Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost; 15 August 2021; Proper 15B (RCL); 1 Kings 2:10-12, 3:3-14; Psalm 111; Ephesians 5:15-20; John 6:51-58.
In writing the Gospel, John, the evangelist embarked on a daring theological project. The crisis of the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE raised serious questions of identity for those who had centered their worship of God on the cult of the Temple (they weren’t really yet called Jews as we think of the term). Where, now, do we encounter God?
The rabbinic school settled on the study of the Torah as the place where the people could meet God. John’s community settled on the answer of community discourse in Jesus. Jesus was where God remained (the verb μένειν, to remain, plays an outsized role in John’s Gospel, often raising the question “who remains in whom?”). For John, the community discourse centered in Jesus instantiates God’s presence in the world.
And so, the community replaces the Temple (along with the tabernacle, the people on the wilderness way, and any other locus of identity for the people). In today’s passage from the Gospel, we encounter a truly shocking statement. Not only does it make us moderns a little queasy, it would have absolutely shocked any first century Jews (if we can apply that name to any particular group): unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.
All of the sacrificial ritual up to and including Herod’s Temple, contained an absolute prohibition on eating or drinking the blood of a sacrificial animal, indeed eating any strangled animal (whose blood had not been drained). Consistent across all of the ceremonial legislation in our Old Testament is the concept that the life of the animal is in the blood, and the life belongs to God alone. The blood was to be poured out upon sacred ground or upon the altar, and never, but never, consumed. It must be returned to God to atone for the animal. And then, its flesh could be eaten with joy. By returning the life to God, the flesh became available as food.
We react to what sounds to us like cannibalism. John’s first hearers would have reacted violently to the idea of drinking blood. But John’s Jesus says that without that, we have no life in us. And if we do drink the blood of the Son of Man, we will have his life in us, the divine life.
So, the community that shares the eucharist (and John 6 is clearly eucharistic language) functions as both altar and God. The life of the Son of Man is poured out on the altar of the community, which then shares in the divine life. And since the life of the sacrificial animal (in this case, the lamb of God) must be returned to God on the altar, the community has in that sense become divine. This is now truly a God incarnate, enfleshed in the gathered community.
It is no wonder that some of the disciples turned back after this saying. The theological audacity is stunning. Eating a sacrificial meal at the Temple (or other shrine before the ascendancy of the Jerusalem cult) established an identity as a member of a particular community. Returning the blood to God on the altar established an exclusive identity as a member of God’s chosen people. Sharing the eucharist in the Johannine community established a divine identity that could have no room for any competing identity. We are the altar on which is sacrificed the lamb of God whose flesh becomes life for the world. It’s a breath-taking vision.