Consuming God
Thumbnail image by stinne24 via Pixabay
Juli Belian
13th Sunday after Pentecost
August 18, 2024
So this bread discourse … It’s a little long, and a bit tricky to follow, even if you read it straight through. But as the lectionary has divided it, it’s nearly impossible to grasp as a whole. Instead, we know it as a series of relatively short passages, cut up week by week to a size that, because easy to swallow, feels each week like something that makes sense.
It doesn’t.
Quite honestly, I am rather at sea regarding how to understand today’s gospel, just as the disciples were then, just as you likely are now. I mean, it’s kinda gross, right? In seminary, we learned that scholars had decided that this is all in reference to the Eucharist. That view certainly supported church theology for centuries: The bread and wine become the true body and blood of Christ through the ministrations of the priest, and if you want eternal life, you need to eat and drink of this one true transubstantiation (in church) (as often as possible).
From that point, there are then two ways to spin that understanding of this passage:
1. For a literalist, Jesus could only have been foreshadowing the establishment of the Eucharist, which would not happen until the Last Supper.
2. For most of the scholars I read, the gospel of John, which was likely not written before 70 A.D. and did not reach its final form until around 100 A.D., includes these passages to underscore the importance of the Eucharist as understood and celebrated by the nascent Church. In other words, the gospel was edited to up the ante on this passage to underscore the crucial nature of the Eucharistic feast.
The first seems … well, just a bit improbable to me. Considering the rough-and-tumble, almost completely ORAL nature of the Gospel stories, even if Jesus DID want to “foreshadow” things, he would have had to have been one hell of a director and producer to ensure that the foreshadowing statements lined up precisely with the foreshadowed event. I mean, he is divine and all that, so it’s possible, but I find it much more plausible that the Johannine community, intensely focused on justifying its practices, would have, let’s say, buffed their communal memory a bit to tidy up some of the rough edges and make it impossible for anyone to miss the point.
But, good Lord, what kind of tidying up is this? This is all still really pretty gross-sounding – I’m with the crowd on this – and definitely not kosher! What can Jesus possibly mean?
Cue up the Protestants, who are very happy to bring in a non-magical view of the Eucharist and see it really as more like a memorial. If that’s your spin on Eucharistic theology, then this is all metaphorical, right? He didn’t really mean eat his flesh and drink his blood, he just meant you should really … well … Hmmmm. What would be the metaphorical equivalent? I guess the same as the standard explanation – you should really get to church more for the Eucharist!
I’m not sure, but I don’t think we can really go down this road so blithely. I’ve spent some time this week prowling through some of the original language and textual scholars’ view on this passage, and I’ve got some less-than-easy news: I think he meant it. That is, I’m still not entirely sure WHAT Jesus meant, but there isn’t much evidence that this passage is metaphorical. The vocabulary of this gospel story does not even really admit any ambiguity, much less metaphor. Let’s take a look:
· Blood: The word used is HAIMA, which means … blood. Strong’s Dictionary says it can also refer to “things that resemble blood,” such as grape juice (really? Grape Juice?) but in fact, of the 99 times the word appears in the KJV, it never once means “grape juice” or even “wine.” It always means blood.
· Flesh: The word used is SARX, which means … flesh! As in, “the soft substance of the living body, which covers the bones …” It can also refer to things that are carnal in nature, but of the 147 times it appears in the Bible, it means “carnal” only 3 or 4 times. The rest of the time it means – flesh.
· Bread: The word used is ARTOS. Big surprise, it means bread. Of the 99 times this word appears in the Bible, it means “bread” or “loaf” 95 times. The other 4 uses are in reference to the “showbread” that were placed in the temple every Sabbath and eaten by the priests at the end of the week. OK, that’s liturgical bread, but it’s still --- bread.
· Living, life, etc.: Well, here again we have a bit of nuance to play with for a moment. There are three words used in the Greek to refer to life or living or live:
o ZOE, a word used to describe “life” but only in the most physical sense. Every living thing has “zoe”; even plants have “zoe.”
o PSYCHE, a word that arises from one of the Greek words for “breath,” but used in reference to animal life only. We have psyche as well as zoe, but so do our pets. It is nothing unique to human beings.
o PNEUMA, the word used for breath, or also for wind. This word is used to describe the Holy Spirit or the spirit of God 234 times (out of the 385 times it occurs in the Bible) and is therefore understood to refer to one’s immortal soul. This is used solely in reference to humans.
So which one do you think is the form of “life” that Jesus uses in this dialogue? If you selected PNEUMA, which also refers to the Holy Spirit or Spirit of God, I hate to tell you, but that’s wrong. Jesus is consistently using PSYCHE, clearly referring to our bodily life, not to our spiritual life or some idea of life-worth-living as opposed to just being live.
· Eat: Again, a bit of nuance, but nothing that softens what Jesus is saying – quite the opposite, in fact. There are two Greek roots usually used to refer to eating: PHAGO or TROGO. PHAGO is the most commonly used version in the New Testament. Both mean “eat,” but of the two, TROGO is the more dramatic. TROGO doesn’t just mean “eat,” it means “eat noisily,” or “gnaw (as in gnawing on a bone),” or even “chew with one’s mouth open.” Jesus is not inviting us to take a quick taste, just a nibble. Jesus is saying we have to gnaw on him like an animal would gnaw on its prey.
