Eat My Body, Drink My Blood

Sermon prepared for St. Barnabas Lutheran Church, Howard Beach, N.Y. August 25, 2024.

Today we continue our examination of the “staff of life,” on the fifth Sunday of what Martha calls “breadtide” and what Father Tim Schenk calls “breadapalooza.”

I’m tempted to begin my meditation by declaring – in the words of the awesome Oprah Winfrey – “I like bread!”

Bread has been on our dinner tables or baked at our camp fires since the dawn of human history.

Bread accompanied the life-saving meals of the soup kitchens during the Great Depression. My mind goes back 70 years (would you believe it?) to my staple diet of Wonder bread smeared with generous globs of peanut butter. 

Who has not enjoyed the fragrance of baking bread in near-by bakeries or in our ovens? 

Perhaps we sample bread so often that we no longer notice its specialness. Sometimes we deliberately avoid bread as a weight-loss tactic until we miss it too much. The longer we avoid bread the more we want it and the more we enjoy it. I remember my father’s reaction to plain white bread after he returned from three hardtack years in the World War II Pacific Theater: “It tastes like cake,” he said.

Jesus’ reference to himself as the “bread of life” is one of many biblical references to bread.

According to one source (which I have accepted arbitrarily because sources differ), the word “bread” is mentioned 361 times in the Bible; 280 of those references are in the Old Testament; there are 81 references to bread in the New Testament – and 62 of those references are found in the four Gospels. 

When Jesus said, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty,” he was talking about our souls, not our stomachs. But he was not suggesting that coming to him was a solution to physical hunger. There are still hungry people in the world, and Jesus cares deeply about them.

As often as bread is mentioned in scripture it becomes clear that as metaphor, bread has multiple meanings. It fills our stomachs. It nourishes our souls.

All that seems plain enough. But in the Gospel lesson this morning we see many of Jesus’ disciples – we don’t know how many – can’t wrap their heads around this message. “This teaching is difficult,” they grumble. “Who can accept it?” (Jn 6:60)

When John uses the term, “disciples,” he of course doesn’t mean the twelve Apostles but the many people who follow Jesus from town to town.

These disciples have a tendency to take literally every word that Jesus speaks. They are “inerrantists” who are confused when Jesus tells stories about events that are filled with truth but didn’t really happen. They miss the deeper meaning of what Jesus says. They would probably be disappointed that the Good Samaritan was a character in a morality play, not a real person.

So when Jesus tells them that “those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them,” they can neither understand nor accept it. And off they go, these poor pigheaded people who no longer want Jesus in their lives.

The divine nature of the bread and the wine take on an even deeper mystery in the long history of the church.  The question is, does the bread and wine symbolically represent the body and blood of Jesus, or does it become the flesh and blood of Jesus?

In my Baptist days we regarded communion as a reminder of what Jesus did for us. We served communion once a month and the elements were carefully carved squares of white bread and grape juice. That didn’t mean we didn’t take the Lord’s Supper seriously. Years ago, when I was editor of The American Baptist magazine, I was looking for a cover illustration for World Wide Communion Sunday. I chose a loaf of Wonder Bread and a bottle of Welch’s Grape juice. Judging from the letters to the editor I received, readers were incensed and thought I was commercializing the Lord’s Supper. That was not my intent and, in point of fact, most Baptist churches used unwrapped Wonder Bread and uncorked Welch’s grape juice to prepare a service which symbolically represented the body and blood of Jesus.

Some Baptists, and I might have been among them, believed our practice of communion was God-approved, as well as our practice of waiting for people to become born-again adults before they were baptized.

We didn’t pause to think how heretical those practices were in the long history of the church.

I’ve just finished reading a series of novels by the late C.J. Sansom about a crookback lawyer in Tudor England. The novels follow Matthew Shardlake as he negotiates the hazardous rip tides of Henry VIII’s religious reforms. He solves crimes, offends the King and other exalted nobles but avoids the Tower. I recommend the series if you, like Martha and me, enjoy church and Tudor history. Sansom describes the social divisions, the rough-hewn pubs, the foul smells of London, and clothing styles of rich and poor so vividly that I’ve felt like I’ve been a time traveler in Tudor London.

But the series is a disquieting glimpse of what it was like to live in England when Henry VIII was vacillating between conflicting and confusing religious views. In order to divorce his Catholic wife and marry Ann Boleyn he declares himself head of the Church of England, endorses Lutheran reforms, encourages the reformers, destroys Catholic monasteries, and declares followers of the old way to be heretics. Common people and aristocrats struggled to follow the King’s new rules for worship so they can avoid being burned at the stake.

But Henry keeps changing the rules. Toward the end of his reign he declares he no longer believes the Lord’s Supper is a mere symbolic representation of the body and blood and orders that his subjects believe that the bread becomes the actual body and the wine becomes the actual blood of Christ during the mass. The penalty for not believing is a hideously painful death.

Sansom introduces us to people who actually lived in Henry’s England, including Anne Askew, a young reformer who embraced, when it was safe to do so, the view that the wine and bread were merely symbolic. When Henry changed his mind she refused to go back to the old belief. Sansom’s vivid description of Anne being tortured in the tower and being burned at the stake is horrifying. I came away with a sobering view of what our ancestors lived and died through, and how blessed we are that we are free to decide what our faith and our practices will be.

The nature of the body and blood of Jesus are the very issues which confused the disciples in our Gospel this morning. And it must be said that it’s very hard to hear that we must drink Jesus’ blood and eat his flesh. It wasn’t only these literal-minded disciples who found it hard. The early Romans were appalled by what they believed was the “cannibalism” of early Christians. Even today, if you try to explain Jesus’ words to unbelievers they accuse you of being followers of Count Dracula.

In every time and place, Jesus has been misunderstood and his faithful have been ridiculed and often martyred for their beliefs.

Dr. Peter Claver Ajer, associate professor of New Testament at Bexley Seabury Seminary in San Francisco, writes that the drinking and eating of Jesus’ blood and flesh are “metaphors (that) best express oneness, intimacy, and the best way to be part of Jesus’ life.”

“The expression ‘feeding on Jesus’ (his flesh and blood) best captures the itimacy in the relationship,” Dr. Ajer writes. “To feed on Jesus is to absorb his teaching, his character, his mind, and ways; [and to] appropriate the virtue in him till his mind becomes our mind and his ways our ways; till we think somewhat as he would do if he were in our place, and can be and do what without him we would not be or do; and this because his power has passed into us and become our power.”

When we understand that Jesus is speaking to us in metaphors, much of the mystery of the miracle of the bread and wine is clarified.’’

But we will never understand the full meaning of this miracle. Nor should we.

I love the teaching of Professor and Orthodox Bishop Kallistros Ware.

“We see that it is not the task of Christianity to provide easy answers to every question, but to make us progressively aware of a mystery. God is not so much the object of our knowledge as the cause of our wonder.”

So let us relieve ourselves from the stress and burden of trying to figure these things out. Let us rejoice in the mystery and the wonder.

And let us never forget the full meaning of what Jesus did for us and what Jesus expects us to be.

Pastor and theologian Henri Nouwen sums it up nicely:

“For Jesus, there are no countries to be conquered, no ideologies to be imposed, no people to be dominated. There are only children, women, and men to be loved.”

Beloved, Jesus is the bread of life. And God is love. Let us allow ourselves to be loved and to love one another and know that God’s love for us is unconditional and eternal.

And that is all we need to know.