John 6:51-58
The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost | 18 August 2024 | A Sermon on John 6:51-58 | by Samuel David Zumwalt, STS |
John 6:51-58 English Standard Version, © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers]
51 I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” 52 The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” 53 So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. 54 Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. 55 For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. 56 Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. 57 As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever feeds on me, he also will live because of me. 58 This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like the bread the fathers ate, and died. Whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.”
Christ the Medicine
Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God, our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
I was 21 when my Dad died of lung cancer. It was such a devastatingly unimaginable time in my life, that, frankly, I began a course correction, a change of trajectory, that has continued to widen the distance between my life then and my life now. Looking back, it was not as evident to me then as it is now. Small choices, incrementally taken, took me places I did not expect. Change is painful, even when it is good. Change brought about by tragedy is even more painful. But, we grow through pain, always through pain, if we do not allow ourselves to become stuck and bitter.
By the time I was 38, I had been a pastor for 11 years. Counting the year of chaplain residency and part-time service in a congregation, I was serving my third parish as a pastor. The night before Mother’s Day, my mother called to tell me my older brother had died at the age of 46. Having watched for years his alcoholic spiral downward into the abyss, I was, nevertheless, shocked by the news, never more so than when three days later I saw his body in a casket. I had kicked the cigarette habit just past my 30th birthday, but now I became obsessed with my own mortality. I began a diet that resulted in losing 40 pounds. I lost so much muscle from a low-fat diet that colleagues would ask me if I were seriously ill, even dying.
Four years later, as I entered a new painful chapter of life, I took up running three miles on three mornings a week and thirty minutes of exercise with 15-pound weights on three other mornings. Early Sunday morning services meant a sabbath from exercise. I gained all the muscle I had lost and more. I became obsessed with aging and began to color my hair. I started using generic Rogaine for hair loss. I bought dress clothes and sports clothes. I swam at the neighborhood pool at times when few or none were there. I looked as good as I could with what I had to work with. But it was a miserable time in my work life and in my personal life. I much prefer now to then.
So, why talk so personally? Is this a defense of one’s life now looking back? Hardly!
There is a season for everything, as Ecclesiastes 3 reminds us. And all those seasons are the seasons of biological life. Regardless of faith or unfaith, of creed or commitments, most humans go through all the seasons of life eventually and not in a straight line. Joni Mitchell wrote of aging: “The seasons they go round and round and the painted ponies go up and down. We’re captive on the carousel of time. We can’t return we can only look behind from where we came and go round and round and round in the circle game” (“Circle Game,” 1968).
You can attend to life in this world and strive to be the best steward of all that God has placed in your hands. Or you can attend to what makes you feel good. Or you can attend to all the bad stuff that has come your way, what you have done and left undone, what others have done and said. Or you can sit around playing video games or watch TV and amuse yourself to death. Or you can try, as I did after my brother’s death, to avoid the Grim Reaper’s visit. The seasons come and go. Nobody knows but the Lord God when this life and this old creation will come to a swift end.
The Medicine of Immortality
There are those who read the Scriptures as if the authors are like golf announcers quietly giving a play by play of all that the Lord Jesus said and did in real time, just as it happened. There is a purposefulness in holding to such a view, because, then, you can exclude any possible layers of meaning in our Lord’s words as if He were bound only to speak in the present moment without any thought of how His death and resurrection will change the way His words are understood. Some protestants are particularly given to egregious efforts to keep Jesus from meaning exactly what He says about Baptism and the Eucharist, because it would mean radical change for them.
In fact, in advance, long before He will be lifted up on the cross in love for sinners, the Lord Jesus promises that Holy Baptism gives the new birth from above (John 3:5). Then, here in John 6, as He teaches in the synagogue in Capernaum, He speaks of His own death on the cross as intimately tied to the sacramental act of eating bread and drinking wine. Of all the apostles, John is the closest to the Lord, the one to whom Jesus from the cross entrusts the care of His mother. John lives to old age, suffers much, reflects deeply on all that His Lord has said and done, and then teaches the next generation of pastors for the churches in his care and beyond. One of those, Ignatius, the martyred bishop of Antioch, writes the Eucharist is the medicine of immortality, because there in the eating and drinking we receive the Lord’s true Body and Blood just as He had taught in Capernaum. What does this mean?
