  In inviting a speaker to address the congregation, the president of the Synagogue would customarily issue a courteous introduction such as: "Rabbi, what bread do you have in your basket to break with us today?"  Sometimes the rabbi would suggest a topic to be treated, and select a relevant passage.  Other times, the topic would be offered from the floor of the congregation.  In this case, the topic came from the floor, i.e. an invitation or challenge to talk about manna in the desert, which Moses gave the people to eat as bread from heaven (John 6:31).  If Jesus does something like that, the implication is, they will believe in him.

In true rabbinical fashion, Jesus deftly takes the people into a deeper understanding of the topic.  He confirms the substitution of bread for manna, but goes on to substitute the Father for Moses.  Suddenly we find ourselves fed, not by Moses, but by God.  The bread which has been received becomes a teaching tool.  And the teacher, Jesus, becomes the one come down from heaven, that is to say, the new bread which gives life.  The manna fed a few people.  The new bread gives life to all people.  Bread is one of the great and ancient symbols among the Jews for God's sacred teaching. The words have two meanings. Firstly, Jesus says his teaching is the bread they need, and secondly he is their teacher. They asked for a sign.  He is the sign! 

Jesus closes this portion of his teaching by referring once again to the bread from heaven (Jn 6:51).  Not only does he thereby give new meaning to the idea of bread from heaven, he does so in the form of a Greek inclusion, an opening and closing parenthesis.  By recalling the phrase, the bread which has come down from heaven, he declares two truths. Jesus is both the teaching of God and also teacher from God. Following a rabbi's typical teaching method, in which the teacher gradually made his point by substituting one word for another, Manna became the bread from heaven (6:32), that became the bread of life, (6:34 and 48), that became the bread of life come down from heaven, (6: 51), that became the teaching from God, and Jesus himself is its teacher.  The teaching and the teacher, the gift and the giver have become one!

Just as an apprentice does the will of the teacher, he has come to do the will of his Father, nothing more and nothing less.  He calls on the people to do likewise.

Arguments begin to arise, first the people arguing among themselves, then finally openly with Jesus.  Some accuse him of teaching cannibalism, eating the flesh and blood of another.  To encourage human sacrifice, and the eating of flesh that ensued, was to teach something that was not only false, but also utterly repulsive, and abhorrent. To say, moreover, that this was God's teaching was blasphemous.  Besides, he is a mere mortal.  We know where he comes from.  He is the son of Joseph, the carpenter.  Or, according to another oral tradition indicated in a letter of Eusebius, he is the son of a Samaritan mercenary and a prostitute.  There is no wisdom, no life there!  Only the Spirit can give life.

It's important to note that, where normally Jesus speaks in parables, then explains to his disciples the meaning of his teaching, here he doesn't.  He reiterates the idea of being the bread which brings life.  But there's a change.  He reinterprets the word Spirit, saying that if they had faith, if they heard the Spirit, they would believe.  The normal ways of human flesh are insufficient.  The Spirit must be listened to, followed.

Instead of receiving another person's teaching, we are now dealing with a reference to the Passover lamb, sacrificed and offered in the Temple and eaten in the Paschal meal as a symbol of union with God.  The word "eat" given here is more appropriately to be understood as "dine".  Receiving Jesus the Christ is not a McDonalds fast-food moment.  It is more akin to the rumination of cattle, taking time to leisurely chew the cud and receive the fullness it has to offer. We use a similar understanding when, presented with a new idea, we say "I'll have to chew on that for a while."  We need time to make sense of it, to integrate it into our being, to become what we receive.

I'm given to understand that the Greek words used here for flesh and blood are a Hebrew statement for the whole living person.  And again we have something different.  The cannibal understands that in eating the flesh and drinking the blood of another, he takes into himself the reality of what that person is.  But there is no thought that the cannibal's life power would also remain with the one being eaten!

For Jesus, the eating he describes is a literary expression meaning precisely a mutual sharing of life and a living communion between persons. Again, we use a similar expression, when we say that a person is one's own flesh and blood.  We are not for a moment suggesting that our flesh, our blood makes up that other person, or that, if that person were to cut him/herself, our blood would pour out.  We are saying that we are intimately related.  Similarly, to eat the Living Bread, Jesus' flesh and blood – his living humanness that has come down from heaven – is Jesus' Hebrew, figurative way of saying that we, you and I, are invited to share the whole of his life mutually with him. His flesh is real food and his blood is real drink. The relationship that is established in receiving, eating and drinking is totally real.  We are to become what we receive.

This is an amazing thing!  Jesus is the sacrament of God.  We, in receiving Christ, are to become what we receive.  Receiving is not simply a gift for us, to make us whole and healthy, so that we can go back to our homes and be happy, satisfied Christians.  Rather, we receive so that we may become sign and sacrament of God's unconditional, total, and irrevocable love for all.  And God not only calls us to that, he trusts us to do that!  That trust by God, in itself, is a great gift.

What does that look like?  What are the consequences of that relationship of trust?  The first reading gives us an example, when Solomon prays:

"when a foreigner, who is not of your people Israel, comes from a distant land because of your name - for they shall hear of your great name, your mighty hand, and your outstretched arm - when a foreigner comes and prays toward this house, then hear in heaven your dwelling place, and do according to all that the foreigner calls to you, so that all the peoples of the earth may know your name and fear you"

We are called to such a relationship with God that we long for all the same goodness that has come to us to come also to the foreigner, the stranger in our midst!

Those of you who are familiar with the Roman Catholic tradition will know that the Latin service of worship used to end with the phrase "Ite, missa est", to which the people responded "Deo gratias".  When we switched to the vernacular, years after it had happened in other Christian traditions, that was translated loosely into "Go the mass is ended", to which the people responded "Thanks be to God".  (It must be said that sometimes the response was more gratitude that the celebration is over than that we were being sent forth!)

The translation, however, is inadequate to the meaning of the words.  Rather than transliterate the word "missa" to "mass", we need to recall the richness of the word.  In that phrase, we are being told "Go, your mission exists", or "Go, you are sent forth, to live in the world God's love for all."  And for THAT, we give thinks.

It is no wonder, then, that whereas the Jews celebrate the Sabbath as a fitting culmination to a week of living in the presence of God, we celebrate our Eucharist on the Sunday, the first day of the week, being fed so that we, entering into mystical and metaphysical union with God, may go out into the world to be sign and sacrament of God for all.

As you receive the gift of Eucharist today, remember that the gift and the giver are one, and that you are called to enter into relationship with that one, becoming what you receive.  Then go, to all those to whom you are sent, giving thanks to God and expressing his total love for all.