More Than Comfort Food (Sermon)

“More Than Comfort Food”

John 6:51-58

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

8/19/18

⁵¹I 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.”

⁵²The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”

⁵³So 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. ⁵⁴Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day;⁵⁵for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. ⁵⁶Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. ⁵⁷Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. ⁵⁸This 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.”

Bread. The staff of life. Like wine, bread holds a mythical place in visual art, song, literature, and liturgy. Some people call bread “comfort food.” Personally, I feel that way about ice cream more than bread, but who doesn’t enjoy at least the idea of golden-brown biscuits, still hot from the oven, butter melting all the way through. There’s something eternal and archetypal about bread.

On one of my mission trips to Malawi, I watched a woman eating bread. She sat on the ground just outside the hospital. It was morning. She was wrapped in dark cloth that wound upward from her ankles, around her waist, her torso, and chest, then covered her head. In her deeply-creased hands, she had a chunk of bread no larger than a votive candle. Staring off into a distance only she could see, she tore off a small piece of the bread and put it in her mouth, and chewed slowly, deliberately. She seemed intent on making each bite of bread last as long as it possibly could. And that little chunk of bread may have been the only food she had that day. At Nkhoma, Malawi, food service was beyond the means of the hospital. So, family was responsible for feeding their loved ones. If that woman were there for a family member, she was saving the larger portion of what she had as life-giving bread for a sick husband, or sibling, or child. In the meantime, that piece of bread was helping to keep her alive so that she could care for the one she loved.

         Chapter 6 of John is a veritable bakery of bread imagery. And it culminates in today’s passage in which Jesus becomes so graphic that he almost destroys one’s appetite for bread. And his teaching clearly destroys the appetite for discipleship in some of his followers. In verse 60, “many disciples” say, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” And in verse 66 we learn that “Because of this [teaching] many disciples turned back and no longer went about with [Jesus].”

They left him! And who can blame them? When Jesus says, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them,” it’s easy to understand why the early church faced condemnation as a cannibalistic cult.

Let’s remember this about the Fourth Gospel: John is the only canonical gospel that does not tell the story of the Last Supper. In John, Jesus’ sacramental act on the night before he died, was a call to humility and service. He washed the disciples’ feet. In writing the last gospel, John is interpreting Jesus for a church facing much more difficult circumstances than the churches to whom Paul, Mark, Matthew, and Luke wrote. He’s also writing from more years of theological reflection and ecclesiastical experience. By positioning the Bread Chapterearly in his telling of Jesus’ story, John gives his readers the chance to wrestle with just how demanding discipleship can be. And this unforgettable image – eating flesh and drinking blood – helps us to understand the sacrament as more than a liturgical ritual. It’s a way of life. Discipleship isa sacramental life, a life of total co-emersion in and with Jesus.

If we want to understand what it means to be one with Jesus, says John, think about how we are one with what we eat and drink. Food and drink are tangible images. They involve all five senses; and being signs of life, our senses requirefood and drink. Like good food, healthy food, Jesus is that which we ingest with delight, especially in community. He is that without which we will die, even as we live. Apart from the eternal Christ, we will, as individuals and as communities, develop a taste for selfishness, fear, ingratitude, and violence. The antidote to this living death, is to eat the body and drink the blood of Jesus, whose “flesh is true food and [whose] blood is true drink.” (Jn. 6:55)

Jesus’ instruction, and the uncomfortable image he uses, can become just another rule. And in the history of the Christian faith, many have been the theologians, popes, preachers, Sunday school teachers, and denominations who have taught it as such. And maybe they’re like the disciples who left Jesus. Imposing and enforcing rules is much easier than following Jesus in sacramental, kingdom-of-God-living here and now. But reducing Jesus’ disturbing image into a finite precept sanitizes it. It becomes a pill to swallow rather than a meal to celebrate, consume, and by which to beconsumed, and thus transformed.

Will Willimon shines some light on this text. “Ah, would the Christian faith be easier,” he says, “if it were a matter of mere belief or intellectual assent! No, today’s rather scandalously carnal, incarnational gospel reminds us that Jesus intends to have all of us, body and soul. His truth wants to burrow deep within us, to consume us as we consume him, to flow through our veins, to be digested, to nourish every nook and cranny of our being.”¹

 Willimon’s point is that Jesus’ “difficult teaching” doesn’t make some cold, legalistic demand. It reveals Jesus’ deep and determined hunger to be utterly and eternally one with us. It reveals his thirst to fill us inside and out. Jesus’ words are an impassioned plea for us to realize that he’s already close to us, at the most essential, cellular level. Jesus is the energy that animates us, the tissue that connects us, the impulses that move us, the thoughts that guide us. As beloved children, made in God’s image, Jesus is our existential reality. The ritual of eating bread and drinking wine and seeing in them the body and blood of Jesus reminds us and declares to the world that Jesus is our “all in all,” and quite literally so.

The disciples who left Jesus may have understood that better than anyone. They, along with the likes of Herod, Pilate, and the Pharisees didn’t wantto be set free from their smorgasbord of comfort foods – things like military might, economic privilege, political advantage, and distracting entertainments.

Willimon concludes his article on today’s text by mentioning a friend who teaches theology at Oxford in England. The professor asks his students what they think theology is about. And they usually say “that theology is about spiritual matters, or about religion, or deeper meaning in life…No, says the teacher, theology (at least Christian, incarnational theology…in the mode of the sixth chapter of the Fourth Gospel) is about everything. Jesus has come down from heaven with the intention of taking it all back. He wants all of us, and he wants us to have all of him.

“This God is so scandalously, intimately available to us,” says Willimon. And “whoever knows this, knows how to live forever.”²

¹Will Willimon in his article, “Homiletical Perspective,” in Feasting on the Word: Year B, Vol. 3. David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, eds. Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville. 2009. p. 361.

²Ibid. p. 361.