Sermon – We Are What We Eat
Leviticus 17:10-14; John 6: 56-69
Farmville Presbyterian Church
8/18/24
Today, I am curious how often we really take into account what is most important to Jesus. It is pretty easy to think about is what is really important to us. Right now my family is super focused on needs that are driving what’s important. Many of our lives are so occupied with our needs and that’s fine. However, that means it is also easy to lose in the rush and the noise what is really important to Christ. This is what I am talking about today – what is at the top of Jesus’ needs. I am reaching past the “God wants me to be a good person and obey” idea. What is really, desperately important to Jesus? Here he is telling us exactly one thing is tremendously important to him, laying it out in stark, eye-popping language. It is exactly because of the shocking nature of the language that we know our Lord needs our attention. THIS IS IMPORTANT!
I will never forget the first time I read this passage from John’s Gospel. The crazy language threw me for a loop. His word for “eat” is not even that simple: he is challenging us to “chew” on his body. This is nuts. I have struggled ever since to make satisfactory sense of this passage myself. The easy answer is to say he is talking about Communion, but that is not entirely correct, or that’s at least not the whole picture. John’s Gospel does not even mention the Last Supper, but that is the way the larger church has largely made sense of Jesus’ scary talk here where we sound like we must be cannibals.
Jesus must be doing something else here that he desperately wants us to understand if we will bother to spend the time thinking. Yes, we bother today.
And thankfully, I have an answer today that I find very helpful and good news. Before we get there, though, we need to understand that John’s Gospel is just fundamentally different from the other gospels. John likes to ask questions through the voices of his characters that make us think. This is like an episode of Columbo or Law and Order or any crime show with people moving the plot along and discovering the truth through asking questions. John wants us to go deeper than surface facts and faith. John wants to pull us into the mystery of the deep end of life in God. He will not let us stay in the baby pool, if we take him seriously and follow.
And yet, Jesus never answers their question about how they can eat and drink his body, but the question is itself super important. It invites Jesus to step in deeper and tell us something that is truly important to him. No, we do not need to understand HOW to eat him, but we need to know WHY we eat him. His shocking language pushes us in that direction.
Ever since Leviticus and before, people DID NOT EVER consume blood. Blood from the beginning is precious to God. You may remember that it was Able’s blood that cried out to God from the ground after his brother Cain killed him. Blood is precious and nearly holy. Kosher butchers to this day must go out of their way to make sure not a drop of blood is in the meat they sell. The shock of Jesus’ command is insanity… unless you know another story about David.
2 Samuel 23 tells the story of David’s mighty Three, his special three best warriors. They were amazing men of valor and incredibly loyal to David. When the Philistines were garrisoned at Bethlehem, David was waging war against them, and he became thirsty. He cried out how good it would be to have a drink from the well at the gate of Bethlehem. These three men famously called “the Three” broke through the ranks just to get David a drink from that well. When David received this sacrificial gift, though, he poured the water on the ground because he could not accept water that came at the potential price of blood. He would not be satisfied by anyone else’s blood being spilled or sacrificed for his thirst.
This was a culture that did invite sacrifice. They did sacrifice animals. That is the whole sacrificial system in Judaism. In fact, it was a very bloody affair with the blood being thrown against the altar and the fatty portions burned. Sorry for the grossness, friends, but I am trying to tell you Jesus’ words in context. They did sacrifice animals for salvation, but people being sacrificed was a major no-no. The very thought of a person being bled out to save us was anathema and offensive to the highest in its very thought. Life is precious. That kind of sacrifice would never work.
Unless you are Jesus. His life is actually so precious that he CAN save us with his death, and he WILL do that very thing. He and only he can be our Savior. This is where he is going with this shocking language. He and only he can be our life and our salvation.
When the Jews were wandering around in the wilderness in that first exodus, the Jews needed two things – food and water. Every few chapters they seem to be crying out to God with help about that, and God always responded with that help. Jesus is calling us to a new exodus, and he is our food and water – exactly and only what we need. He is our Savior, and he is literally our life. He does not give us something else to save our sorry souls on this journey through life; he gives us HIMSELF.
Every time we celebrate Holy Communion, this is what we are proclaiming. We might not be terribly clear about it, but every time we taste the bread and juice, every time we chew and drink, we are making a public declaration about what is most important. We are telling the world that we have only ONE Savior and he us our perfect sustenance. He is what we need, and he is what we get.
We reject the powers of this world, anything that might invite us to trust in it. We reject anything else that we feel we must take on our journey through life. My wife is known for her thorough ability to pack. In fact, I think she likes to go on trips because that gives her the opportunity to pack too much stuff. I gave up years ago fussing about having to get a luggage cart for the two of us to spend one night in a motel. We have coolers and laundry bags and luggage and pillows and more. No would accuse her of being a light packer, and that is fine for our trips. I have grown to accept it in 29 years of marriage, but our journey in Jesus should never be like that. We have our food; we have our drink; we have what we need; we have enough. Jesus is our life, our path, our food, and our guide. He is our all-in-all. Without him, though, we are nothing.
It is so incredibly important to Jesus our Christ that we understand this. He wants to be our everything, not one choice among many. He desperately wants to be the center of our lives around which everything else is decided. That is his love for us, even if it is hard for us to hear or shocking.
We do the same thing if we are worried people are not going to listen. If eyes are going to glaze over and ears become lazy, it is time to wake them up with the kind of faith that no one saw coming. This idea sent shockwaves though the peoples. Romans spread the vicious but ignorant rumors that Christians were actual cannibals who ate their leader every time they share their sacred meal.
The grace of Jesus always challenges us. It is always more freeing, more loving, more embracing than makes us comfortable. The moment you think you understand just how much God loves us in Jesus, you have the rug pulled out from under you. I had a taste of this at a recent meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous that I attended to build our relationship with that group meeting in our church every week. Thirtiesh people filled the room downstairs, and people shared the kind of struggles that I have never known. They shared openly and honestly. It was humbling to me especially when I realized how much they had paid to be a part of that group. No one would trade places with them, but they were sharing God’s grace in ways that overwhelmed me. They were finding life and hope and community where others only find failure and guilt. In their failures and through their failures, God was providing a way forward through what might look like a dead end and a solid wall to the world. Always keep that group and those brothers and sisters in your prayer. They are living proof that nothing in all creation, not even our failures, can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. He is our life and hope and salvation. To God be the glory. Amen.