This is a sermon that I preached on Sunday, 8/25/24, at Berkeley Friends Church. The scripture reading for this sermon was: Ephesians 6:10-20 & John 6:56-69. You can listen to the audio, or keeping scrolling to read my manuscript. (The spoken sermon differs from the written text.)
Our scripture readings this morning – especially our reading from the Gospel of John – are very challenging. They lay before us a stark and extreme worldview. Jesus tells us that if we want to have life, we have to eat his blood and drink his flesh. If we take what he’s saying seriously, the full impact of his words should be as disturbing to us as they were to Jesus’ first disciples.
Unsurprisingly, we’ve tried to make this passage easier. Much of the church has normalized Jesus’ commandment to eat his blood and flesh through practicing the ritual of bread and wine on Sunday mornings. But for those who heard these words from Jesus’ mouth, no such abstractions and comforting rituals had been invented yet. To those who were there with Jesus two thousand years ago, his words came as a shock. Why was this Jewish rabbi talking about cannibalism?
Jesus, for his part, doesn’t seem to have much sympathy with those who struggled with this teaching. He dismisses them with what seems to be sarcasm – “does this offend you?” (Of course it offends us, Jesus!!) He goes on to use more harsh language, saying that “it is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless.”
What is Jesus talking about? Is this all metaphorical? Is he revealing that the body and blood upon which his disciples are to feed is not literal, but spiritual blood and flesh? That’s the interpretation that Quakers have taken to a greater degree than most other Christians. We teach that communion with Christ is inward, invisible, and spiritual. No need for wafers and wine, no need for literal eating. Certainly no need for cannibalism. The Quaker branch of Christianity teaches that we feed on the body and blood of Christ in our meetings for worship, waiting on his spirit to fill us and give us life.
But for those who were there, two thousand years ago, none of this was obvious. Frankly, it’s easy for me to imagine myself as being one of those disciples who parted ways with Jesus after he started saying these things. The Jews of those days were used to extreme statements by rabbis and leaders and messiahs – but cannibalism? This was beyond the pale.
Apparently Jesus wasn’t concerned. He said that whoever fell away and whoever stayed was in the hands of God. After challenging the disciples in this way, he summed up the nature of the obstacle before them: It was one that only God could overcome. He said, “No one can come to me unless it is granted by the Father.”
This seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Immediately after this episode, it says that, “because of this many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him.” Jesus lost a lot of clout. He had pushed his disciples too far.
Throughout this passage, it’s hard to know what tone of voice to read Jesus in. As I said before, when Jesus says, “Does this offend you?” and when he says, “It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless,” it’s not clear to me whether he’s curious, or angry, or sarcastic, or disappointed. There are so many ways he could have said these phrases, and each one leaves me with a different feeling.
It’s the same with the final part of this passage, when Jesus asks his most loyal friends, the Twelve, “Do you also wish to go away?” What does Jesus’s voice sound like here?
I am tempted to read him as sad, concerned. I want Jesus to be worried, because I want to believe that Jesus cared for and loved his good friends. That he didn’t want to lose them, and wasn’t sure how this thing was going to go.
The writer leaves this as a mystery to us. But the response that the Twelve give Jesus seems unambiguous. Simon Peter says, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.”
Peter and the rest of the Twelve are deeply challenged by Jesus’ words, and we know that none of them will manage to follow him faithfully when Jesus faces the time of trial. But for now, they don’t feel like they have any alternative. In Jesus they have seen the face of God. In his challenge, they find that God has indeed granted it to them to come to Jesus. Despite the apparent insanity of what Jesus has said, despite the call to cannibalism, they will follow him.
It’s not clear to me how they can do this. I can only conclude that it is as Jesus said it would be – the Twelve were given a special grace from God to follow Jesus even though it made no sense at all. They were given the ability to go all the way, to throw their entire lot in with Jesus, holding nothing back.
This passage reminded me of a quote that I had heard once, which, when I tried to look it up, I realized is unattributed. It’s not clear who said it first, but whoever it was, it wasn’t me. The quote goes like this:
There are many who would follow Christ halfway, but not the other half. They would be willing to give up possessions, property, and even life itself, but they are not willing to give up themselves.
