The Feast of Eternal Life

John 6:51-58

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.

You Are What You Eat

Text: Gospel of John 6:51-58

Since the mass introduction of processed foods into the Western diet during the 20^th century a growing concern with eating healthy foods has arisen and the use of a popular catchphrase “You are what you eat”.  The idea is if we eat healthy foods, we will be healthy.  The phrase has been a part of the popular mindset since 1942 when a nutritionist and radio personality named Vince Lindlahr wrote a book entitled You Are What You Eat: How to Win and Keep Health with Diet.  He also developed the Catabolic Diet where you eat nothing but foods that take more calories to digest than they actually contain.  In the ‘60’s hippy era, promoters of the macrobiotic diet or “long-life” diet made ready use of the phrase.  They encouraged eating grains and local vegetables and properly chewing your food to promote long-life and prevent cancer.  Their ideas have persisted hence the arising of a lot of eat-local movements and Farmer’s Markets selling organically raised foods.  Some on the Christian side of things have begun to promote the God-diet; if God didn’t make it, don’t eat it.  They also want to push the card that spiritual health is also related to healthy eating.  If you eat the foods God has given, you will be better related to God.  I’ll withhold comment on that, but I will note that it is quite possible that the actual origin of the phrase is Christian beliefs.

Most trace its origin to the 19^th century German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach who is known for offering the most damning critique yet of Christian “religion”.  In his book The Essence of Christianity he says Christians have projected their own human qualities, values, and ideals onto an object that they call “God” and worship that rather than experiencing God who can be experienced with the senses.  He wasn’t too far off.  There is a huge difference between Christian “religion” and practicing the heart of Christian faith which is our participating in the divine communion of the Triune God of grace – the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – by means of union with Christ Jesus in the Holy Spirit.  There’s a difference between just claiming to be a Christian who believes certain dogma about Jesus and actually eating his flesh and drinking his blood – which is what’s at the heart of the difficult claim Jesus confronts us with here in John’s Gospel.   

Back to Feuerbach, in an essay entitled Concerning Spiritualism and Materialism from around 1863 he wrote, “Der Mensch ist, was er ißt.”  “Man is what he eats”.  The point he was making had little to do with overall health but rather with a revolution of the poor.  He was saying that if there is going to be a general uprising or revolution by the poor against the rich, then the poor need to have a better food staple than potatoes.  Potatoes lack the necessary fats for proper development of the brain.  Hence, due to this food staple the poor will lack the intelligence to wage a revolution.  He wrote that, of course, less than fifteen years after the infamous potato famines in Ireland and Scotland.  He said beans would be a superior alternative.  Either staple the poor don’t have much of a choice.  It’s either an underdeveloped brain or chronic flatulence?

Prior to Feuerbach, the historical roots of this phrase and the idea that there is a correlation between what we eat and our overall way of being may lie in the Roman Catholic church’s doctrine of transubstantiation; that the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper actually change in substance from bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus so that one literally eats the body and blood of Jesus to the effect of becoming one body with him.  Part of the prayer many churches read today during Holy Communion reflects this belief:

“We offer and present unto thee, O Lord, our selves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto thee; humbly beseeching thee that we, and all others who shall be partakers of this Holy Communion, may worthily receive the most precious Body and Blood of thy Son Jesus Christ, be filled with thy grace and heavenly benediction, and made one body with him, that he may dwell in us, and we in him.”

Roman Catholics rightly want to stress the crucial importance of partaking of the Lord’s Supper and our spiritual health and growth in Christ.  In short, we become , whom we eat.  Our tradition, the Reformed Tradition, tends to avoid getting bogged down in the question of how we receive Christ Jesus through participation in this meal and rather rightly focuses on the question of who it is we are receiving with this meal: Jesus Christ the incarnate Son of God and Saviour of the world.  In some mysterious way we are partaking of Jesus’ life and are being nurtured by grace for faith.  We believe that it is not so important how it is we partake of him in the Supper for no one can answer that.  Rather, it is that we are nourished by means of a spiritual/relational union with him that changes us, transforms us, heals us each to be more as he is.  It is not that the bread and wine are transformed, rather it is that we are transformed.

It is our belief that Jesus was referring to the totality of our relationship with him and the Father in and through the Holy Spirit and not just the literalities of a sacramental meal when he said: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.  Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.  For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink.  Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him.”  We are what we eat and here eating means more than just the celebration of the meal of Holy Communion.  The act of eating is what goes into maintaining our living and life-giving relationship with Jesus Christ which involves contemplation of him, talking with him, breathing him, following him, studying him, and obeying his command to love as he loved us.  Either we are eating Christ which means experiencing him and being transformed by him by the working of the Holy Spirit or we are eating something else and are rather perishing.

Back to Feuerbach, taking seriously his critique of Christian “religion” in which we more or less project ourselves onto God and in essence create a god in our own human image to worship and serve, a god we use to gird up and protect the social institutions we hold near and dear, a god we use to ensure morality among people, a god whose chief purpose is to judge between good and evil.  If that is the god we worship and serve, then we are just like it.  We use the name of god coercively to protect social institutions that we claim are instituted by it.  We substitute simply being good people for spiritual discipline and obedience to Christ.  And, we judge rather than truly love our neighbours and ourselves.  Instead of bearing the cross, we bear the gavel.  So much of Christianity in our culture is nothing more than the religion eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil rather than the fruit of the Tree of Life.  When it comes to the matter of faith, the matter of our relationship to whatever it is we call god, we are what we eat.  Therefore, we must honestly ask ourselves what are we eating?  Dead idols foster death.  Are we truly eating Christ Jesus in a living spiritual communion with him which we experience by means of the work of the Holy Spirit and truly taking up the cross as our way of life in this world or are we simply clinging to blind faith and the beliefs and practises of a dying religious institution?  Amen.