We all come to the end of biological life at a time largely beyond our control. We can do all the right things and come to an untimely end. Or, we can eat a pound of bacon, smoke tobacco, drink alcohol, and still live to old age depending on the level of our activity and the givens of genetics. That, too, is beyond our control, so don’t think you can abuse your body without consequence.
Our Lord has been leading us to this moment during the previous three Sunday readings from John 6: He is the Medicine of immortality. If you want to have real life that goes on after your mortal body reaches its natural end, sooner or later (and it may be sooner!), then God’s beloved Son Jesus, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world is the antidote you need to the poison of sin, death, and the devil. Unless you eat of the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His Blood you have no life in you. Why? Because He is eternal life, the Source and the Means.
Now this troubles our sense of what is reasonable, and, God knows we want everything to seem reasonable to ourselves. It’s just one blasted mind-boggling mystery after another with Jesus. And we will return next week to those who will throw up their hands and go their own way.
Think about what we’ve heard thus far in John’s Gospel. Jesus is the Word made flesh, the Word who was in the beginning with God and was God. Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Jesus turns water into gallons of wine. Jesus makes enemies by cleansing the Jerusalem Temple and says if you destroy this Temple He will raise it up in three days. Jesus tells the scholarly Nicodemus you must be born again by water and the Spirit. Jesus tells the Samaritan woman at the well everything she has ever done and then promises her a spring of water welling up to eternal life. Jesus heals a lame man by the pool of Bethzatha in Jerusalem. He feeds 5,000 men and walks on water. He calls Himself the Bread of Life. And now He says they must eat His Flesh and drink His Blood. You hardly have a chance to catch your breath before Jesus is saying and doing something else so outrageously beyond our ken. Oy veh!
Just Because It’s a Mystery Doesn’t Make It Untrue
A lot of us buy a lot of unreasonable things all the time. Despite decades of evidence to the contrary, I keep thinking the Dallas Cowboys are going to win the Super Bowl again. Despite 33 years of buying lotto tickets, and despite never having won more than $500 on one day, I keep paying the tax on people who are bad at math. Doubtless I will go to liberal protestant purgatory or at least the synodical naughty list for admitting such. And I could go on. But I digress.
Nobel prize-winning economists predict Wall Street Armageddon, and it doesn’t happen. Tenured professors with three degrees and slews of articles and books teach nonsense about gender that any curious five-year-olds can dispute empirically. Persons of otherwise average intelligence can be thrilled to be pregnant but turn around and argue it’s not really a baby. Most people can pay into Social Security for an entire career and pretend the money hasn’t been spent.
So, when someone who believes nonsense just because it was said sincerely and passionately by a really polished actor, professor, politician, pundit, or drooling idiot with an active libido; then, turns around and says the Christian faith cannot be true because it’s unreasonable. I smile kindly, the way I do at some cute, helpless child. It is really hard for all of us to admit we’re not God!
If you want eternal life, you will get baptized into Jesus’ death and resurrection. Why? Because He is God in human flesh and He says so. If you want eternal life today, and you’re baptized, you receive Jesus, the Medicine of Immortality in the Host and Cup. Why? Because He promises to be there for death-bound, evil-afflicted sinners, like you and me, who finally stop arguing with God about Who is Boss, and just say, “Lord, I want to believe. Have mercy on me a sinner!”
Biological life is going to come to an end no matter how much we fight against death and don’t want to die. But death cannot and will not ever have the last word. For Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia! So…children of God…take your Medicine today with joy and gratitude!
In the name of the Father, and of the +Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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©The Rev. Fr. Samuel David Zumwalt, STS
St. Matthew’s Ev. Lutheran Church
Wilmington, North Carolina USA