Bread 4: Who Is Jesus? Word Made Flesh- Rev. Wendy McCormick Aug 25,2024
Who is Jesus? Word Made Flesh Rev Wendy McCormick
August 25, 2024
They called them cannibals, you know. The surrounding dominant culture murmured about those secretive house-gathering Jesus followers who were said to practice a strange ritual of cannibalism. If we’re paying attention to these verses from John 6, we can see why. Not just the familiar and nuanced word “body” that we use when we talk about ourselves as an integrated body of believers, the church, or when we come to the Lord’s table and repeat Jesus’ words, “This is my body broken for you.” By this point in Jesus’ discourse that follows the feeding of the 5000, he is using the more carnal and pretty non-metaphoric word flesh. “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them,” Even the Greek word for eat here is graphic -- chewing, gnawing, masticating . . . . . of course, people thought we were cannibals.
John tells us people “disputed among themselves how this could be,” and he labels “the Jews” as chief among those disputing. But just a few verses later he will report that some of the followers totally walked away --- because be honest – take off your churchy, the bible said it must be true hearing aids and admit it. It doesn’t really make sense. Plus, it’s kind of creepy. Eat my flesh and drink my blood. And so of course the church has argued through the centuries about all this, because if we’re not cannibals, then what in the world does it mean to say that we follow Jesus’ command to eat my flesh and drink my blood? When we gather for the Lord’s Supper, the Eucharist, Holy Communion, what happens?
Trans-substantiation, con-substantiation, real presence, memorial meal. That was the spectrum of explanations some of us learned in confirmation class. A lot of blood, sweat and tears – especially blood -- spilled over that great theological debate during the Reformation era of the 16th-18th centuries. We don’t fight so much anymore about the meaning of eating Jesus’ flesh and drinking his blood. We all take it for granted that John must be referring to communion the way we do it.
But here in the gospel, the desire for concrete, settled understanding leads to bickering and finger-pointing and – quote -- disputing among themselves – unquote -- about who’s right. And that still goes on in the Church, capital C. When we think about the increasing number of Americans who identify religiously as ‘none of the above,’ I wonder: Are people less interested in joining us because Christianity looks like a challenging way to live, because following Jesus is a deep and complex journey without easy answers but with dedicated companions for the journey and the promise of realizing a full and abundant life? Or are people less interested in joining us because what we’re about looks more like arguing and blaming and digging into our own particular version of truth?
Jesus is making a radical claim here. An outrageous claim about God and what it means to live in relationship with God, what it means to really follow Jesus. It’s a lot to chew on, a lot to digest. Some will dispute among themselves. Some will insist on a concrete hard and fast explanation even if it’s limited or even wrong. And some will walk away. The days of American Christianity meaning no more than being a law-abiding citizen who doesn’t cause anyone any trouble and teaches your kids right from wrong are gone. Long gone. That’s probably why we’re not the dominant religion anymore. What was dominant was never the path of really ingesting and Jesus until he becomes a part of you.
But for those who wade in, for those who hang in, for those who dare to chew on this claim, on this Jesus, there lies a fullness of life no earthly food can provide.
They thought it was creepy and cannibalistic for a reason. They wondered how this can be and said it made no sense for a reason. From that idyllic story of feeding a lot of hungry people on a wide expanse of grass, Jesus has kicked this conversation up notch by notch until we get to flesh. This is about flesh and blood, he says. You can’t get more real, more human than that. Meat and bones. Flesh and blood. John has brought us step by step to the claim that introduced this gospel: The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, the famous verse we read at Christmas and then maybe don’t think about much more. It makes us think of a baby. God as a vulnerable newborn. The Word became flesh.
But the word became flesh and then grew up. The living word made flesh isn’t just a baby but the guy who grew up to heal the sick and feed the hungry. It’s the doctrine of the incarnation. We confess it in our creeds --- we believe Jesus is fully human, fully God. Human and Divine. Not 50/50 but 100% of both.
Jesus is picking up where Chapter 1 left off at Christmas. It’s not just a baby. It’s a whole life. It’s all of human life. Our passage does talk about eternal life, and we’ll get there. But an incarnational God, a flesh and blood Jesus is first and foremost all about life in the here and now. Flesh and blood. Here in this world. With us. Among us. The more we spiritualize and sacramentalize this Word made Flesh the more likely we are to limit and romanticize him in here and the less likely we are to find him out there -- in the earthly, fleshy, real-life places and people of our world.
And that’s what it’s all really about. John is talking about the flesh and blood of Jesus. Matthew talks about feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and visiting the prisoner because that’s where you meet Jesus. When did we see you hungry and feed you or in prison and visit you? Remember what Jesus said? Whenever you did it for one of the least of these, you did it for me. And whenever you turned and walked away from someone in need, you were turning and walking away from me.
