Fine Young Cannibals
Fine Young Cannibals
Proverbs 9:1-6; Psalm 34:9-14; Ephesians 5:15-20; John 6:51-58
Jesus said: “Those who chew up and devour my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day.”
We are continuing to read the gospel of John’s story of the aftermath of Jesus feeding the five thousand. The crowd has come to Jesus in search of more bread, and Jesus keeps inviting them to search for something more, to the food that Jesus himself gives, the food that Jesus himself is.
As the crowd continues to resist and question what Jesus is saying, Jesus keeps upping the ante, and in today’s reading one could be forgiven for thinking that Jesus is advocating cannibalism. Jesus switches from using the ordinary Greek word for “eat” to a different word that’s normally used for the way animals eat. It has the feel of a violent, savage, inhuman kind of chewing and devouring, not something that happens with a salad fork and a napkin discreetly placed on the lap.
And even more crudely, Jesus says that those who would seek eternal life not only have to chew up and devour his flesh, but must also drink his blood. Never mind human blood – even eating animal meat with the blood still in it was a major violation of the Old Testament law – Leviticus 17:10 reads: “If anyone of the house of Israel or of the aliens who reside among them eats any blood, I will set my face against that person who eats blood, and will cut that person off from the people.” In the book of Acts, when the apostles finally meet together to decide once and for all whether Gentiles who become Christians have to follow the Jewish law, the final outcome is: You don’t want to be circumcised, OK, we can understand that. You want to eat pork, fine, you do you. But please – no meat with blood in it. No rare steaks, that’s just wrong.
So when Jesus says: If you want eternal life, you must chew up and devour my flesh and drink my blood – well, you can understand why the crowd reacted so poorly. Because Jesus is literally telling them to do something they all would have perceived as repulsive, as uncivilized, as inhuman, as just wrong. So why does Jesus do it?
We modern people are also uncomfortable with the literal and cannibalistic meaning of what Jesus is saying, which is why we tend to very quickly spiritualize these words to refer to communion. Which is not completely wrong, but it doesn’t explain why Jesus uses such gross imagery in this gospel. That God would provide human beings with a feast to build communion and bestow wisdom and grace and invite us into the eternal life of God – this is a familiar theme in the Scriptures. Our first reading from Proverbs today is one of many one could cite. But those passages understandably present the meal God offers us as something appetizing and appealing – not something crude and vulgar.
I think that – to do justice to the shockingly violent language Jesus uses here – we must understand them as referring not in the first place to communion as much as to the cross. The cross where the flesh of Jesus is chewed up and devoured, where the blood of Jesus is poured out for the life of the world. I think that Jesus is trying to shock his hearers into seeing that they just don’t need to learn the power to five loaves and two fish into a meal for thousands – what they really need to learn is the power that comes from the cross. And yes, the sacrament of communion is one of the ways that power comes to us – but where it comes from is the cross.
The crowd that hears Jesus – like all human beings, including us – these people probably think that they’re basically good people who just need a little encouragement to keep them on the straight and narrow, maybe a little boost to get them across the finish line. They don’t think they need anything dramatic to be right with God.
But Jesus sees them – as Jesus sees us – to be trapped by powers that chew people up and such the lifeblood out of them. Some of these powers are economic, then and now. We know, at some level, that many of our clothes and phones and so many other things are made in sweatshops in faraway places, where peoples lives are devoured and sucked out to save a few pennies. Because these things happen so far away, to people we never see, we can pretend it’s not happening, even when we know that it is. There was a story recently about a strike at a FritoLay plant in Kansas where the company used to force people to work 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. The workers told stories of people dropping dead at work from heart attacks, but you can’t slow down the production line. Nobody should have to die to make Cheetos.
But the thing is, we know that these same forces that will put profits over people affect even those of us who don’t have to work for pennies in sweatshops. We are told that we will find reward in our lives from our achievements, our status, the money that we make – and the treadmill keeps going faster and faster and we have no time for family or relationships or friends until our own lives have been devoured and bled dry.
God knows that these powers have trapped us – they hide from us so it’s hard to see the destruction, the chewing up and the devouring of people’s lives. We become complicit in our own destruction and in that of others, not because we’re bad people but because that’s the way life is. And the salvation that God wants to give us is first and foremost deliverance from being chewed up and devoured by these powers, from having our lifeblood sucked dry. This is why God enters into our world and in Jesus throws himself into the jaws of these powers – to expose them as the inhuman monsters they are. So that we would see that these powers have blood dripping from their teeth. So that we would learn not to cooperate or play along with these powers, and how to discover the power and the presence of God even in the midst of a world full of dry bones.
Jesus shocks his hearers with his offensive language, to prepare us for the shock that he intends to offer by giving his own life. Jesus offers us a gift that – unlike the bread eaten by the 5,000 – is a gift we could never have asked for and are not asked to consent to – a gift that we find shocking and that we are supposed to find shocking. And this is the food that Jesus really wants to give us – his very self, so that we might become one with him in offering up our own flesh and blood, our own lives, not as victims of the powers that devour and destroy, but as gifts for the life of our neighbors and the life of the whole world.