Sunday, August 16, 2015 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m.

Chomp and Guzzle

Shannon J. Kershner
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 111
John 6:51-58

Wouldn’t the Christian faith be easier if it were a matter of mere belief or intellectual assent! . . . Today’s incarnational gospel reminds us that Jesus intends to have all of us, body and soul. His truth wants to burrow deep within us, to consume us as we consume him, to flow through our veins, to bedigested, to nourish every nook and cranny of our being.

William H. Willimon

What is going on with Jesus? Why on earth is he telling the truth of discipleship in such vivid—and frankly, rather gory—language? To illustrate, allow me to offer you a more accurate translation of verse 56 in our text for today. Our New Revised Standard Version states “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.” Now to me, and perhaps to you, that translation already seems provocative enough to paint quite a word picture.

However, it turns out that our translators cleaned up Jesus’ words a bit. They decided to interpret his teaching from the Lord’s Supper/communion angle, translating the verbs as “eat” and “drink,” like what is written in the other three Gospels. But that is not exactly what John has Jesus saying in this exchange with the crowd. In John’s Gospel, Jesus actually says to the seekers, “Those who chomp and gnaw on my flesh and guzzle my blood make a home in me, and I in them.” That is pretty stiff stuff for a Sunday morning before lunch. Some of us might even find it rather barbaric and quite repugnant, actually.

And yet according to John’s Gospel, this is how Jesus put it. So Jesus must have wanted to offend people, to shock them into paying deeper attention. After all, if we think his words are offensive in our culture, just imagine what they sounded like in Jesus’ own time. His imagery would have been jaw-droppingly scandalous. No one in his or her right mind eats human flesh. And particularly in that culture, drinking blood was strictly forbidden as well. Surely Jesus’ words violated just about every purity and cleanliness law that existed. His teaching was an absolute scandal. It must have sounded ridiculous to their ears.

Now, before we continue, let’s remind ourselves of the context of these verses. As we talked about a couple of weeks ago with the text before this one, Jesus had already begun to sound ridiculous when he suggested that he was the living bread and could offer a deeper kind of sustenance than the manna had provided for their wilderness-wandering ancestors. That claim was outrageous to those in the crowd! The manna had been a gift from God for the people of God. God sent it to them after God had liberated them from slavery in Egypt. So this misguided notion that Jesus himself was somehow an even more nourishing kind of bread did, at best, sound to that crowd to be nothing but a figment of his own imagination. And at worst, his claim to be living bread was completely impertinent.

John makes sure we know that the force and shock of Jesus’ words instigated a major disturbance in the crowd. In verse 52, we learn that some of those who heard his words began to dispute amongst themselves. Like with the verbs translated “eat” and “drink,” here again our translators might be trying to gentle Jesus a bit. One commentator claims the Greek words John actually used suggest fistfights and brawls. In other words, Jesus’ imagery was strong enough, offensive enough, to get people fighting. Can you imagine?

But Jesus was just getting started! After his claim of being living bread stirred up the crowd, he continued speaking brazenly by suggesting that in order to live an abundant life, in order to be in true relationship with God, in order to have your story continue after death, you must chomp on his flesh and guzzle his blood. Surely the people in that crowd just stood there speechless. I would not be surprised if parents put their hands over the ears of their children, hoping to try and protect them from such suggestions.

So why did Jesus put it that way? Why did he choose to be so vivid, so “in your face”? Again, as we saw a couple of week ago, the crowd seemed hungry to know who Jesus was. They wanted to understand more clearly what it meant to be his disciple, to follow him. They appeared open and ready. So they point-blank asked him what they had to do for this nourishment, this grace of God, convinced they must have to do something in order to receive it. And their hunger to understand, their openness to follow, their curiosity about who he was and what he was about, actually provided Jesus with a golden opportunity. For if he were in this Messiah thing for himself, for his success, to jump-start his personal church-growth movement and to get his face on all the billboards and on prime time, all he had to say in response was something safe, something palatable.

Something like, “Well, since my grace is undeserved and unearned, if you want to be my disciple, nothing really has to change in your life. We do have many options from which you can choose on the menu of the church’s various ministries and mission that might make you happy, that could meet your needs, that would go over well with your friends, and that might indeed increase your personal sense of contentment. But if your life is working for you and the living is easy, then nothing really has to change. And I promise, as your Savior, to spoon-feed you my living bread and to bottle-feed you my living water.”

Jesus could have responded to the crowd in that kind of a way. And if he had, who knows what might have happened? If Jesus had simply said those smooth, palatable, easily digested, non-offensive words; if he had not issued any kind of a challenge or posed any demands for discipleship, then he might not have ended up on a lonely cross, suffering and dying. But Jesus did not respond that way. Instead he chose to use the most demanding and offensive words about discipleship he could have picked.

“You want to be my followers? You want to feel full? You want to let the light of your baptism shine? You want to respond to my grace in the way you live your life? You want to be a part of my living body, the church? Is that what you long for? Then chomp on my flesh and guzzle my blood. Ingest me. Consume me. And I will make my home in you, and you will find your home in me.” I’ve begun to wonder if he wiped his mouth as he said it, for dramatic effect.

