All Saints’, Dorval
August 18, 2024
I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever, and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.
If you noticed that this is the exact same verse with which I began last week’s sermon, congratulations, you’re correct. It was the last verse including in that week’s reading, and is repeated at the beginning of this week’s.
It signals a shift in the overall bread discourse: up to this point Jesus has been talking about bread – the bread that is his flesh – in isolation, but in today’s passage, he also starts to talk about blood. His hearers are confused and possibly scornful, asking each other, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” And Jesus, instead of backpedaling in response to their disgust and alarm, doubles down: “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” And then repeats the word “blood” three times in as many verses.
This insistence on the flesh and blood is a bit out of character for John’s gospel, which if anything tends to spend a lot of time floating around amid a cloud of abstractions. Indeed, only five verses after the end of today’s reading, in response to the disciples complaining about the difficulty of this teaching, Jesus says, “It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless.” One could be forgiven for asking Jesus, “OK, could you please make up your mind which it is?”
Of course John is writing this in the late first century. The Christian church is still very new in the grand scheme of things, but it is already clear that its central ritual, commanded by Jesus, is the sharing of bread and wine in the Eucharist. So claiming that the “flesh”, the bread, is irrelevant, and only the spirit counts, is not and can never be consistent with Christian practice, however much the individual writer might want to focus on spiritual things.
But I don’t think that John is only grudgingly acknowledging the unavoidable fact that Christians do actually eat bread and drink wine when they gather. He is far too emphatic about the necessity of eating Christ’s flesh and drinking his blood, for that.
So how do we reconcile these apparently contradictory statements? Is the flesh essential, or “useless”? If it’s the spirit that gives life, why is Jesus so insistent that we must eat his flesh and drink his blood?
As with so many of these questions, I think the answer has to be “all of the above”.
In a few minutes, at the Offertory, we will sing the ancient hymn “Let all mortal flesh keep silence”, which is an adaptation of a portion of the Divine Liturgy of St. James, a Eucharistic prayer that dates back to the fourth century AD. The text unrolls a transcendent vision of the heavenly realm, illuminated by the “Light of Light” and populated by seraphim singing unearthly music announcing the presence of the King. And yet all this grandeur is in service of … a piece of bread, the plainest and most workaday thing imaginable, which yet somehow at the same time constitutes the presence of God. You can see why I chose the image on today’s sermon slide: all those extraordinarily ornate vestments surrounding an ordinary loaf.
The Spirit, the foretaste of heaven, makes the bread holy. But it doesn’t work just one way. The bread also makes the Spirit real, makes it possible for it to be present to our senses and in our stomachs, and not just an idea that’s nice to think about.
Flesh and spirit interpenetrate each other in the Eucharist, and neither means nearly as much without the other. Just as the divine and the human interpenetrate each other in Jesus Christ, and it is precisely that joining that means that Jesus changes everything about human life and the cosmos.
This is all very well, you may say, but what does it have to do with much of anything beyond being a nice idea?
But this is, indeed, much more than a fancy-sounding theological concept to be discussed in an ivory tower. It applies to the daily reality of our human experience as well – in fact, that’s kind of the point.
If we are paying attention and seeking God’s presence in our daily lives, everything we do, including the most mundane tasks, can be infused with spirit. From changing the baby’s diaper, to walking the dog, to buying groceries, to pruning a tree, to singing a hymn, to walking a 5k for charity – all these things take on a whole new dimension when we do them in consciousness of the people we love, the commitments we have made, and the opportunity to co-create goodness with God.
And it works in reverse as well. I suspect we all know, or know of, people who sound very spiritual and evolved and yet somehow that never seems to quite translate into how they actually live. If you claim to be in love with your spouse but expect them to get up and cook dinner after having surgery; if you say you’re a caring parent but somehow you’re never the one doing bath and bedtime; if you describe your high-flying aspirations as a writer and yet never find time to actually write; if you purport to be a spiritual leader but treat the actual people in your life abusively. Theory must be accompanied by practice; assertions of spirituality must be borne out in the flesh, in the real world of daily life and human relationships.
Theology has language for these concepts. There’s the spiritual, the realm of glory and abstraction; that’s the transcendent. There’s the flesh, the daily and the ordinary; that’s the mundane. But in between, or rather uniting both, is the realm of the immanent (spelled with an A; from the Latin, in manere, to remain within; not the same word as “imminent,” which means “about to happen”).
The immanent is where flesh and spirit meet and enrich each other; where it makes perfect sense that we eat the flesh and drink the blood of God while also affirming the essential nature of Spirit; where a loaf of daily bread is surrounded by divine pageantry; where Jesus, the human and divine, gives us the bread that abides to eternal life.
Amen.
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