The Eleventh Sunday After
Pentecost I Kings
The Rev. Bambi Willis
John
“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.”
John 6: 51
Jesus causes trouble this morning in our gospel reading from John. To the Jews, Jesus says: “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.” And the Jews begin to quarrel with one another, asking: “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” Without answering, Jesus becomes even more graphic: “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” Jesus gives us his flesh and his blood, a sacrifice of love which God makes for the life of the world.
Our evangelist John speaks of “blood’ only five times in his gospel and four of those are in our text this morning. “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. 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.” Our text is covered in blood and the Jews are rightly conflicted.
For the Jews, the very thought of
“drinking blood” was abhorrent, contrary to the command of God. In the book of Leviticus, we read: “If anyone of the house of
On the altar, the blood of bulls
and goats would be poured out by the priests to restore
But now Jesus says: “Eat my
flesh. Drink my blood.” Jesus’ death is a sacrifice, a sacrifice not
offered up by human hands, but by God. John
is taking all the power and meaning of the most significant ritual act of the
people
In the gospel of John, Jesus’ death is Jesus’ glorification. On the cross Jesus is “lifted up,” John tells us, and the One sent into the world by God returns to God. And the sacrifice of God that began when God became man – humbled himself, in the words of Paul - is completed on the cross.
Just as the system of sacrifice revealed a relationship between Israel and God, a relationship in which Israel knew their very life depended upon God, for our evangelist the cross reveals a relationship in God’s own life, a relationship of self-giving love in which Jesus gives up his life, offering himself completely to God, a divine act of love between God as Father and God as Son.
In John’s hands, the “scandal of the cross” – the scandal that the Savior of the world died - becomes a revelation of the glory of the sacrificial love of God, a love which holds nothing back, which gives up everything for the sake of the other, a communion of love into which we are invited to share in and show forth. The cross was not a defeat, some kind of failure on God’s part to save Jesus. Nor was the cross a punishment meted out by an angry God on a wayward world. The cross was an act of love, confirmed by the Resurrection, that self-giving sacrificial love is who God is, the way of the Lord and the life of the world.
In our collect this morning we prayed: “Almighty God, you have given your only Son to be for us a sacrifice for sin.” In the light of the gospel of John, the sacrifice God makes on behalf of the world reaches far beyond forgiveness for our individual sins. The whole notion of sacrifice is predicated upon the knowledge that all is not right in the world, and we, and everyone else, are somehow complicit with the world’s brokenness. The world is broken and only God can fix it.
Sacrifice, in other words, makes no sense without an appreciation of evil, the “darkness” of the world into which Jesus comes as “light,” in the words of John. And the solution to evil is not “being better.” Evil is not a moral problem but a religious problem. On the cross, God gives Godself up to evil, allowing evil to do evil’s worst. Out of love for the world, God does not resist the evil that nails Jesus to the cross but raises Christ up on the third day, showing forth the power of self-giving love to be greater than the power of evil, a power that leads always to death and never to life.
You and I live in a world in which the notion of evil is often seen as a rather primitive idea that has been put to flight by a more enlightened age. We often believe we can fix what is wrong with this world with more education, better healthcare, less violent video games and stricter gun control laws. And while we are called to work for justice and peace, we can never forget that all of us are still “walking in darkness,” still a part of a fallen creation. Without a recognition that indeed there are “evil powers of this world that corrupt and destroy the creatures of God,” in the words of the Baptismal service, we become our own gods, exploiting this world to satisfy our desires.
In this world, the world in which we all live, good and evil co-exist. And none of us are immune from the powers that draw us away from God, that lead us into death rather than life. In faith, we look forward to the day when God brings in God’s kingdom, when “death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more” in the words of Revelation. Until that day comes, evil is real and only the power and grace of God can save us.
On the cross, God meets evil head on, making the sacrifice we cannot make, giving up the Son of God and raising him to new life on the third day. And as witnesses to the resurrection, God gives us “life” through communion with others, relationships of self-giving love in which we find life by giving ours away. At those times, when we do indeed, give ourselves away to another, when we come to love another as much as we love ourselves, we come as close as we can in this world to appreciating the mystery of God’s sacrifice for us.
I want to end with a story, a love
story. Some number of years ago in a
hospital not far from here, the night chaplain was making rounds on the
palliative medicine unit. The family
room on the unit was empty, most of the rooms were quiet and dark, and the
nurses moved among the rooms, checking I.V.’s without
comment. In one room, however, the
chaplain encountered an older gentleman sitting in a chair, his hand holding
the hand of the patient, a woman who was clearly oblivious to the companion at
her bedside. She had terminal cancer,
the man told the chaplain and they had been married for sixty-two years. They
had three children and several grandchildren.
She was dying and at