The Eleventh Sunday after Trinity (Proper 15), 16 August 2015
Queen Camel, Sparkford
They disputed among themselves, saying, ‘How can this man give us his flesh to eat?’
Have you noticed that when it comes to eating flesh, most of us happily do it, but are often squeamish talking about it. I remember one Easter, at my brother-in-law’s parents farm in Sussex, spoiling the family’s enjoyment of our roast lunch when I innocently asked my brother-in-law’s stepfather where he got the tasty, tender, joint of meat from, which we were eating. A farmer of few words, he answered me by turning his head towards the window and nodding in the direction of the little wooly lambs which we’d been watching skipping and playing outside… “Oh…”
Seems that those who were hanging on the words of Jesus while he was teaching in the synagogue at Capernaum, were also squeamish talking about eating flesh. Jesus made them squirm even more.
So much gospel gets lost in translation that if we don’t pay attention to what was originally said, then we end up with a different Jesus altogether, a washed-out version. So let us hear today’s gospel passage again, this time translated so that Jesus’ words are far closer in spirit to those he actually spoke that day:
52 The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, ‘How can this man give us his flesh to eat?’ 53 So Jesus said to them, ‘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. 54 Those who gnaw at my flesh and swig back my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; 55 for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. 56 Those who chomp and chew my flesh and guzzle down my blood abide in me, and I in them. 57 Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever munches on me will live because of me. 58 This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors nibbled at, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live for ever.’ [1]
Gnaw my flesh and guzzle down my blood: this makes us sound like wild animals, Jesus’ audience would have thought; chew and chomp and munch on me: this makes us feel like cannibals…. How offensive. How brutal. No wonder John tells us, not long after this, that many of his disciples said, ‘This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?’ and ‘because of this [they] turned back and no longer went about with him’.
Back in the time of John’s gospel it was a common accusation: that Christians were involved in ritual murder, even eating their own newborn children, was levelled at them by their critics in pagan Rome. [2] And even today there are those who will accuse Christians of cannibalism because of what we do at the eucharist - eat the body, drink the blood of Christ. Now whether or not we believe that is actually physically what we’re doing at the eucharist, it’s clear that we are in awkward territory here. And it’s the very same territory which Jesus was negotiating, during that synagogue debate that day.
In John Chapter 6 Jesus is trying to engage his audience in the vital struggle between two worlds of understanding. On the one hand he is talking about the new world of the kingdom of God which he is introducing to the people, a world in which he, The Bread of God, comes down from heaven and gives life to the world, a world in which he, The Bread of Life, promises those who come to him that they will never be hungry, those who believe in him that they will never be thirsty. On the other hand Jesus knows that he is speaking into a world which still believes the myth that God demands sacrifices - flesh and blood sacrifices - from humans, for them to be put right with Him.
Furthermore, Jesus’ struggle is this: he can read human behaviour well enough to fully understand that it is he who will eventually be sacrificed by these people, it is his flesh which will be ripped and torn, his blood spilt, in their bid to appease their God. Jesus is not flinching from this most awful situation: that, as these people saw it, to sanctify him, they must first sacrifice him. He is trying to reveal to his listeners that blood sacrifices are the work of humans, not of God; that we are so caught up in this myth that we cannot see it; but that it is a myth which once identified, can be overcome. [3]
What myth? This is what the anthropologists tell us - those who study human behaviour:
That in ancient societies where there was a dispute over territory or honour, someone was killed. And that killing settled the dispute. Because of that killing, the territory was fixed. Because of that killing, honour was established. And so that murder was remembered as the cause of reconciliation and the source of order in the community. And every time after that, when a dispute arose in the community, they would arrange for a ritual killing to take place, a sacrifice to be made, which honoured and mimicked the original killing.
The purpose of that ritual sacrifice was to restore order and create reconciliation again. It always worked. And over time, over centuries, of this ritual being endlessly repeated, the original murder was forgotten, the ritual became sacred and the myth around it grew to religious proportions. It became God’s idea, this sacrificial killing, not ours. [4]
Now, Jesus’ audience were well familiar with sacrificial rituals, for in the temple every day their priests would take male yearling lambs, lay them on the altar, slit their throats, drain their blood, sprinkle it on the altar, then pour the remainder away, hang and flay the carcass, remove the hide, slit the heart and cut off the legs, remove and wash the innards, cut the carcass carefully into parts, wash and salt them, and then burn it all in its entirety. [5]
Now this makes me grateful that by comparison, as an Anglican priest, all I have to do is to take a tiny wafer and break it in two…
It will strike you that the wafer is a feeble representation of the flesh of Christ. It’s a reminder of the distance we put between ourselves and the original murder which we remember here.
But the point that Jesus was trying to make in the synagogue that day when he made his audience feel like cannibals, is that whether Anglican wafers or temple lambs, we have created rituals which sanctify our violence towards each other and mask the reality of the world we make. Jesus is getting behind the myth of sacrificial violence, challenging the assumption that it is ordained by God as the way we should order our world. Jesus is breaking the silence of every sacrificial victim who went before him.