It seems to me that in this moment with Jesus, in the fateful sixth chapter of John, that the disciples are put to the test. It is demanded of them to choose: Will they follow Jesus the whole way, will they surrender everything, even their selves, even their sanity, to follow what they know to be true? Will they seek the truth, even when the truth makes absolutely no sense to them, and could cost them everything?
It was one thing for these young men to leave their fishing boats and follow Jesus. As we know from the end of the Gospel of John, when Jesus encounters the disciples out in their boats again, the Twelve could always go back to fishing if they needed to. Their journey of discipleship was not irrevocable. But in this moment, here in the sixth chapter of John, it feels as though Jesus is asking them to take a final step towards complete self-abandonment. He is asking them to accept something totally crazy.
Madness is threatening. It’s not clear whether you can come back from it. To surrender yourself to something truly beyond your understanding, to center your life on a mystery, to risk the things you know and possess for things invisible – that takes courage. That takes grace. That takes a holy insanity that only the Father can grant.
Which brings us to our reading from Ephesians this morning, where Paul exhorts us to put on the whole armor of God. Paul informs us that we are in a cosmic struggle. The challenges in our lives that we believe come from our boss, a frenemy, a certain politician that we hate, or that group over there who’s keeping us down – whoever it is, Paul tells us: You’re not in a struggle with them. You’re in a struggle with cosmic powers. You’re in a struggle with systems and structures and demons and the very Devil himself. We are in a warfare that is spiritual, and only spiritual weapons will help us here.
This sounds pretty nuts, almost as loony as the spiritual cannibalism of Jesus. When Paul tells us to put on our spiritual armor so that we can do battle with the Devil, our first instinct might be to say, “go sell crazy somewhere else, Paul.”
But I’d like to suggest that Paul’s message here is, in fact, quite sane – quite real, powerful, and liberatory. Because what happens if we follow Paul’s teaching here? What will occur if we go all the way, surrendering our plausible world of petty struggles with other humans whom we can harm and who can harm us? What happens when we embrace the message of cosmic, spiritual warfare, fought with gospel sandals, shields of faith, and the sword of the Spirit?
Well, what happens is, we stop hating people. We stop doing violence to people. We stop demonizing other human beings. We realize that no man, woman, or child is our enemy. We see that the enemy of our soul is spiritual, and we are all his prey unless we take refuge in the mighty name of Jesus – in his armor, his strength, his power.
This was the realization that gave Jesus the strength to die on the cross. It was this reality that gave the early church the conviction to die as martyrs in Roman spectacles. It was this self-abandoned, spiritual warfare, filled with love of neighbor and hatred of spiritual oppression that gave the early Quakers the ability to suffer and sometimes even die to extend the kingdom of God to their neighbors – to bear witness to the world of peace, justice, and truth that Jesus offers.
It was this realization, seeing the world as it really is – seeing their neighbors as the beloved children of God that they really are – that allowed our spiritual ancestors to go all the way, to give themselves entirely to Jesus and the gospel – to eat his flesh and drink his blood – to see as he sees and love as he loves.
I believe that all of us here have been called and chosen by God to come to Jesus. I believe that all of us are being offered eyes to see the world as God sees it – to experience the spirit that gives life. The fleshly way of viewing the world – the way that hates other human beings and blames them for our suffering, rather than loving those who hate us and praying for those who persecute us – this fleshly way is useless.
The way of complete surrender, giving ourselves entirely over to Jesus, even in his seeming madness, is the way to real sanity. The broken way of the cross is the way to wholeness. The way to peace is through taking up the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God – the love of God in Jesus. This is the sword that heals.
The call for us this morning is to put on the whole armor of God. The call for us this morning is to eat his flesh and drink his blood. The call to us is to let go of that reasonable, rational, self-concerned part of ourselves that is still clinging to a normal life. The call is that we allow ourselves to be caught up in the great current of God’s love.
Letting go of all the good excuses that hold us back, let’s come to Jesus. Let’s embrace the madness. Let’s find out where he will lead us in his mission of love, peace, and reconciliation.