Roll all that up together and there really isn’t any way around it: Unless we decide Jesus was just countering his detractors by saying, “Bite me,” we must keep engaging with this text to try to understand what we must do with it. Jesus is telling us – and quite literally, I’m afraid – that we must gnaw on his flesh and slurp up his blood to ensure that our bodies have eternal life.
And that really is just gross.
Did I mention a few weeks ago that we’re in a cult? Yeah, you can see why the Romans thought so. I mean, this really is pretty gross in light of the very literal, even hyped, vocabulary.
Having found no resolution to my initial puzzle, I looked at the other readings for a bit. Humph. Thanks a lot, lectionary writers. We have a theme—the fear of God being such a great thing and all, as encapsulated in the phrase, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”— but I could not see how that ties in with the bread discourse at all.
It’s rather baffling, frankly. Jesus tells us over and over again that he has come to save us, that he and God love us, that God’s very nature is love, but that is overlaid on an ancient tradition of seeing God as terrifying. Unless we misunderstand the word, “fear,” perhaps? Alas, no. As used in Proverbs (though a verse or two later than our reading) and in the Psalm and Epistle for the day, “fear” means “fear,” “terror,” or “dread.” It’s also said to mean “moral reverence,” but this concept still has me pulling up the carpet underneath wondering whether it has always had that metaphorical meaning or whether that’s like the grape juice – it only looks like reverence when “fear” sounds too scary, just like “blood” means “grape juice” only if you’re a Methodist.
So away I go, wondering, “What is fear?” Psychologists define fear as “a basic, emotional response to a perceived threat or danger [that] triggers the body’s ‘fight-or-flight’ response, leading to physiological changes like increased heart rate and adrenaline levels.”[1] Thus, we can read the scriptures as telling us that perceiving God as a threat or danger is the beginning of wisdom. Or, as Stewart Weeks has proposed, we can recognize the ambiguirty of the Hebrew grammar involved and read the sentence as, The fear of the Lord is the first fruit or initial product of wisdom.[2] That is, perhaps perceiving God as a threat or a danger is the first evidence that we are becoming wise.
That might bear repeating: Perceiving God as a threat or a danger is the first evidence that we are becoming wise.
As I puzzled on this, I noticed something else in that article about fear. Researchers have found a strong relationship between fear and disgust. “According to a study investigating those who feared or did not fear snakes, those who experienced this fear reported high feelings of disgust [as well as] fear.”[3] The correlation between disgust and fear is reported over and over in the scholarly literature. Perhaps confusingly – perhaps not – other studies have found that humans tend to find most frightening both those reptiles and insects that disgust us and those we believe to be most beautiful.[4]
Have you ever been afraid of the Eucharist? Perhaps, during COVID, we all were? But we weren’t afraid of the Eucharist itself, only our own contagion. What about disgust? Other than today, or the other occasional times when someone may have said “flesh” and “blood” over and over, have you ever found the Eucharist disgusting? Interestingly, disgust is really not that different from fear. Disgust protects us by causing us, nearly involuntarily, to avoid stimuli associated with contamination or infection. That is, we are disgusted for the same reason we are frightened – because we have encountered something potentially life-threatening, and it’s in our evolutionary best interest to get away from it. But have any of us ever felt that about the Eucharist?
Perhaps the problem is that, for us, the Eucharist has too little fear and disgust left in it. Instead of thinking hard about gnawing off Jesus’ right arm, we see pictures of Jesus on our tortillas and in our grilled cheese.
Have we slid into a comfortable complacency in which our only thoughts about the Eucharist are whether this week’s bread is GOOD bread or whether it’s those DISGUSTING wafers, or whether the wine is drinkable or should we just dunk instead … all completely ordinary kinds of concerns – unless we’re talking about gnawing on Jesus’ arm or thigh. Of the two errors available – making the Eucharist too awesome for anyone to actually participate, or making it so comfortable that no one hesitates – I believe we make the right one here at St. Luke’s, but today’s gospel gives us a chance to remember that what Jesus is claiming here is completely extraordinary, somewhat disgusting, and yes, frightening. We naturally fear and avoid that which we associate with contamination or infection. Do we ever think about receiving the Eucharist as infecting us with Christ? Have you ever had that flash, right before you are offered the elements, that, if you do eat the bread and drink the wine, anything could happen?
If not, I wonder: Are we just like the crowd, chasing after the bread and missing the point?
Or are we still able to access the truly terrifying, even disgusting, idea that we are consuming God? If we are, perhaps that is the beginning of wisdom.
[1] https://www.simplypsychology.org/what-is-fear.html.
[2] ) Stuart Weeks, Instruction & Imagery in Proverbs 1-9 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 117-118.
[3] Id.
[4] Markéta Janovcová et al., HumanAttitude toward Reptiles: A Relationship between Fear, Disgust, and Aesthetic Preferences, Animals 2019, 9, 238 (MDPI); Jeffrey Alan Lockwood, The infested mind : why humans fear, loathe, and love insects (Oxford Press, 2013).