Can
you think of a highpoint experience in your life when you felt most fully alive
and engaged? I can think of a few. Two were travel seminars. In university got to take a study tour Mexico
to study and experience the culture. In
Seminary I went to the Middle East, and saw more than just Israel. I got to experience Syria, Jordan, the Sinai
Peninsula, and Greece as well.
These
trips were invigorating for me and life changing. I got to see, taste, smell, touch, and hear
the sights, tastes, smells, textures, and sounds of people and cultures very
different from my own. The size of the
groups I went with was small so that new friendships formed and I discovered
that people actually liked me. That’s
good news for a guy who is otherwise quite shy.
For some odd reason I got asked to preach while on these trips. I’ve preached in rural Mexico and I’ve
preached in Damascus in the house of Ananias, the man the Lord sent to open
Paul’s eyes. I got to ride a camel up
Mt. Sinai at four in the morning to watch the sun come up.
Those
two study trips were times when I felt fully alive and engaged. Yet, as good as
those experiences were for me that kind of feeling fully alive is not what
Jesus meant when he said, “Those who gnaw on my flesh and drink my blood have
eternal life and I will raise them up on the last day.”
Before
saying anything more here, I have to clarify a few of things. First, Jesus is not suggesting we literally
eat his flesh and drink his blood. He’s rather
using an offensive analogy to make his point to the Jewish religious
authorities who hate him anyway. Yes,
Jesus has lost his patience and is being rude. This long speech Jesus is giving about him
being the Bread of Life comes right after he fed over 15,000 with five loves of
bread and two fish. He proved himself to
be Israel’s Messiah, indeed God in their midst, but the religious authorities
just could not let go of their religious power and accept him as the One. So, Jesus is going all out here to get under
their skin. “I’m to food of life. Gnaw on my flesh like your trying to get to
those tiny little bits of meat tucked away in the nooks and crannies of a
T-bone steak. Drink my blood like a
Pagan. Only those who cannibalize me can
have the eternal life that is mine to give…MINE to give”
The
analogy Jesus is creating here definitely points to animal sacrifice in general
and the Passover sacrifice in particular.
In ancient Israel you only ate meat that was taken to the priest and sacrificed
to God in thanks or in repentance. You
didn’t just kill it and eat it. Taking
life of an animal was a sacred thing. You
took it to the priest. The priest
offered it up and of course kept a portion.
Then you took it home and shared it among the extended family in a
celebratory meal, a feast. Eating flesh
was a sacred, communal thing. Passover is the best example of this and Passover
is important in John’s Gospel because Jesus dies during Passover. Everyone in a household ate the meat of the
Passover sacrifice. It was something
families did together. To this day the
Passover meal is the most important meal Jewish families share together.
Drinking
blood, on the other hand, was something you never did in ancient Israel. Pagans did it, but not the people of
God. Israelites believed that the blood
was the life of the animal and so they priest burned it on the altar to return
it to God. On Passover, of course we
know that they painted the blood of the sacrifice on their doorposts so that the
angel of death would pass over their houses and only strike the Egyptian
firstborn. When Jesus says “drink my blood” he means
taking his very life, his saving life into one self. The only reasonable thing he can be referring
to here is the presence of the Holy Spirit in, with, and among us. Being personally filled with the Holy Spirit
was what the Jews were expecting in the age to come when the Messiah returned
and established the Kingdom of God and put the world to right.
A
second thing to clarify is that this life filled with the Holy Spirit in the
Age to Come in which God has put things to right is part of what Jesus means
when he says “eternal life” which we can have a taste of now in him instead of
having to wait for him to return to receive it.
Unfortunately, the church over the centuries has totally bought its
definition of the word “eternal” from the Greek philosophers rather than the
Hebrew writers of the Bible. We like to
think of eternal in terms of time so that eternal means timeless and eternal
life simply means entering into a timeless, spiritual, disembodied realm after
we die. That’s not biblical. In fact, in John 17:3 Jesus defines eternal
life. He says, “And this is eternal
life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus the Christ whom you
have sent.” He says this after just a
few paragraphs before talking about sending the Holy Spirit to his disciples.
Eternal life is not timeless existence.
It is knowing God as he has revealed himself in Jesus Christ whom we
encounter in the presence of the Holy Spirit whom he has sent who is with,
among, and in us right now. The eternal life
of the Age to Come is with us now – life filled with knowing God, healed of Sin
and Death, and put right.
To
patch all this together I would like to revisit my original question. I asked can you think of a highpoint
experience in your life when you felt most fully alive and engaged? Let me ask this question in a different way –
Can you think of times in your life when you have felt most full of eternal
life, when you’ve known God was with you, healing your brokenness, and putting
things right in your life? To put it in
the offensive terms Jesus used – Can you think of times in your life when you
were eating Jesus flesh and drinking his blood?
I
first experienced this feast of eternal life back in my university days in what
we called discipleship groups. I met
together weekly with five other students.
We had Bible study, shared what was going on with us each – our
struggles and hurts, and we prayed for each other. The presence of the Holy Spirit was with us
in those meetings. You could feel
Him. Over the course of a few months we
all found ourselves being healed of deep hurts and our lives falling into
order.
Over
the years I’ve learned to abide in Jesus and to know that he abides in me. It is somewhat easier for ministers in this
respect. Having to prepare a weekly
sermon I really get to gnaw on the Scriptures.
I get to gather with you folks and worship every week. I get to visit and pray with and for you
folks. I get to see our Lord be
remarkably faithful to you. Church isn’t
just something I come to because I’m a good person and this is what good people
do to be better. Church is the context
of eternal life for me. My life in
Christ ministering with and among you even though we would appear to be dying
institution is a taste of eternal life.
The
feast of eternal life is in each of our churches. When have you felt most full of eternal life,
when you’ve known God was with you, healing your brokenness, and putting things
to right in you life? Amen.