It’s a lesson we’ve been trying to embrace as we move from being a check-writing church to a hands-on church when it comes to caring for our community. Of course, economic disparities are real, so it doesn’t mean we stop being generous with our financial resources. It’s not either-or in that sense. It’s both-and. The hands-on part is important because that’s how we meet Jesus. That’s how we get changed, transformed, that’s how human and divine connect, that’s how we take the word made flesh that we ingest here and share word made flesh out there.
More people probably eat – numerically – by the checks we write – individually and as a church. And that needs to be done. But we don’t embody – or enflesh – Jesus that way. And so we are less likely to meet Jesus that way.
Rev Greg Boyle, is a Jesuit priest, the founder and director of Homeboy Industries, the world's largest gang intervention and rehabilitation program, and former pastor of Dolores Mission Church in Los Angeles. He is the author of several books and a wonderful speaker. Boyle spent his whole ministry living and working in a neighborhood ruled by gang violence. He is in high demand because his story is so remarkable and so inspiring. Such an incredible example of ministry and service. But he shuns the description of his work as “serving” or “helping” the poor and disadvantaged. “Serving is just the hallway into the ballroom,” he says, because the goal isn’t serving. The goal is meeting Jesus. The goal is a relationship with Jesus and the abundant life it offers. Boyle quotes the principle taught by Ignatius of Loyola that we find Jesus “standing in the lowly places.”
In an interview with Krista Tippett for the On Being podcast, Boyle said this:
“’See Jesus standing in the lowly place.’ [Christianity is] not about saluting a set of beliefs, necessarily; it’s about walking with Jesus and being a companion. And I haven’t found anything that’s brought me more life or joy than standing with Jesus, but also with the particularity of standing in the lowly place with the easily despised and the readily left out, and with the demonized so that the demonizing will stop, and with the disposable so that the day will come when we stop throwing people away. And I find the fullness of life in trying to, as best I can, in my own way, to stand there.”
Boyle calls it the fullness of life --- it’s what Jesus calls abundant life – or eternal life. Boyle, like John and Matthew, is arguing that the deep spiritual hunger we all have can only be satisfied by finding Jesus standing in the lowly places, in feeding the hungry and visiting the prisoner instead of walking by --- that’s what the word made flesh is all about. That’s what it means to chew on the flesh of Jesus.
Our pendulum as Christians has swung far in the direction of embracing Jesus’ death. John’s Jesus calls us back to Jesus’ life, to embracing, devouring, chewing on, Jesus’ life and the fullness of humanity. And as Fr Boyle’s words and example suggest, that’s all about relationship. Relationship with Jesus. Not a spiritual relationship with Jesus that’s mostly in here. But a full life, flesh and blood relationship with Jesus can only happen when we seek Jesus in the earthly, the human, the flesh and blood that needs to be fed, that cries out for the dignity and respect due each of God’s children – the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the imprisoned --- and as Greg Boyle adds, those who are easily despised, readily left out and the disposable.
When we encounter the human, fleshy Jesus out there, then the spiritual makes sense and finds its place properly integrated into real life. For John’s Jesus it’s not just that we aren’t useful but that we are missing out on what eternal or abundant life really means. Because it isn’t a golden ticket redeemable postmortem for the ultimate happy place. That’s what it’s been reduced to. It’s full and abundant life meant for here and now. We realize that abundant life when we are living in Jesus and Jesus is living in us, when we are in relationship with Jesus, by finding Jesus in one another, those we live with, those we worship with, and those the world would otherwise avoid and throw away.
And that abundant life, meant for all people, is greater, stronger, deeper, than the limits of this world. That’s why we call it eternal. When we abide in Jesus and Jesus abides in us, we are living that full, abundant, eternal life.
So, the question isn’t really nailing down what all an enfleshed Jesus means in concrete explanations. The questions are more like: how do we enter this spiraling conversation of what it means to eat his flesh and drink his blood and so abide in him and he in us. And where have we met Jesus lately? And where do we find Jesus in the world out there? And how do we take Jesus in every day like manna, like a steady diet feeding our hunger that are fresh every morning? And how do we cultivate hearts and church communities where this fleshy Jesus might abide? Because there is no place we can go, there is nothing we can experience, there is no human hardship anywhere that Jesus isn’t there. Word made flesh. It is an ever-deepening relationship with this Jesus who is in and with humanity in all its fleshy brokenness. And that’s where we realize life that is full, abundant, and yes, eternal. Amen.
