[A sermon delivered to the Hinckley Unitarians congregation on 15th of August 2021]
(Readings: Proverbs 9:1-6 and John 6:51-58)
Sometimes we can be forgiven for thinking of the Bible as an ethereal, otherworldly book. Then readings like our second one today makes us realise that there is a lot of earthly language in it too. Mentions of “eating flesh” and “drinking blood” seem more vaporific than angelic!
That was certainly my reaction, and if it was yours too, then we are in good company. Even the relatively (small ‘o’) orthodox Scottish Presbyterian New Testament scholar William Barclay is forced to admit in his commentary on this passage from the Gospel of John that the passage is “very difficult” and is likely so strange to us, as a modern audience, that we will likely find it “grotesque”.
It is also certainly possible to read this passage very literally in a way that would support theories that propose the real presence of Jesus in the elements of the Eucharist, such as transubstantiation. I have my own view on these sacramental questions and, this being a good Unitarian congregation, if we are made up of 30 people today, then there will, I’m sure, be at least 40 different views among us! That is no bad thing and I look forward to discussing your views on these spiritual questions with you for, hopefully, many years to come. I feel very blessed to be able to minister in a denomination that allows for such diversity of points of view.
Today though, I wish to focus on the community aspect of communion, rather than the explicit act of receiving bread and grape juice.
That is certainly the aspect that William Barclay brings out in his commentary, as a good Presbyterian he certainly would have had little time for arguments in support of the catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. Indeed, he contends that Jesus’s words here echo those of Greco-Roman mystery religions that initiated their followers with mystery plays devoted to the gods of Mithra, Hermes, or Osiris. This theory has been fairly successfully refuted by more recent scholarship. However, it is undeniable that shared religious meals where ubiquitous in the ancient world – well before Christianity arrived on the scene.
A better way of reading this passage then might well be as an invitation to a shared meal. Yet there is still no getting away from the early language of the passage – the blood and flesh.
This might be the point of the passage. Rather than the more modern debates around if or how Jesus is divine, in the early church, the debate was around the question of Jesus’s humanity. What would become the more orthodox (again, with a small ‘o’) branch of Christianity was determined to argue that Jesus was really human, against those who would go on to develop more Gnostic strands of belief who argued that Jesus was pure spirit and his human form was a mere illusion. Being made of flesh and blood is a sure sign that one is human – it is hard to think of a clearer statement of being physically biologically present. John, after all, was writing his gospel around 70 years after Jesus’s death – the point was to represent Jesus and his message in order to clarify the teaching within a developing religion – not to quote Jesus verbatim from memory.
In providing clarification on Jesus’s humanity John is also providing comfort for early Christians – that Jesus was really human like they were and knew what it was like to suffer for the sake of righteousness. His flesh was of the same substance as our own.
Mentions of blood in this passage could have had a certain significance in a Jewish context too. Oh, and by the way, this passage suffers from the typical Johannian shorthand of referring to “the Jews” when the author was actually referring to “the Jewish leadership”. “The Jews” in the context of our second reading today are characters far more analogous to “religious leaders” in general. It is such a shame that this choice of wording has contributed so much towards antisemitism on the part of Christians. Jesus was, indeed, Jewish, and so were the early Christians and there is engagement with Jewish theology in the gospels. There is a Jewish dietary prohibition against consuming the blood of other living things that goes all the way back to the Book of Genesis. This was because blood is representative of life-spirit. This belief was evidently a result of early human observation, if one is wounded so badly that too much blood escapes from us, then we die – therefore it was concluded that blood is what animates us with life.
The invitation here is that we ingest Jesus’s spirit of life. This invitation does not have to be interpreted literally. William Barclay takes the example of a book on a shelf – if I take it down off the shelf and read it then I am in a sense ingesting its words and digesting its contents. If I am inspired by it and meditate often on its meaning, then it becomes a part of myself. The invitation is to take Jesus’s humanity into our own lives.
Here there is a vital element of what I would call communion – although something is still missing: community.
There are a couple of pieces of advice I can still remember from my old school headmaster. I am sure he taught me more than two things, but nevertheless, two things are all I can remember today! The first was to buy shoes and boots that are made in a traditional way so that they can be mended by a local cobbler. This keeps the cobbler employed, keeps excess waste out of landfill due to replacing only those parts of the shoe that need to be replaced, and according to him, this results in healthier feet. The second piece of advice I remember being something of an unofficial school motto – “only a fool eats their lunch alone.”
On a practical level I’m not sure I always agree with that last bit of advice – I am an introvert and occasionally I like to experience the pace and quiet of preparing and eating something by myself. Yet even I have to admit that this advice has, on many an occasion, lead to me making an effort to get to know someone over good food and has ended up in me being very glad I put the effort in to do so.
There is much to be gained from sharing a meal with someone. At school we sat in our tutor groups at a long table and got to talk with our tutor and fellow students in an informal way. Likewise, during my recent studies at Harris Manchester College, Oxford, meals in the college hall were often the highlight of my day. I could forget about theology for a moment and instead have a chat with someone who had been spending the day trying to get to grips with some principle of particle physics, or some theory in migration studies. Conversely I would sometimes have the challenge of having to explain some aspect of theology to them – this would help to clarify my own thinking and I might even get to hear an outsiders prospective that I might not have heard before!
This is something that is picked up in our first reading from the Book of Proverbs. In this passage Wisdom, an attribute of God, is represented as a woman who has built her house and prepared food within it in order to offer hospitality to all and to give them enlightenment:
Come, east of my bread
Proverbs 9:5-6
and drink of the wine I have mixed
Lay aside immaturity, and live,
and walk in the way of insight
It is precisely this invitation that is mirrored by Jesus in our second reading. Jesus here is embodying that Divine wisdom that is so often expressed as feminine in scripture.
Just as Jesus transgressed gender roles with this feminine invitation of Wisdom, it also causes us to transgress cultural assumptions of what religion should be. Rather than just being pie in the sky spiritual woo, the wisdom religion of Jesus is something embodied in the here and now. It is something that calls us to a divine community that is inclusive of the flesh and blood of the world in all its earthly diversity that is life.
Amen.
