Flesh and Blood '06

Texts: Proverbs 9:1-6; Ephesians 5:15-20; John 6:51-58

Today we continue with this amazing chapter 6 of St John’s gospel, and we really are into the hard stuff. It’s one thing for Jesus to describe himself as the manna or bread of life that comes down from heaven – to equate himself with the manna in the wilderness – if he means that in a sort of metaphorical sense. If he means that in him God is providing sustenance of some sort for the whole world, well, we can cope with that. But today the language changes and it does so quite dramatically.

Last week, at the very end of the gospel reading we got the first mention of the word “flesh”, and this week, carrying on from where we left off, we find that word taking centre stage. Instead of talking about eating the bread of heaven, we appear to have Jesus insisting that we are to eat his flesh and drink his blood. No wonder the early church was plagued by accusations of cannibalism! What on earth are we to make of all this?

The first thing I would make of all this is to accept that St John’s gospel does not even pretend to be an accurate historical record of Jesus’ actual teaching. If it is, then we have real problems because there are far too many occasions where his account differs markedly from that of the other three gospel writes, and one of those differences is crucial to this passage and I’ll come to it in a moment.

So I do not think that what we have from St John this morning is an account of some teaching Jesus gave to a mixed crowd of Jews and Gentiles one day by the side of the Sea of Galilee . So what is St John doing?

Here’s the first important clue. If we ask ourselves when Jesus first instituted what we call Holy Communion or the Eucharist, we think we know the answer, don’t we? Jesus gave us this instruction at the Last Supper, Maundy Thursday evening, as we call it today. All three of our Eucharistic liturgies remind us of that: on the night before he died…(or) on the night he was betrayed. And all three of the other gospels tell us the same thing. Matthew, Mark and Luke all agree that it was on that particular night that Jesus told his disciples to remember him by the breaking of bread and the sharing of wine.

But here’s a strange thing. St John , alone of the gospels, has five chapters dealing with Jesus’ teaching on that very night. He tells us about the foot-washing, and he records Jesus’ new commandment. He tells us about the promise of the Holy Spirit, and a whole lot more besides. But something is missing. Nowhere in those five chapters does St John make any mention of the institution of the Eucharist. Why?

Well, one answer is that he has already dealt with the Eucharist in this chapter 6. Some commentators would doubt that; not all of them agree that chapter 6 is about the Eucharist. I agree with those who say it clearly is about the Eucharist. But – and here’s the point – it does not tell us what to do – it’s not concerned with the mechanics of the Eucharist as the other three gospels are. Not does it say, this is what Jesus did, so this is what we should to remember him or imitate him in some way.

What St John is doing is supplying the reason for doing it at all – he is giving us the theology of the Eucharist. And he is very clearly tying it in with the whole idea of salvation. The Eucharist is not just a memorial act – an aid to our memory – something characteristic of Jesus, so that when we do it we remember him more clearly. The Eucharist, according to this passage, is essential to salvation. No Eucharist, says St John , no eternal life. I’ll come back to this point soon, but I want to say a bit more about the background here.

By the time this gospel was being written, and it may be as late as 100-120 AD, the Eucharist in much the same form as we have it today, was already well established in the church. Nobody needed to be told how to do it, or that Jesus was the one who first did it at the Last Supper. The argument in the church at Ephesus , as in some denominations today, is that it is not essential to salvation. That its function is purely remembrance, and that we can remember Jesus just as well in other ways. That’s the argument that St John is addressing in this passage.

Or perhaps, we should say that it is one of the two arguments that St John is addressing in this passage, because there are strong grounds for believing that a related argument was also raging in his church at Ephesus . This related to whether or not Jesus had a real, physical, material, human body – a body of flesh and blood as we might still say today. In our modern world, most people will accept that there was an historical person called Jesus of Nazareth; that he was a remarkable person in many ways, etc. They doubt his divinity.

But one of the great debates of St John’s time was not about Jesus’ divinity but his humanity. We see a classic hint of this in St John’s account of Jesus walking on the water. The disciples think he is a ghost – that is, he isn’t flesh and blood. Similar difficulties are recorded in respect of some of the Resurrection appearances. So, again, in the particular way St John is presenting Jesus’ teaching in this passage, he seems to be confronting head-on any suggestion that Jesus did not have a fully human body, just like ours.

And notice that I said, Jesus’ teaching. I must stress that I am not accusing St John of making up some teaching of his own. He is interpreting Jesus’ teaching about the Eucharist and about himself, yes, but it remains Jesus’ teaching, not St John’s .

So what have we got here? Primarily, what we’ve got here is an argument about the efficacy of the Eucharist, its actual effect on those who participate. We are what we eat, people sometimes say. St John is saying something similar. As we receive Communion, so we take Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour, into ourselves and become him. It’s really the same argument we find in our other two readings. According to Proverbs, the more attention we give to wisdom, the wiser we become. According to St Paul in his letter to the Ephesians,, the more we behave in a godly way, the more godly we become. And in the same way, says St John, the more we eat the body and drink the blood of Christ, the more we shall become Christ.

The opposite is also true. If we eat well, we stay well. If we don’t eat well, we sicken. That’s true of fruit, vegetables and cereals; and, says St John , its true of the bread and wine of Communion.

St John could hardly put it more clearly, as he has Jesus say:

…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 at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood remain in me and I in them.

Of course, this sort of stuff invites quibbling. I have on a number of occasions been asked how often we must have Communion – how much is enough. Once you’ve had it, are you okay for ever? Well, I’m tempted to say, however well you have eaten in the past, how long would you remain alive if you stopped eating today?

It’s a daft question, to put it mildly. To be more honest it borders on the blasphemous. If in the Eucharist we are receiving Jesus himself, then to stop partaking in the Eucharist is to stop partaking in his life, which is God’s life.

That’s really what St John is saying.