John
6:51-58
I
love giving Communion to young children because they love getting it. Sometimes
they run up to the altar rail; many of them give me big smiles when they put
their hands out; I remember one of them not long ago bouncing up and down and
clapping her hands as it got to be her turn. Occasionally a parent will tell me
that they don’t want their children to receive Communion until they
“understand” it. But that’s the beauty of it: they don’t have it figured out
and they don’t need to have it figured out: they’re just experiencing it. They
come forward; they’re welcomed; they’re fed; they’re brought close to
Something.
And
we have a lot to learn from them. The truth is that we adults don’t have it
figured out, either, but often we think we should. So we spin our theories:
transubstantiation, consubstantiation. We try to explain to ourselves how it
can be both a wafer of bread and the Body of Christ. We become spiritual
mechanics: what exactly happens to the bread and wine, and when and how does it
happen? Or we decide that it is just a symbol and nothing is happening. All
such analyses are attempts to put the mystery into a box, so that we can have a
feeling of mastery and control — which is why all analyses fail. It would be
like you telling someone, “I love you with all my heart,” and that person
responding, “Well, you know, the heart is a muscle that pumps blood, and it
doesn’t actually feel any emotions.” True — and it misses the whole point!
The
people described in John’s Gospel today are missing the whole point. How can this man give us his flesh to eat? They
are being crudely literalistic, and trying to understand something rationally
that cannot be understood rationally. And Jesus points us beyond any such
attempts to rationalize. He uses language and imagery that is obviously
disturbing and mind-blowing. Like a Zen koan, his talk of eating flesh and
drinking blood cannot be understood in a straightforward, logical way. And he
clearly does not want it to be. He pushes us beyond the limitations of our
minds. When Jesus declares his flesh to be food, he doesn’t then say “Analyze
this,” or “Argue about this,” or “Write theological dissertations about this.”
He says, “Eat this.” He doesn’t want us to understand it: he wants us to
experience it.
The
Psalmist says in Psalm 34, Taste and see
that the Lord is good. Living faith
is never just about following the rules or coming up with the correct
doctrines. The Holy Eucharist is not an intellectual exercise or an academic
test. We’re not supposed to comprehend or master Holy Communion; we’re supposed
to eat it and drink it. This Gospel today, like our worship in general, is
meant to lead us into a profound experience of the Reality we name God, whose
essence is Love.
And
before I say anything else, let me affirm that it is certainly important and
worthwhile to intellectually reflect on our experience of God. We want and need
good theology. But that is always secondary to the experience itself — it never
replaces it. We don’t want to know about God: we want to know God.
That
God is so very close to us, closer than we can actually imagine. He becomes
flesh and blood in Jesus, and then we eat that flesh and drink that blood.
Eating is an intimate activity: taking something into our bodies that becomes
part of us. And, according to Jesus, that is the way we fully experience God:
by realizing God lives in us, deeply and inseparably entwined with us: Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood
abide in me, and I in them. This is the heart of the Gospel. There are
moral ramifications to it: loving God and loving our neighbor as ourselves.
There are practical ramifications to it: the need to forgive, to let go of
anger and resentment, to show compassion to those in need. Following Jesus is a
way of life, but it begins by eating him, and experiencing the very life of God
within us. Jesus teaches it in the Gospel, and the rest of the New Testament
says “Amen” to it. Paul writes in Galatians that it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me (3:20). That
is the source of his love, his power, and his joy. And that is true for
everyone. He writes to the Corinthians, Do
you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? (1
Cor. 3:16). Our reading from
Ephesians today exhorts us to be filled with the Spirit, continually filled
with the Spirit of Christ. The Second Letter of Peter says that we have become participants of the divine nature (2 Pet.
1:4). We don’t make that happen: the life of God within us is a gift. Every
time we receive the Body and Blood of Christ we are reminded of that gift in
the most concrete way possible, by eating and drinking it. If our knowledge of
God is restricted to some sense of
divinity “out there,” then we are missing a key and vital experience, that
which gives us life today and forever: Just
as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats
me will live because of me.
But
having said that, there is really no spiritual homework I can give you. There
is nothing for you to go out and do, nothing to accomplish, nothing to make
happen. This is why Jesus can say, Seek,
and you will find, because what you most need, what you most desire, you
already have. The great Sufi poet Rumi has a wonderful poem that goes:
The minute I heard my first love
story,
I started looking for you, not
knowing
How blind that was.
Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere.
They’re in each other all along.
God
is love. In love, God has poured God’s very life into the humanity of Christ,
who pours that very life into us through the Spirit. That’s what loves does: it
becomes one with the Beloved. Each one of us is God’s beloved: God is one with
us, intimately part of us, an endless wellspring of love, power, and joy. We
eat and drink the sacramental sign of that on Sundays, but it’s true every
moment of every day. We don’t have to do anything other than accept it and
experience it and live it.
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