Made of What We Eat
Preacher: The Rev. Andrew Van Kirk
Passage: John 6:51-58
Series: The Bread of Life Discourse
When I was about fifteen years old, my family and I went out to dinner one night at Good Eats down on Greenville Avenue in Dallas. The special that night was two-for-one chicken fried steak platters. When the waiter came around to taking our order, I said, "I'd like to do he two-for-one chicken fried steak, please, with mashed potatoes." The waiter scribbled it down, looked up, and then asked, "Ok, and who's going to be having the other chicken fried steak?"
And I looked at him with daggers in my eyes, and I said, "No, no. Two chicken fried steaks, for one." And he looked at me and held my gaze for a moment, and then looked over at my parents, and my dad gamely said, "So I'll have the burger please, medium."
And when those two chicken fried steaks were placed in front of me, somebody said something like, "If you eat all that, you're going to turn into a chicken fried steak." And I want you to know that I ate all that. And I did not turn into chicken fried steak.
I can't tell you how many times I was threatened with turning into a food product of which I consumed an inordinate amount; or heard someone else threatened with a similar fate. The closest case I ever saw was a girl who was diagnosed with some fungal infection and the prescribed remedy was to eat only carrots for a week. She did turn rather orange actually. But she didn't turn into a carrot.
Of course, she turned orange because we really are made of what we eat. Her body took those carrots and made them a part of her, now orangish, flesh.
By virtue of my ordained role, I probably consume more body and blood of Jesus than just about anyone here. Still, no one has ever said to me, "If you keep eating all that Jesus, Father Andrew, you're going to turn into Jesus." Nor has it happened yet.
And yet there is something about this idea that what we eat becomes a part of us that is central to understanding what Jesus was talking about when he told the crowd in today's gospel reading to eat his flesh and drink his blood.
Our gospel reading today is the final portion of what is known as Jesus' Bread of Life discourse. Last week we talked about the first part. There Jesus identified himself as the "bread of heaven," and in so doing he built on a tradition that began with the manna, the bread God sent the Israelites in the desert to eat, and used that manna as a spiritual metaphor for God's promised wisdom and spiritual fulfillment. And Jesus said, I am that promised spiritual bread. I am the only thing that can permanently fill the desires and longings and cravings of your heart.
So we have the physical manna, to the spiritual bread given by God, to Jesus saying, "I am that bread of heaven," and then, Jesus, surprisingly, Jesus goes back to the physical. The last line of last week's reading is the first line of today's reading, look at it with me: "I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; (so far, so good) and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh." (John 6:51)
This last line about the flesh does not go over well. At all. The Jewish crowds around him collectively say, "Yuck!" That's basically what verse 52 says; you can look at it yourself.
But Jesus does not back down: "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" (John 6:53). And then in v. 55, my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink.
This is not metaphorical language. Jesus has already done the metaphor; that's what last week was about: the bread of heaven as spiritual fulfillment. But this is flesh as food. It's literal. When the crowds say, "yuck," Jesus does not try and explain himself. Jesus goes to great pains not to let anyone take it metaphorically: my flesh is really food; in v. 57 he says, "Whoever eats me…" And though it's not in our reading today, at the end of this exchange, John notes that "many," maybe even most, of those following Jesus left him after this. It was too much.
Now what we know is that this is obviously Eucharistic language; Jesus is preparing us ahead of time for that moment when he gathers with this disciples and says "This is my body, this is my blood."
We receive Jesus' flesh and blood in the sacrament. And so we can say that we really eat Jesus; which means we really eat God. And so our body comes into fellowship and union with God as surely as my fifteen year-old body came into fellowship and union with that chicken fried steak.
In trying to understand this great mystery, and why Jesus is so insistent on it, I want us to think back to the first story in the Bible with humans as characters. That first story is the story of a meal. A meal that shouldn't have been eaten. One day the serpent, the craftiest of the animals, met the woman in the garden and convinced her that the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the one tree God had forbidden the man and the woman to eat, was really tasty and totally worth trying. And so she ate. And then the man ate. And this was first sin, which broke the man and the woman's relationship with God, and through which, as Paul writes, sin and death came into the world (cf. Roman 5:12). It all happened because they ate something.
