13th Sunday after Pentecost: John 6:51 – 58

Jesus said, “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.” The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” So Jesus said to them, “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. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever.”

In December 2004 a geography teacher in England by the name of Andrew Kearny talked to his students about how earthquakes produce tidal waves, also called tsunamis. He told his students how they could recognize the warning signs that a tidal wave was about to hit a shore line.  One of his pupils, by the name of Tilly, 10 years old, listened carefully to what he said. A few days later Christmas vacation began, and she travelled with her family to Phuket in Thailand. On December 26 she looked out at the ocean and noticed that there were bubbles in the water; also, that the ocean was receding in an unnatural way from the beach. Because of what she had heard in her geography lesson, she knew that a tsunami was about to occur. She warned the people on the beach; then she ran into her hotel and warned the staff about the tidal wave that was about to hit the beach. They believed her and evacuated as many people as quickly as possible. It has been estimated that this girl saved the lives of about 100 people.

This incident illustrates how important it is to listen. The word “hear” or “listen” is one of the key words of the Bible. The English girl who saved a hundred lives because she listened carefully, can help us to understand Biblical language, especially the drastic language which we heard in the gospel reading:

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.

This language is shocking, and could even be described as disgusting. However, there is a precedent for this language. For example, the prophet Ezekiel was told to eat a scroll containing the words of God. Ezekiel was told:

“Son of man, eat this scroll, and go, speak to the house of Israel.” So I opened my mouth, and he gave me this scroll to eat. And he said to me, “Son of man, feed your belly with this scroll that I give you and fill your stomach with it.” Then I ate it, and it was in my mouth as sweet as honey.

The prophet is being told to listen to the word of God in such a way that it becomes incorporated into his being, like digested food. Eating the scroll means that the word of God is to be incarnated, so that it becomes an integral part of the prophet’s mind and body.

Along the same line, it could be said that the ten-year-old girl who listened to her teacher had “eaten” and “drunk” his words. If she had not “eaten and drunk” the geography lesson, she would not have recognized immediately what was happening at the beach in Thailand, and her warnings to the hotel staff would not have sounded convincing.

One of the key words of the Old Testament is the word “listen” or “hear”. A central text of Judaism is to be found in the book of Deuteronomy, chapter 6:

Hear, O Israel: (or “Listen, O Israel”) The LORD our God, the LORD is one.

When a Jewish child learns to speak, these words from Deuteronomy are supposed to be the first spoken sentence. The first word a child speaks is supposed to be the word “hear” or “listen”.

The Hebrew word “shema”, translated as “to hear” or “to listen” occurs 92 times in the book of Deuteronomy. “Hear” or “listen” occurs 120 times in the gospel of John.  According to a Hebrew scholar, shema cannot be translated. It means much more than to merely use one’s ears. There is a tradition in Judaism that a listening person is someone who asks questions.

We can see this dynamic in Jesus himself. When Jesus was 12 years old, his parents took him to Jerusalem for the Passover festival. Mary and Joseph momentarily lost track of his whereabouts and finally found him in the temple.  As Luke writes:

After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions.

The first two recorded activities of Jesus’ life were “listening” and “asking questions”. These two activities are practically identical. If you listen, you will ask questions.

There was a Polish-Jewish scientist by the name of Isidor Isaac Rabi, who won the Nobel prize in Physics in 1944. He came to the United States as an infant and grew up in the Lower East Side of New York. When he came home from school, his mother was not interested in knowing if he had learned anything. She only wanted to know one thing: “Did you ask good questions today?” Isodor Rabi claimed: “I became a scientist because I learned to ask good questions.” 

This brings us back to the reading from the gospel of John. The reading begins:

Jesus said, “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.”

The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”  

Here we see this dynamic that people who listen immediately ask questions.  Jesus mixes two metaphors here, bread and flesh, which makes for a confusing sentence: he claims that he is the living bread which came down from heaven and that those who eat him will be eating his flesh. The Jews who hear these words respond the way that they are supposed to respond: they ask a relevant question: “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”

Jesus answers this question by saying something which is completely outrageous:

Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me.

After hearing these words, many of his disciples said: “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?”  When they say: “Who can listen to it?” they are essentially saying: we are so confounded that we do not even know which questions to ask.

The words of Jesus sound like cannibalism. In the original Greek the words of Jesus are even more irritating than in the English translation, because he talks about “chewing” or “biting” his flesh. But even worse is the talk about blood. For Jews, drinking blood was forbidden. According to Biblical teaching, blood is the seat of life, and all life belongs exclusively to God. Drinking blood was an act of sacrilege. There are ten passages in the Torah which warn against drinking blood. For this reason, Jehovah’s Witnesses refuse blood transfusions.

There is only one way to make sense out of Jesus’ drastic language: namely, he is talking about the mystery of the Incarnation.  As John proclaims at the beginning of his gospel: “The word became flesh and lived among us.” God became a genuine flesh and blood human being in Palestine, a man capable of sweating and bleeding.

From the very beginning, there were followers of Christ who refused to believe in the incarnation. This is understandable.  How could immortality become mortal? How could the God who led Israel out of Egypt become a baby, needing diapers? How could the Creator become a creature?  How could Almighty God become a crucifixion victim? The Incarnation is impossible, which is why many followers of Jesus rejected the idea.  

When Jesus tells people to eat his flesh and drink his blood he is confronting them with the physicality of the incarnation. To eat the flesh of Jesus and drink his blood means to integrate him as a physical person into one’s being. The God of Israel, the Creator of heaven and earth, the Father of humanity, became a genuine flesh and blood human being and this event is supposed to become an integral part of one’s identity.  When Jesus tells people that it is life-giving to eat his flesh and drink his blood he is confronting them with the question: “Who am I?”

As already mentioned, to listen means to ask questions. In the first centuries, Christians asked tons of questions about the identity of Jesus. After the resurrection it took 420 years for Christianity to define the identity of Jesus. Until the year 451, when an ecumenical council at Chalcedon came to a consensus, Christianity struggled with the question: how can Jesus be God and man at the same time in the same person? This question lead to heated discussions which even became violent at times, and the identity of Jesus still remains a fathomless mystery.

From the very beginning and up to the present day, there are Christians who refuse to eat the flesh of Jesus and drink his blood, which means that they do not embrace Jesus as God and man, but spiritualize him, reducing him to a moral concept, to a message or to an idea. Jesus becomes reduced to something that we admire, he becomes tolerance, peace, love or non-violent resistance. A lot of people accept Jesus as a moral example or as a prototype for Gandhi or Martin Luther King, but cannot embrace him as God incarnate, worthy of worship and praise. The ultimate act of worship is to receive the body and blood of Jesus in the Eucharist. When we celebrate Holy Communion, we eat and drink the incarnation, so that it becomes an integral part of who we are. The challenge of Christian faith is to believe and to celebrate the impossibility of God becoming a human being, which was formulated nicely by the poet John Betjamin, who proclaimed: “God was man in Palestine and lives today in bread and wine.”

Because of the Incarnation, hearing the voice of Jesus becomes just about the most important thing which you can do. As Jesus says in John 5:

Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life…, an hour is coming, and is now here, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live. 

So, let us hear the words of Jesus and demonstrate that we hear them by eating and drinking his words in Holy Scripture, by eating and drinking the elements of Holy Communion and by asking good questions when we talk about Jesus and about our Christian faith.