The Rev. Frank Logue
King of Peace Episcopal Church
Kingsland, Georgia
August 16, 2009

Eat This Bread, Live Forever

John 6:51-58 

Today’s Gospel reading should give pause to anyone who wants to think of Jesus as a great teacher. I am referring to those who think of Jesus as a great teacher and nothing more, and so equate Jesus to someone like Aristotle or Socrates. 

For if Jesus was nothing more than a man who is known for his teachings, then we wouldn’t want to hear him teaching things like, “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.” 

This isn’t good teaching. It’s odd. But he makes this downright creepy by adding,  

“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.” 

After years or even a lifetime of receiving communion, we have the context for these verses. We can read Jesus talking about eating his flesh and drinking his blood and though it sounds little odd, we think of communion and it makes some sense and we go on with life.  

We have evidence that in the early days of the Roman Empire, outsiders to the Christian faith heard this sort of talk and accused Christians of cannibalism. They certainly didn’t think of Jesus as a good moral teacher alongside great Greek and Roman teachers. After all, if Jesus had really said, “Eat my flesh and drink my blood” one wouldn’t want to send their children to a school like that. 

I want to provide you with a little more context for understanding what Jesus was saying that day and how it relates to our lives, but it should give reason to appreciate C.S. Lewis’ remark,  

A man who was merely a man and said the sorts of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic, on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg, or else he would be the devil of hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a madman or something worse . . . but let us not come up with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. 

Clearly, I believe that Jesus was not a madman.  After all, I work to pattern my life after his life and teachings. The point is that some of Jesus’ teachings make a lot more sense to those of us who know him to be the Son of God and would not seem to be sensible at all to those who only see him as a great teacher. 

This week’s reading comes from a long passage in John’s Gospel that we are reading each Sunday from July 26 to August 23. The problem with taking five weeks to read through one long passage of scripture is that we can loose the thread of the conversation. 

Jesus fed 5,000 people. Then after that miracle, we are told that the Passover is near and Jesus begins to teach using the miracle feeding as a jumping off place. With the Passover in mind, Jesus referring to the bread that comes down from heaven makes more sense. As I explained in a sermon a few weeks ago on another part of this passage, Jesus is reinterpreting the story of the Passover and the Exodus through his own life and ministry.  

Jesus has given them physical food, but uses that to teach that he can give them spiritual food as well. He said, “Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life.” He wants those who are listening to him to not just eat some bread and fish and then go home to hunger again. He wants them to develop a spiritual hunger and thirst that he and only he can fill. And to teach this, Jesus uses the Passover story, which was about moving from slavery into freedom to show how faith in him also moves his followers from slavery to freedom and even from death into life. 

It is a spiritual lesson and a metaphor hard to grasp. The words from this Gospel are given in the first year of Jesus’ three years of ministry. Later, at The Last Supper, he will continue reinterpreting the Passover through his life and ministry and in so doing will institute the meal we celebrate each week as communion. It is the Passover experience renewed as we take and eat the bread and wine of communion and in so doing consume the spiritual food and drink that sustain us for our spiritual journeys.  

But communion is not merely spiritual. It is real bread and real wine, in which Jesus is really present. This is what he promised us. And if Jesus had just been a great teacher, it would have been the talk of a madman. But Jesus was and is the Son of God and in communion he continues to provide us with his presence in such a way as to strengthen us for our daily lives.  

We need this strengthening of the Body and Blood of Jesus encountered in the Eucharist as apart from God, we find it easier and easier to remain apart from God and to rely on other, lesser answers to our deep hungers and thirsts which only Jesus can satisfy. This is where the comparison to physical hunger and thirst helps us as we know that we need the nourishment of food and drink again and again. We may eat a good meal now, but we will need another tomorrow and one in between those two as well. In that same way we need spiritual nourishment again and again. 

I want to show you a scene from the television show Mad Men. The show is about an advertising agency on Madison Avenue. The setting is the hard-drinking, womanizing early sixties. In this scene, the office copier is being used with permission by Peggy Olsen on behalf of her Catholic Church. Her priest knows that she has had a child out of wedlock and uses the time at the copier to talk with Peggy: 

Show scene from the show in which Father Gill is marveling over the copier as he runs off the church fliers. He tells Peggy that he knows how lucky they are to have her. He sits by her desk and asks if there's something she needs to talk about, since he’s noticed she doesn't take communion. Peggy says, “Nope.” Father Gill says God already knows whatever it is. Then, she points out, she doesn't need to talk about it. Father Gill points out that he’s here, right now, if she needs him. Peggy says to not take it the wrong way but she doesn't think he'd understand. He presses that God is bigger than what we were raised on. Peggy points out that he doesn’t have to live life like everyone else, luckily, she supposes. He says he wasn't born a priest and that when you distance yourself from the church you distance yourself from community. She says she knows that and she’s not pushing herself away. He says there’s no sin too great to confess and that when she does she'll have a brand new start. He says she’s a smart, beautiful girl and wonders if she feels unworthy of God’s love. She looks at him, getting teary. She points out that his copies are done and she boxes them up for him. He thanks her and departs. She stands in her office, holding her abdomen.

The priest who is speaking to Peggy in the scene from Mad Men knows that in confessing her sins and coming back to the altar again and receiving Jesus anew, she can find the strength to change her life and begin anew. She feels unworthy and so holds back from the only thing that will bring the healing she longs for.

Peggy seems to feel unworthy. She hasn’t left the church, so much as she feels disconnected. I find that sometimes people drop away from church because they feel unworthy of being in God’s presence. This is counter-productive as while we might not be worthy of God, we will never become worthy without God.  

Jesus has offered his own self as life-giving food. He has taught, not as merely a good teacher, but as God’s own Son, that in eating and drinking the bread and wine of communion, we are given the very substance that leads to everlasting life. Those who ate the Manna in the Exodus experience as they followed Moses later died, but Jesus promises his body and blood in communion give the gift of everlasting life. 

I know that I am preaching to the choir, as I am preaching to the folks here this morning ready to come forward very soon for communion. But I also know that from time to time, each of us can find ourselves feeling distanced from God. And so this is word to the wise that when that happens, know that staying away from the altar is not the way to find healing in times like that. Keep coming. Keep asking for and expecting the peace which Jesus alone can give. You need the nourishment you find here as much as you need something to eat and something to drink.  

You are also in contact every day with others who have found themselves apart from church. This is the place where God can speak to their hearts through our readings and the sermon and just the spirit’s presence in them in the worship. It is also the place where they can receive the bread and wine of communion and so experience Jesus sustaining presence in an irreplaceable way, the nourishment you need for your hungry soul. 

There are two important sides to the Christian walk. The first comes in coming to saving faith in Jesus which is marked in baptism. And in that great sacrament of baptism, we are marked as Christ’s own forever. But this is the first and biggest most important step on what is to be a life-long journey.  

And it is returning again and again week after week for Jesus’ presence in Word and the sacrament of communion that we are conformed more and more to be like Jesus. And in those times in life when challenges rise and we are not sure we have what it takes, we return again to be sustained by Jesus’ presence. And if we begin to feel unworthy of God’s love, we know that we can always confess our sins, and with his support, we can change our lives and find the power through Christ to continue on. 

Amen.