14th Sunday After Pentecost: 1 Kings 8: 22-30, 41-43; Psalm 84
Ephesians 6:10-20; John 6:56-69
Rev. Cameron Partridge
August 25, 2024
“Jesus said, ‘Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me….the one who eats this bread will live forever.” -John 6:56-58
Good Morning, St. Aidan’s. We have arrived this morning at the final passage in our five-week-long sojourn through the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John. It began with the Feeding of the Five Thousand story at the end of July (6:1-14) and has wended its way through a dial in the synagogue at Capernaum (6:22-69) in which Jesus presses a profound, provocative point to a perplexed group of listeners: “I am the bread of life.” What on earth does this mean? Other familiar meals pointed to this truth, but do not encompass it. He and the disciples had just fed a crowd in the wilderness. That meal had evoked the previous pattern of the manna, “bread from heaven,” that sustained the Israelites as they made their way in the wilderness. Jesus was not akin to the Moses figure in that story, however, but instead to the bread itself: “I am the bread of life,” the true bread from heaven given by God the Parent.
This had launched a series of baffled back-and-forths. The first problem (two weeks ago): place of origin. This is Jesus we’re talking about, right? Joseph and Mary’s son? He thinks he’s from where (6:42)? The second problem (last week): composition. “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” (6:52) Just, logically, how is this possible?[1] On an ongoing basis? But Jesus only presses his provocative point more: “my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink” (6:55). And then, as we just heard, “Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me” (6:57). At which point his listeners, thoroughly exasperated, say “this is teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” (6:60) It is indeed difficult. Deliberately so. “Does this offend you?” (6:61) And the answer is fairly clear: yes, it does.
The verb to offend comes from the verb σκανδαλίζω, which can also be rendered “to cause to stumble.” This is the verb form of the noun σκάνδαλον which the Apostle Paul uses to describe of the core of his proclamation in his first letter to the Corinthians: Jesus Christ the crucified one, is a stumbling block (1 Cor 1:23). There is something about who Jesus was and how he made himself known to anyone he met, from his disciples to wider crowds; something in the proclamation of his Good News by others such as Paul; that provokes, that causes one to stop and turn, indeed to stumble. Jesus is not being difficult just to be difficult, or to get attention. He seeks to shock us to a deeper truth: his abiding union with God the Parent; our call to a union with him that flows from his own oneness; our call to oneness with one another and with all creation.
Theologian Charles Campbell speaks of this quality of Jesus’ proclamation as not only scandalous but grotesque – again, deliberately so. The term grotesque, Campbell explains, originally comes from “an Italian phrase meaning ‘work (or painting) found in a grotto’ (grotto-esque).” In the late fifteenth century C.E., murals and paintings had been discovered in grottos connected to ancient Roman buildings that were being excavated.[2] These grotto paintings were wildly chaotic and filled with incongruity: monsters, monster-animals, animal-humans, human plants. They “presented unsettling, disorienting hybrids that transgressed accepted categories.”[3] They blurred boundaries and disrupted distinct categories. They deliberately unsettled. The gospel embodied and proclaimed by Jesus Christ provokes, disrupts, undoes category distinctions, Campbell (and, frankly, many others) assert.[4] “The Word that was God became flesh and dwelt among us. God-flesh. John proclaims a paradoxical anomaly that transgresses our binary categories and subverts the norms of the human and the divine. The Word became grotesque and dwelt among us,” Campbell writes.[5] Biblical scholar Stephen D. Moore has also emphasized the Gospel of John’s particular penchant for provocative hybridity: “the Johannine Jesus… is not solely, a human being… the god-man is also a nonhuman animal (“Behold the lamb”[6]); a vegetable (“I am the vine”); a vegetable by-product (“I am the bread”; “I am the door”); inorganic matter, namely water (“let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink…”); and inorganic energy, namely electromagnetic radiation (“I am the light”),”[7] not to mention “Son of God.”
