John 6:51-58

Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life… whoever eats me will live because of me.

I was reading this passage in preparation for our weekly Holy Communion and prayer for healing service at Wollongong and I was shocked by the words. I hadn’t realised or noticed or I had forgotten that Jesus said these words in such an explicit way. In my mind I thought that they were the words of the church not of Jesus. Whoever eats me will live… eats me? I looked back over my notes on this lectionary reading from 2009 and I read how I had much the same reaction. This passage confronts. As a vegetarian it is not too my taste.

In the whole discourse about Jesus as the bread of life in John chapter six, it seems to me that the absorbing of Jesus’ teaching is more than feeding the mind. It is absorbing God’s life into our lives. It is so much about becoming one with Jesus. Elsewhere Jesus says, “As you Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us… so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, as we are one (John 17:21-23)” and ‘Abide in me as I abide in you’ (John 15:4). And here in John 6:56 Jesus says, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them”.

We human beings are so absorbed in each other, often devouring one another, and so absorbed in ways of relating that are learned from institutions based on rivalry and the survival of the strongest, the richest, the powerful at the expense of the poorest and weakest; that the words of Jesus seem nice but ineffectual in our reality they are insipid, utopian, idealistic. Yet the invitation to us is to instead be absorbed in all that distracts and consumes us in this life to be instead absorbed in God’s eternal life.

So Jesus shocks us with his cannibalistic talk but I think that somewhere between merely learning from him (or about him and the ways of God) and eating him, is a path. Discipleship is always more than understanding the message, it is following despite not understanding, it is relating without fully knowing someone.

When we eat food on earth it keeps us alive but one day we will all die. When we eat the flesh of Jesus and drink his blood we are eating eternal food, food that will keep us alive eternally. Can we be alive eternally and yet die physically? In eating this food we are becoming one with Jesus, one with God, we are becoming eternal. This is more than listening, more than learning, more than taking notes, more than remembering, more than knowing, more than mimicking, more than imitating, more than being like Jesus; it is becoming one with God, one with God.

That is too much to get one’s head around. How can we live forever and yet die? When we die we all fall into the eternal (the elements) or are absorbed by the eternal but what of when we are alive? Are we not part of the eternal anyway? Do we not live and move and have our being in God whether we believe it or not? While we live on this earth, during this time of temporal life, do we have the choice to live at the same time connected to the eternal yet using our own thoughts, our own ways rather than the ways of God, the ways of the kingdom of God?