Jesus [would] not let his listeners ignore the horror of collective violence - [and this] very act of remembrance [is] at the heart of our worship each time we gather for the Eucharist. [6]
Many in Jesus’ religious audience were repulsed by his words; those who stayed with him were the ones prepared to engage with him in the struggle towards opening up new truths. It is notable how in the 20th Century it was an atheist philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, who had the nerve to describe a truth that religious people had avoided for centuries: that on the cross, we killed God - “All of us are his murderers,” Nietzsche wrote. [7]
We might say on the cross Jesus demonstrated the myth of ritual sacrifice to the world. I choose carefully the word demonstrated - because it carries two meanings.
A demonstration is on the one hand, a revelation of the truth - and by becoming the sacrificial victim Jesus revealed the truth of the sacrificial myth - opening it up for the world to see what is behind it and how it works.
On the other hand, demonstration is a form of protest - and with his broken body on the cross Jesus is protesting the myth of sacrifice, he is offering a way to break that myth once and for all and to create a new world of human understanding and behaviour where sacrifice is replaced by forgiving self-giving, loving self-offering, which is of a different order altogether.
What Nietzsche misses, of course, is the reality and power of the resurrection. Indeed, we killed God, but he did not stay dead. And the forces of forgiving self-giving, the power of loving self-offering broke forth from the empty tomb to begin to reshape our understanding of who God is, and who we are and can be.
One aspect of the way our understanding of God and ourselves has been changed by the resurrection, is that since Christ, the sacrificial victim, demonstrated the myth of sacrifice to the world, revealed the truth of it and protested against its power, this revelation means that in our culture now the voice of the victim is able to be raised, heard and understood. Even though that voice will often shock and provoke, just as Jesus’ voice did.
For society expects its sacrificial victims to stay silent, not to speak out against their ritual slaughter - so is shocked at the war memorials lauding the myth of salvation through nationalism, when a voice like that of Harry Patch of Somerset speaks out against sacrifice: “We've had 87 years to think what war is,” the First World War veteran said in 2004. “To me, it's a licence to go out and murder. Why should the British government call me up and take me out to a battlefield to shoot a man I never knew, whose language I couldn't speak? All those lives lost for a war finished over a table. Now what is the sense in that?” [8]
And society expects its sacrificial victims to lay still, not to struggle against their imminent demise - so is shocked in the supermarkets where maintaining the myth of sustainable market forces comes at the expense of those further down the supply chain, when people like the dairy farmers of Somerset turn up to remove the shelves of all their milk and give it away freely outside, in protest at the sacrifices they are forced to make on this their livelihood. [9]
Just as Jesus used a series of rude and remarkable words to open his audience’s eyes to the hidden realities behind their culture, so the sacrificial victims of our society reveal by their witness the truths behind the way we make things work at their expense; they give us the means to begin to redirect our culture in the ways of justice and of peace.
So today we must ask the hard question - who speaks with Christ’s voice: the refugees sharing their stories from the Calais migrant camp on Songs of Praise, or those who are protesting the broadcast? [10]
It is astonishing to think that Jesus’ life and teachings lead us away from sacrificial religion and sacrificial culture and into the ways of human-kindness, forgiving self-giving, self-offering love.
Our culture is a long way from primitive societies sacrificing human or animal flesh to appease a god and restore order; so we may protest our rationality and civility these days. But the myths underlying human culture remain just the same and serve the same purposes - they are hidden, but now, thanks to the words and witness of Jesus, they are being revealed and are able to be redeemed.
Notes
[1] See Paul Neuchterlein, Girardian Lectionary, PROPER 15 (August 14-20) - YEAR B, Exegetical Notes on John 6:51-58, for discussion of the Greek verbs for ‘eat’ used in this passage. I've exaggerated the language in what I take to be the spirit of the original.
[2] See, eg, Stephen Benko, Pagan Rome and the Early Christians, Chapter III, The Charges of Immorality and Cannibalism.
[3] Paul Neuchterlein, Girardian Lectionary: Neuchterlein on John 6 influences this passage.
[4] This is a bumbling attempt of mine to precis a core conviction in the energising theory of Rene Girard. Among the many excellent writers and preachers now developing Girard’s insights I suggest S. Mark Heim, Saved From Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross as a very good exploration of this theme.
[5] From the description of E.P. Sanders, Judaism: Practice and Belief, quoted in Giles Fraser, Redeeming Nietzsche: On the Piety of Unbelief, p.141.
[6] S. Mark Heim, Saved From Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross, pp. 57-60, quoted in Paul Neuchterlein, Girardian Lectionary, PROPER 15 (August 14-20) - YEAR B.
[7] Frederich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (The Joyful Wisdom), Book Three, 125, quoted in Giles Fraser, Redeeming Nietzsche: On the Piety of Unbelief, p.142.
[8] Wikipedia: Harry Patch, citing an interview in The Sunday Times, 7 November 2004.
[9] Farmers' milk protest: video emerges of apparent action at Morrisons in Wincanton, Western Gazette, South Somerset, August 7, 2015.
[10] Aaqil Ahmed, Why Songs of Praise is visiting the migrant camp in Calais, BBC Blog, 14 August 2015.
Comments