Jesus the Christ is neither contained nor containable. He is not respectable. He is not interested in reaffirming our neat categories. He does not call us to reify or calcify the world as we have inherited it. Instead he makes his way into every facet, every oozing corner, every painful hurt, every life form. Standing there in the breach, he calls us into a union more radical than our well-worn habits of mind, body, and heart can fathom. That union is part and parcel of the in-breaking new creation, the divine dream that he calls us to help manifest.[8] None of this is tame. All of it can feel offensive. As our gospel passage goes on to say, Jesus was aware that there would be those, even among his closest followers, who would not be able to stay with him. They would leave. Some would even deeply betray him. And so Jesus turns to the twelve and asks them, heartbreakingly, “Do you also wish to go away?” (6:67) There is to my ears a hint of despair in his question. As if to ask, can you just not handle this, or me? Is my message, or am I, just too much for you? But God love Peter. Peter the utterly fallible one who would be among those who betrayed Jesus and yet stayed connected. Peter responds, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life” (6:68). To whom can we go? You are the one. We may not understand. We may stumble. We may recoil in offense. But you have us. We are yours. Peter’s response is founded upon and filled with love.
That response reflects the love that flows from the radical union Jesus has been proclaiming. This is a love that is not simply personal but so wide and so deep as to exceed the understanding of our hearts. Remember (what I think of as) the famous football-stadium line from John’s gospel? “God so loved the world” – note not a particular category of creation, but the whole, literally τὸν κόσμον, the cosmos – that God gave, the only-begotten One, God’s Son, Jesus the Christ (3:16). And not for the purpose of perishing, of the dissolution of all things, but for the purpose of eternal life. The good news embodied and proclaimed by Jesus the Christ is scandalous in shape and cosmic in scope. It crosses all categories in as much grotesquerie as we care to imagine. This is the God who pitched the divine tent among us, among creation, and calls us into a radical union, to abide, to remain, to dwell – as μένω can variously be translated – in love. Our abiding love is not meant to be neat and tidy, but boundary-crossing, upwelling, truth-telling, foundationally healing, truly transformative.
This is what it means to take and eat, to consume, to abide with the flesh and blood of the Son of Humanity, the Vine, the Lamb, the Door, the Light, the Bread of Life. It is to follow Jesus, to embrace our call to be his disciples, to receive Communion with gratitude week by week, and to share meals with our neighbors, our friends.[9] It is to break bread with those with whom we disagree, to open the ears of our hearts, to listen through painful disconnection. It is to recognize our embeddedness in this world as creatures among other creatures, en-mattered spirit, connected across all manner of boundaries with God’s vast, variegated cosmos. We receive the gift of the bread of life to steward that life as faithfully and as radically as we can on a planet and amid a climate that desperately needs our faithfulness, our transformed life, our radical love. Thanks be to God for this scandalous connection, for this widening, deepening, wildly provocative gift.
[1] As Andrew McGowan comments, the issue is not so much a concern about cannibalism so much as the “implausibility” of Jesus’ statements: https://abmcg.substack.com/p/the-sign-of-the-loaves-v-the-spirit
[2] Charles Campbell, The Scandal of the Gospel: Preaching the Grotesque (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2021), 5.
[3] Campbell, 5-6. Italics in original.
[4] Some examples include Patrick Cheng’s books, starting with Radical Love: An Introduction to Queer Theology (New York: Seabury Books, 2011); Jay Johnson, Peculiar Faith: Queer Theology for Christian Witness (New York: Seabury Books, 2014); Marcella Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender and Politics (London & New York: Routledge, 2000); Kwok Pui-Lan, Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology (Westminster John Knox Press, 2005).
[5] Campbell, 41
[6] Biblical scholar Dale Martin also memorably revels in describing how Jesus in the Revelation to John is “repeatedly portrayed as a huge, vicious, violent, bloody, horned Lamb.” Sex and the Single Savior: Gender and Sexuality in Biblical Interpretation (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), 110.
[7] Stephen D. Moore, Gospel Jesus’ and Other Nonhumans (Atlanta, GA: SBL Press, 2017),107-108. And as Jay Jonson writes in Peculiar Faith (p. 85), “in that very mix, many stumble.”
[8] As always, the “divine dream” reference is inspired by Verna Dozier, The Dream of God: A Call To Return (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Press, 1991)
[9] Andrew McGowan makes this point about the Bread of Life sequence being more about discipleship than about Eucharist: https://abmcg.substack.com/p/the-sign-of-the-loaves-iv-eating
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