Hard Words, Good News
The 14th Sunday after Pentecost
Sunday, August 25, Proper 16B
1 Kings 8:22-30, 41-43; Ephesians 6:10-20; John 6:56-69
Years ago, a colleague in a nearby parish asked if I would officiate at a wedding in his church because he was going to be out of town. When the couple had asked if they could get married on Memorial Day weekend, he initially told them yes, but, months later, after much of the wedding had been planned, my colleague learned that his family was going out of town, so he asked if I get him out of a jam. I wasn’t going anywhere, so I was happy to help.
When I meet with a couple for premarital counseling, our first session focuses mostly on getting to know each other, but we also spend a little time reading through the marriage liturgy as a way of exploring what the Episcopal Church teaches about marriage. In our denomination, one of the very few canonical requirements for marriage preparation is that the clergy must instruct the couple as to the nature and purpose of marriage. After that, the couple is required to sign what is called the Declaration of Intention, which essentially states that the purpose of marriage is mutual joy, help and comfort, and the gift and heritage of children and that marriage is unconditional, mutual, exclusive, faithful, and lifelong.
As we started to wrap up our first session, I asked the couple to sign the Declaration of Intention, but the groom-to-be simply said, “I can’t sign that.” I was confused. It is literally a form that all couples are required to sign. There isn’t an opportunity for nuance or discussion. “Why not?” I asked. “Because I’m an atheist,” he replied. Because the form used religious language to describe the nature and purpose of marriage, he wouldn’t sign it.
A three-fold wave of anxiety, frustration, and resentment washed over me. I had agreed to do the wedding as a favor for my friend, and I didn’t want to let him down, but I was angry at myself for not thinking to ask him whether the couple would be difficult. I told them I’d think about what to do and that we could talk about it next time. The next day, I asked my boss what he thought I should do, explaining the groom-to-be’s atheistic crisis of conscience. My boss said, “Tell him he sounds like an Episcopalian who doesn’t know it yet.” His words were a simultaneously insightful and damning assessment of both the situation at hand and the Episcopal Church as a whole. As a denomination that prioritizes inclusion over instruction, we are a church that likes identifying with Jesus as long as we don’t have to sign something. And today’s exchange between Jesus and his disciples suggests that we’re in good company.
For five weeks in a row, the lectionary has given us gospel lessons from John 6, the part of the gospel in which Jesus describes himself as the Bread of Life. Actually, because we celebrated the Transfiguration as a baptismal feast, we skipped one of those weeks, but we’ve been stuck in John 6 so long that I wouldn’t blame you for not remembering that. “I am the Bread of Life,” Jesus says, “…the bread that came down from heaven…The bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh…Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them…The one who eats this bread will live forever.”
It’s a lot. I won’t lie to you and tell you that I’m disappointed that this is the last week in the series. I find most of John 6 a bit tedious and repetitive. I suppose get a little impatient with longwinded preachers, even Jesus. But today we’ve finally come to the part of the discourse that involves Episcopalians—those followers of Jesus who don’t have a problem as long as Jesus is squaring off against his opponents but aren’t so sure they want to follow him if it means signing off on all of the strange things he says.
Jesus was a provocateur. One of his favorite pedagogical techniques is hyperbole—overstating a truth about God or God’s people that forces us to reexamine our assumptions about the faith. So far in the Bread of Life discourse, Jesus has managed to alienate curious newcomers and religious hardliners. He has dismissed would-be disciples as only interested in a free lunch, and he has challenged those leaders who refused to accept that the son of Mary and Joseph could also be the one who has come down from heaven.
Those committed followers who had been with him for a while would have been familiar with these tactics. When the outsiders and opponents asked Jesus to clarify what he meant when he identified himself as the Bread of Life, instead of explaining the metaphor, he doubled down on the literal take that his flesh and his blood were real food and real drink. Surely that would be enough to chase away the half-hearted and the naysayers.
But this time Jesus seems to have gone too far. As John writes, “When many of his disciples heard it, they said, ‘This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?’” My favorite part is the root of the word that is translated for us as “difficult.” It literally means “inflexible” or “unyielding.” Is there anything we Episcopalians like less than a doctrinally rigid perspective? Yet that’s exactly what is at issue here. John notes that the disciples were complaining about this among themselves, using the same word to describe their consternation as that of Jesus’ religious opponents. Apparently, when pressed far enough, we disciples aren’t all that different from them.
We are foolish to think that Jesus’ challenging teachings aren’t meant to challenge us. I don’t like the Bread of Life discourse, which is exactly why I need to read it and study it and ask God to help me receive it until I become the very thing this difficult text is trying to convey. We do not belong to God because we understand and agree with Jesus. We belong to God because we abide in Christ and Christ abides in us. His response to those disciples who cannot be conformed to this inflexible teaching is to ask them to imagine something beyond their imaginations: “What if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before?” Might that be enough to win us over, too?
The key to receiving what Jesus is offering us is not to try to bring the wisdom of God down to the earth where we can comprehend it but to ask God to transport us into heaven where our hearts and minds can be opened to the limitless possibilities of God. That’s the hardest part of all—acknowledging that that we don’t come to those insights on our own but only when God draws us to Godself. And we admit that truth every time we celebrate the Holy Eucharist.
When we share in Holy Communion, we ask God to nourish us with the spiritual food of Christ’s Body and Blood. This is far more than an act of remembrance. It is an act of renewing our participation in the divine life. We treat the consecrated bread and wine with reverence, not because they have magically become Christ’s flesh and blood, but because they are the physical and earthly means by which we partake in the spiritual and heavenly feeding of our souls. Because we have been united with Christ in the waters of Baptism, a part of us is present with him in heaven, and we nourish that part of ourselves with the real Body of Christ whenever we come to this table as the Body of Christ. In this holy food of bread and wine, therefore, Christ is present among us just as we are present with him in heaven, and, whenever we share this bread and this cup, we ask God to draw us more fully into that place—more completely into the divine life where the wisdom of God can fill us.
If that sounds like more than you signed on for, you’re not alone. No one said that being a Christian would be easy, least of all Jesus. At the end of the passage, Jesus asks Peter and the twelve, “Do you also wish to go away?” There is no antagonism in his question, only the longing and pastoral concern of a rabbi who wants to be sure that he hasn’t alienated his closest friends.
Jesus isn’t trying to push us away. He wants us to know God’s love, and he knows that we need God’s help to find it. As the prayer book reminds us, Jesus stretched out his arms of love on the hard wood of the cross that all might come within his saving embrace. Back when I was meeting with that couple, I wish I had been wise enough to use words like that, but I am thankful for the ethos of gracious welcome that fills our tradition and that somehow enabled that groom to sign the Declaration even if he wasn’t sure he meant it.
It’s always easier to apply Jesus’ challenging teachings to someone else, but, if his love is meant for us as well, then his tough teachings are, too. If you’re having a hard time receiving the difficult truths that Jesus is offering you, then you’ve come to the right place. Holy Communion is not a reward for the sanctified but a prescription for sick souls. This is the place where God helps us become that which we seek to become. This is where the Body of Christ becomes the Body of Christ as we receive the Body of Christ.
© 2024 The Rev. Evan D. Garner
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church – Fayetteville, Arkansas
