I preached this sermon at St. Lydia's on Sunday, January 22, as part of our exploration of the Gospel of John. The text is John 6:22-56; read it here.
The writer of John is a little bit of a trickster.
Throughout the first six chapters of this gospel,
he (or she) has acclimated us to a language of symbols.
Jesus is the light of the world –
this not a literal statement, but a metaphor.
“In order to follow me,” he tells Nicodemus,
“you must be born again.”
Nicodemus is a bit of a fool,
taking is words to literally,
missing their metaphorical meaning.
“I can give you living water,”
he says to the Samaritan woman.
She catches his meaning,
she understands the metaphorical language.
The writer of John has acclimated us to a language of symbols:
a world of metaphors in which ordinary things
like light
and birth
and water
can have secondary, spiritual meaning.
At this point in the gospel,
we are just starting to wade into the deep places
in the pool the writer has created,
immersing ourselves in this new language
of evocative symbols as they gain dimension.
By the time we roll around to chapter six,
we think we’ve got it figured out.
“I am the bread of life,”
Jesus says.
A symbol, we think, a metaphor.
Bread, which nourishes,
which feeds,
which sustains.
Bread, which grants each of us life.
And then something strange happens.
Then there’s twist:
“The bread I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
Swiftly, a hole is punctured in our world of symbolic meaning.
And the knife that makes the hole
is the word, “shall,”
because it connected us, disconcertingly,
to the future.
“The bread I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
We’re suddenly pretty sure that “flesh,” is not a metaphor.
It is as if time has suddenly collapsed,
and this moment holds within it another moment,
still many months off,
another Passover,
on another hill
when what is broken will not be bread,
but Christ’s very body.
A body which, he instructs us,
we are to devour.
God must die.
And we must eat God.
All this is very strange.
Disconcerting.
The line between the literal and the symoblic
unnervingly blurred.
As I child,
I remember reading a book called “Tuck Everlasting.”
The book was about a family, the Tuck family,
who lived deep in the woods,
and drank from a stream that gave them eternal life.
They would never die, and they would never grow old.
A girl named Winnie learns their secret,
and thinks it must be the most wonderful thing,
not to die.
But soon she learns that life everlasting
does not free the Tuck family, but constructs a prison around them.
They spend their days hiding away
from anyone who might notice their secret –
that they’re not getting older –
worriedly protecting the spring.
They’ve evaded death,
but along the way, lost the ability to live.
The Gospel of John also tells a story of eternal life.
But in this story,
Christ is offering something very different
than immortality bottled
from a magic spring.
The Tuck family side-steps death for years,
and finds a life of stagnation,
But Jesus invites death to dance,
He moves in step,
looks death straight in the eye,
and comes out on the other side,
offering life to the whole world.
To fine life,
Jesus does not avoid death,
but must instead devours it.
And instructs us to
eat it up,
eat him up,
until the death and the life is a part of us,
all of it,
twisted together in our very body.
All this is very strange.
Disconcerting.
As it's meant to be.
It stands as a question mark,
a riddle for us to puzzle over as we struggle to comprehend:
The one who eats this bread,
this bread, my body,
my body, the word,
the word, God’s breath,
God’s life,
my death.
The one who eats this bread,
will live forever.
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