Jesus’ choice of vivid imagery reminds me of Flannery O’Connor’s short story “The River,” in which O’Connor reflects on our other sacrament— the Sacrament of Baptism. The story is about a child who actually drowns when trying to baptize himself in a river. Some folks have stated O’Connor’s goal with that story must have been to remind her readers of how intensely powerful baptism is; to make sure we all remember that scripture speaks of baptism as a death of the old self in order to have the birth of a new self, one found in Christ. A few of O’Connor’s critics, however, thought her imagery was too extreme. It was a much-too-grotesque depiction of baptism. But when asked about those critiques, O’Connor replied, “In the land of the nearly blind, you need to draw really big caricatures.”

Might that be what Jesus was doing when he chose to use such a graphic description of discipleship? Is that why, when the crowd asked him what they had to do to perform the works of God, Jesus replied they needed to trust him and then to consume him into every part of their being and their doing? Scholar F. D. Bruner thinks so. In his rather new commentary on John, he points out that Jesus has no desire to entertain us with interesting ideas or thoughts. Jesus has little interest in making us feel either smarter or holier. Ours is a thinking faith, for sure, but faith cannot just live as an intellectual enterprise. Rather, what Jesus wants to do, Bruner claims, is to grab us, to become a part of the whole of who we are, in order to make us into whole new human beings. That is what discipleship is about. That is what Jesus is about.

So perhaps Jesus’ words in our text about eating his flesh and drinking his blood are Jesus’ shocking way of inviting us into a deeper discipleship, a deeper intimacy and closeness with him. Chomp my flesh. Guzzle my blood. Consume me. You cannot get any closer than that.

I will never forget a conversation I had about this text with a member of my Texas congregation. I wrote it down and put it in a file. I pulled it out again this week. She said, “At first in John you eat the bread at the miracle by the lake. Then you think you still want more. So you search for him across the water. Then you think you still want more. So you ask him what else can you do? And the next thing you know, you are faced with taking in the whole of Jesus into every moment of your life, into all the decisions that you make. It seems absolutely overwhelming when you think about it.” Indeed. It is a graphic and rather overwhelming proposal for life. It is a scandalous way to think of discipleship. If we say yes and take up the call to consume Jesus, nothing can ever be the same with us or in our lives.

Consume Jesus. Take the whole of Jesus into every moment of our lives, into every decision that we make. And when we do, no longer can we divorce what happens here on a Sunday from what happens in our lives every other day of the week. No longer can we neatly compartmentalize life into church, work, home, etc. Consume Jesus. And then no longer will being an active and vital part of a congregation be merely an optional choice among many, or simply something we do only to meet our own needs without considering the needs of God’s world.

Consume Jesus. Take the whole of Jesus into every moment of our lives, into every decision that we make, and nothing will ever be the same, for no longer will we be able to hear the challenges posed by the young, grassroots leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement, or the critiques by activists for the physically disabled, and ignore what they have to say or not take them seriously because it doesn’t fit with our particular experience of the world. No longer can we ever talk about anyone as “those people,” because they are family, so what happens to them matters to us and vice versa. Consume Jesus. And when we do, then no longer can we learn about the continued destruction of the world God created as good and then just hope for the best without imagining what we could do to help change it.

Consume Jesus. Take the whole of Jesus into every moment of our lives, into every decision that we make, and nothing will ever be the same. And when we do, no longer can we look at our checkbooks, our resources, our time, the same way again without asking ourselves what those things show us about what we value and invest ourselves into the most.

Consume Jesus. Take the whole of him into every fiber of our being, every pore of our bodies, every moment of our lives. And when we do as he invites, when we consume Jesus, we might begin to grasp that not a split second of our lives is devoid of holy presence. We see and taste and know that in Jesus, God has promised to be one with us and for us forever, to stick with us and even in us no matter what. We start to comprehend that God’s life clings to our bones and courses through our veins (www.davidlose.net/2015/08/pentecost-12-b-meeting-the-carnal-god/). We cannot get away. It might indeed be a scandalous, even offensive way to think of discipleship, but it is the invitation Jesus offers.

Consume me, Jesus says. Take the whole of who I am into every moment of your lives, every decision that you make, and let me change you. Let my life, Jesus offers, and the divine presence I bear stick in your bellies and course through your bodies, shaping who and what you are (question posed by David Lose on www.workingpreacher.org ). And watch what happens.

For Jesus promises that in him we will find our home, our fullness, our purpose, and Jesus will make his home in us. But let’s be honest about what this will mean: Sometimes the reality of being disciples will give us indigestion because God’s justice and mercy and our response to love self and neighbor make for hard work much of the time. It would be a great deal easier just to look out for ourselves, to ignore the brokenness around us, to pretend that discipleship is a smooth, palatable, easily digested way to go through life. But Jesus won’t let us get away with that for he knows that is not really living. Consume me, he invites. Is this scandalous? Perhaps. But is it what is saving us each day? Absolutely.