The fourth century theologian St. Gregory of Nyssa, referring to this story, said that we, as human beings, had "tasted the solvent of our nature." (Great Catechism, xxxvii) This first sin was "the solvent of our nature."
As I pondered this line from a fourth century saint, I thought of a terrifying movie from my childhood.
Actually, in my childhood, there are a number of movies that fit that category. And I don't mean horror movies. I mean this whole set of movies that adults apparently thought were "great for kids" that I found completely terrifying.
The Wizard of Oz is so completely disorienting. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a very scary movie. Alice and Wonderland – I guess you might say that I simply was scared of movies that gave evidence of the concocted in a drug fueled mania.
But, right at the top of the list of terrifying movies that scarred me for life is Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
Who Framed Roger Rabbit? remains terrifying to me actually, to this day. Because of "The Dip." "The Dip" is a ghastly green chemical liquid Judge Doom uses to execute toons. (Judge Doom is the bad guy; in case you hadn't figured that out.)
Here's the deal about cartoon death. It's not supposed to happen. When Wylie E. Coyote falls off an impossibly high cliff and hits the ground, and then a piano crashes on top of him, and then a dozen bowling balls pound his head further into the dirt, when that happens, Coyote gets some of those dizzy squiggles above his head and his eyes get bloodshot, but then he picks his flattened self up off the ground and makes another run at Roadrunner.
But "The Dip" – when a toon is plunged into a barrel of "The Dip," it is obliterated. It does not come back. One moment it is; the next moment it is not. It is absolute oblivion.
This is how it works. And I'm warning you, this scene has plagued me for decades. I still find it horrifying scene:
There's nothing left of that shoe; not even a corpse. Just some red goo. Who Framed Roger Rabbit? was my first conscious confrontation with complete existential annihilation. It was not a good family movie night.
To use St. Gregory's language, "The Dip" is solvent of a toon's nature. Literally: "The Dip" is a mix of benzene, turpentine, and acetone. They are all paint thinners. They are literal solvents of toons.
So when Gregory writes how we have "tasted the solvent of our nature," something like that his image. This is a fruitful way to think about what we mean by "fallen humanity" or "original sin" – something about our human nature, our relationship with God, the fullness of what God meant humanity to be, that has been dissolved.
And if you don't like "original sin" because it makes babies into bad guys, fine. But look around for hot second. Something is clear wrong here; something about human beings is broken, destroyed, dissolved.
And Gregory then teaches that what we need is something that will combine what has been dissolved, to put us back together again, to restore the fullness of the image of God within is. And what is this thing, Gregory asks. It's the bread of heaven, the flesh and blood of the one whose flesh and blood did not die but rose again; the one whose nature never was, and never could be dissolved.
The Eucharist, then, is the opposite of Eve's apple. The forbidden fruit is the first supper; the body and blood is the last supper. The one that undoes the undoing.
In the Eucharist, again to borrow Gregory, God blends "Himself with the bodies of believers," and in so doing, puts us who had suffered "The Dip" right again.
To live, Jesus says, you have to eat me, that Christ's perfect human nature may mingle with ours; immortality mix with our mortal frame; God mix with man and woman. "Whoever eats me will live becuase of me," Jesus said.
When you come forward to the altar rail this morning, I want you come with a heart focused on this amazing thing that is happening. You really are made of what you eat. When you eat Jesus, in some small way you'll be made of Jesus. Go back to your pew and look at your hands as you pray; those are Jesus' hands to go out in the world this week. Think your thoughts; recognizing that some part of that mind is his mind. Your feet are Jesus feet. Your heart is his heart. Love like it this week.
That life within us; it doesn't come from us. It's God's life. He saved us from "The Dip;" we have his life in us. It's the bread he gave for the life of the world. Amen.
