Flesh and Blood

In clergy circles, there’s a lot of griping every third year when the summer of bread comes around. For five weeks, the Sunday readings seem to talk about bread and nothing but bread. It can feel repetitive. I would imagine that it’s also a lousy time to be gluten free.

If you’ve been in church for the past several weeks, you’ve heard about the feeding of 5000 people with five loaves of barley bread. You’ve heard Jesus call himself the bread of life. The living bread that comes down from heaven. A new and better manna in the wilderness. And next week he’ll say it again.

We’re hearing about it a lot. Maybe this bread thing is important.

If you’ve ever made sourdough, you learned a little bit about what bread meant to the people of Jesus’s time. It was the staple of their diet, the thing they couldn’t do without. It represented life, sustenance, nourishment, security to a people who didn’t always know where their next meal would come from.

It also took time to make, patience. Grinding of grain. Days of watching, waiting for natural yeast to grow. Bread was in a real sense alive.

Did any of you join in on the sourdough craze at the beginning of the pandemic? I tried it, but I never managed to get my loaves to rise properly. In theory, all you need is flour and water in an open jar. You leave it at room temperature, waiting for it to pick up natural yeast from the air. Every day, you add a bit more flour and water, feeding the starter, waiting for it to come alive. Once it’s reliably doubling in size, you can use it to make bread. But even once you have a healthy starter, it takes at least a full day for dough to rise.

One woman I know named her pandemic sourdough starter “Leonard.” I don’t know whether ancient people named their starters, but they certainly would have tended to them, watched over them. Bread was important.

When Jesus called himself the bread of life, he invoked all these images. He himself was the bread from heaven that would never fail. That’s a comforting image.

But then there’s this week’s Gospel. This Sunday, we hear about not just bread, but flesh and blood. Bread as a metaphor is powerful. But just in case we thought we were only dealing with a nice, comfortable metaphor, Jesus tells us that we need to eat his flesh and drink his blood. And he tells us not just once, but three times.

“Jesus said to them, “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.”

Eat his flesh and drink his blood. That’s kind of gruesome, isn’t it? It sounds like a cross between the Donner Party and Dracula, half cannibalism, half vampire story.

I’d be willing to bet that congregations around the world are hearing a lot of sermons about the passage from Proverbs this morning.

Maybe we can contextualize ourselves out of the difficulty. Maybe these words meant something different, something easier to accept to the people who first heard them.

Well, not really. If anything, it was worse for them. The Jewish dietary laws were complicated, but one rule was crystal clear—do not, under any circumstances, consume blood.

It seems clear that Jesus’s words were designed to shock, to knock us away from our assumptions and to disabuse us of our comforting metaphors.

You can take many things from these words.

For me, one of the most important lessons of Jesus’s talk about flesh and blood is that Christianity is not, and can never be, a purely spiritual religion. Whether we like it or not, the Christian faith takes place in the realm of the body, of bread and wine, water and fire. Christianity involves stuff, mess. It exists among pain and fear and discomfort. It exists in the world in which we live. A world in which we love and struggle and hope and die.

It’s also impossible to hear Jesus’s words about flesh and blood and not hear echoes of the Eucharist. We use the same language, after all. “The Body of Christ. The bread of heaven.” “The Blood of Christ. The cup of salvation.”

But the very visceral language of today’s Gospel reading suggests that it’s about more than just ritual and liturgy.

Manna was bread from heaven, but Jesus calls himself living bread, bread that gives eternal life.

When you eat something, you make it part of yourself. You internalize it. It changes you.

Throughout the Bible, the imagery of eating is important. Food is a gift of God, a means of life, and also a metaphor for wisdom and knowledge of God.

The prophet Ezekiel tells of eating a scroll of prophecy. God says to him, “‘Mortal, eat this scroll that I give you and fill your stomach with it.’ Then I ate it, and in my mouth it was as sweet as honey.”

You can find similar imagery in today’s passage from Proverbs. Wisdom sets a table and says to those who have need of her: “Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed.”

I can’t tell you precisely what it means to eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood. The language challenges me just as much as I expect it challenges you. But I can say this: let it challenge you. Let your discomfort remind you just how important it is to abide in Jesus and let him abide in you. Let it remind you just how remarkable it is to have that option open to you.

Some churches say these words as an invitation to Communion: “Behold who you are. Become what you receive.”

Maybe that’s the main point. The Body of Christ. The Blood of Christ. “Behold who you are. Become what you receive.”