A few years ago an insurance company ran
a television ad touting how their products save money. My husband John and I don’t watch a lot of TV at home—we kind of got out of the habit when we lived in
Nicaragua—so its not often that I actually know what the popular commercials are. But this one captured my attention. It featured a middle aged guy reporting on how he was saving money on his weight loss program by having the local middle school girls follow him around and shame him every time he was about to eat anything fattening. “Ew,” one would pop up and say. And the other two, “Seriously?” and “so gross.” Then the dieting man would look sad and push the waffles or the pastrami sandwich away.
It was a pretty funny ad in its own time, and it seems to have earned some ongoing cult following based on how many times its been re-posted on social media. Part of what what made it such effective marketing, I think, is that it spoke to human experiences we can all identify with. Its no secret how scornful adolescent girls can be—for goodness sakes, I was one—and we all know the pain of being shamed. Perhaps even for what we eat
And in today’s Gospel, we hear Jesus telling us this: “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them,” and “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. ”If you’ve been in church over the past few weeks, you have been hearing a lot from the sixth chapter of John, which comes up in our lectionary every three years. So it might be tempting to think of today’s Gospel proclamation as yet one more variation on the Jesus-as-the-bread-of-life theme. Which would be accurate to a degree—its all one teaching—but today’s portion is perhaps the most radically incarnational.
Recall that the chapter began with literal bread that fed five thousand, and then there was a historical and theological discourse on bread as symbol of God’s providence and presence, until finally at the end of the chapter we arrive at something akin to a lesson in food chemistry: “my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink.” And the adolescent girl within me is tempted to say “Ew. Seriously? So gross…”
And let me say, the text actually invites this response. If it sounds weird to us, let me assure you that it sounded at least as weird to John’s first century community. It even tells us at the beginning that there was dispute: “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” And the verse we didn’t hear, which follows right after today’s lesson, “When many of his disciples heard it, they said, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?”
To record Jesus speaking of eating human flesh and drinking blood was intended to shock his hearers, and us as well. Its what I’ll call the “incarnational ick factor.” But it wasn’t just the cannibalistic intimations of eating human flesh or the threat of ritual contamination through blood, although those images would have been repugnant to Jews. It was also the sheer improbability of God appearing in human flesh at all, which John’s Gospel insists on the cosmic importance of when it opens with the words “the word became flesh and lived among us.”
All of which brings me to another adolescent girl, Mary the mother of our Lord. Yesterday most of catholic Christianity observed her Assumption (or Dormition in the Orthodox tradition). This means the death or falling asleep of Our Lady. And of course she did die, just as she was born and breathed and ate and cried and was scared and visited by an angel who told her not to fear the sacred task God had entrusted to her. Her faithfulness is worthy of our devotion.
But I wonder if we haven’t cleaned Mary up so much that we have lost touch with the “ick factor” that her presence introduced into our understanding of God. Let us remember that he first blood spilled in order that God might carry out his plan of salvation through Jesus was not his on the cross, but hers in the birthing of our Lord. In a specific, small, unglamorous and quite possibly icky stable.
The bloody, fleshy, messy humanness of God’s gift to us is inescapable in today’s Gospel. And intimately connected to it, the sacrifice that saves us. The etymology of sacrifice means to make something holy. In the Christian tradition, Jesus’ willingness to give his life is the perfect sacrifice for the whole world, as our liturgy reminds us Sunday after Sunday. But Mary’s willingness was also a holy sacrifice, as is our own every time we surrender our messy human selves to God.
As we will in the Holy Eucharist we’ll celebrate shortly. Which brings me back to the question of eating flesh and drinking blood. It’s a subject of some scholarly debate as to whether the Gospel we heard today is John’s equivalent of an institution narrative. That is, an invitation to the ritual remembrance of the Lord’s Supper. And for those of us who have more of a catholic understanding of Holy Eucharist, its possible to read John’s Gospel as endorsing a theology of God’s real presence in bread and wine.
Possible, but by no means necessary. The Anglican tradition has always offered broad latitude as to how we might understand God’s action and presence in the Eucharist, just as it does in the ways that we choose to venerate Our Lady. “I have no desire to make windows into men’s souls,” Elizabeth 1 famously said of the theological conflicts of the 16th century. Of the Eucharist she wrote—
Christ was the word that spake it.
He took the bread and break it;
And what his words did make it
That I believe and take it.
It is a privilege to be your guest in Puerto Vallarta and celebrate Holy Eucharist in your midst. However we understand it, may it be for us both solace and strength. But my prayer is that it be a little bit “icky” too. Let this ritual meal remind us of Jesus who ate with tax collectors and sinners, who was not shy to challenge prevailing assumptions about holiness and sacrifice, and whose incarnation ultimately sanctified the “ick factor” in our human condition. All of it—our bodies and our hunger and our birthing and our bonding and even our dying—is made holy by the God who freely took on flesh and blood. And who freely gave it, as well. As an act of faithfulness. As food. As a perfect sacrifice for the whole world.
