“…unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood,
you have no life in you.”
If we stop to think about what Jesus just said,
this sounds awful, shocking, unnerving.
How could anyone talk this way about himself?
“Here, eat me, drink my blood.”
The mind recoils from this
as though caught in a nightmare
after staying up late to watch some vampire movie.
Well, now that Jesus has our attention,
what does he mean?
In this Bread of Life Chapter from the Gospel of John,
I think Jesus is talking on two levels here, both of them literal.
First is the materially literal level, the actual physical level:
eat my flesh, drink my blood. Yes! just that.
But to understand this, we need to know just who is the “I” who is saying this.
This is the One who saw himself as abiding in the Father and the Father in him,
so that they were one.
This is the One who said,
“Inasmuch as you did it unto the least of these…you did it unto me.”
If you can accept it, this is the One
who saw all creation from a non-dualist perspective,
who knew that all creation is of a piece,
that when we look at another,
if we do not see that other’s need as our need,
then we are living out of a lie,
THE lie, of the illusion of separation one from another.
To live as though others are separate from yourself
is to rationalize away the call and responsibility of compassion
that comes with Jesus saying,
“Inasmuch as you did it unto the least of these…you did it unto me.”
Now, have you ever stopped to think about how, when it comes right down to it,
everything is eating everything else?!
The fox eats the rabbit who eats Mr. McGregor’s cabbage.
The cabbage eats the soil and the sunshine and the rain.
The rain and the air eat away the iron.
The river eats away the river bank.
The mosquito feasts on my tender ankle
as I sit outside feasting on picnic fare.
The worms eat the body of the carnivore, and the eater returns to the soil.
The earth of the grave consumes the corpse.
As Annie Dillard wrote in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,
“The world is one big chomp.”
And this fits with the passage under consideration
for the Greek words used here for eating emphasize this literalness.
There are two Greek words for the verb, to eat, used in the passage.
The first is the regular word, fagein, to eat,
and the second is trwgw, which means more precisely, “to chomp,”
to chew on, to gnaw, to sink your teeth into.
Much more graphic, right?
This emphasizes the point that Jesus is making;
and it makes this matter of eating his flesh and drinking his blood
even more in your face.
On the literal organic level from the perspective of nondualism,
we eat and we are eaten.
The question is, can we recognize this closely enmeshed relationship
of all of life, of every life form, in this beautiful web of Life,
and have respect and compassion and reverence
for the life we consume in order to live ourselves?
That is one level of literal meaning, the organic level.
The second level of literal meaning
is the spiritually literal meaning of what Jesus was saying.
That is, what is the spiritual process and spiritual truth
that is being described in this passage?
You remember the old saying, “You are what you eat”?
That applies here, I would suggest.
What will help us know, what will help us realize
that that which we take into ourselves becomes a part of us?
Verse 56 of this Gospel passage reads,
“Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.”
Here is our baptismal identity,
what Jesus prayed for that we would realize
that we abide in him and he in us,
just as he abides in the Father and is one with the Father.
Verse 57 says:
“Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father,
so whoever eats me, who really chews on me, will live through me.”
Getting this, not just having an intellectual understanding of it ,
but having a lived experience of this reality of self-identity in Christ,
opens up our vision to what the Gospel of John calls “Eternal Life.”
Here’s verse 58 in a free translation:
The one chewing on this bread lives into this Eternal Life.
So finally let’s bring that into what we are doing right here and now,
this making eucharist, this thanksgiving meal,
this feasting on the Lamb of God, the self-offering of our Savior.
We have before us the means to respond obediently to these awful words
about eating the body and drinking the blood of our Lord,
to consume with devotion and reverence the food provided for us.
Here in a very concentrated and focused way sacramentally
we literally fulfill Jesus’ command to consume him.
Recalling the Apostle Paul’s warning to the faith community in Corinth,
may we eat the bread and drink the cup
discerning the Body of the Lord.
In the Eucharist the bread and cup sacramentally provide us
with a sacred meal, discerned spiritually.
As we partake of that may we come to know
that every meal is actually a sacred meal.
May we come to see truly what it means in Acts 17:28 to say:
“In him we live and move and have our being,”
and to know how it is that “the fullness of [Christ] fills all in all”
as it says in Ephesians 1:23.
The Spirit of the Resurrected Jesus pervades all of creation.
Every meal is a sacred meal.
So then, to return to the reading from Ephesians for this week:
“Be careful then how you live,
not as unwise people but as wise, making the most of the time,
because the days are evil.
– (This is today’s reality – overrun by so many pressing concerns.) -
So do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is. …
be filled with the Spirit…
giving thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything
in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
The Spirit of the Resurrected Jesus pervades all of creation.
Every meal is a sacred meal.
For what we are about to receive,
may the Lord make us truly grateful.
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