Bread of Life III -- Reclaiming Eucharist:  Proper 15, Year B

1 Kings 2:10-12, 3:3-14; Proverbs 9:1-6; Psalm 111; Psalm 34:9-14; Ephesians 5:15-20; John 6:51-58

The Elves repeat John 6:51 from last week: “I am the life-giving bread that came down from heaven.  Anyone who eats this bread will live forever.  And the bread that I will give for the world’s life is my mortal flesh.”  John’s Jesus speaks in metaphor that does not appear in the synoptic gospels.  The language of eating and drinking Jesus’s flesh and blood is not found elsewhere, and is highly likely to be an anachronistic reference to the bread and wine of the Christian Eucharist.  The Five Gospels, p. 421.  If scholars are correct, the portion of John’s Gospel we are concentrating on for Proper 15 was added at a later stage.  These additions, which seem to be a carefully worded argument, expand upon the metaphor that John’s Jesus applies to himself.  John’s point is so important to Christian orthodoxy that verses 56-58 will be repeated next week:  “Those who feed on my mortal flesh and drink my blood are part of me, and I am part of them.  The Father of life sent me, and I have life because of the Father.  Just so, anyone who feeds on me will have life because of me.  This is the bread that comes down from heaven.  Unlike your ancestors who ate manna and then died, anyone who feeds on this bread will live forever.”

The language and metaphor of eating, ingesting, taking in, is graphic and compelling:  Are we going to swallow the lies?  Do we have the stomach for finishing the job?  Classically, when the heroine encounters the demon at the bottom of the well, if the proper word is not spoken, the demon will eat her.  Wall Street executives eat bankers for lunch.  Don’t like what I’m doing or saying?  “Bite me!”   John’s Jesus knew that he would forfeit his own life in the service of God’s justice-compassion.  That is not an unreasonable assumption for the historical Jesus to have made.  He consistently taught the subversion of Empire, and participation in God’s Covenant.  For the writer of John’s Gospel to have Jesus say that “the bread that I will give for the world’s life is my mortal flesh” is to use the most powerful imagery humans can devise to express the kind of total courage and commitment required to transform human life.  Ironically, Christian Eucharist has all too often been interpreted just as literally as “the Jews” seem to treat Jesus’s metaphor in verse 52:  “How can this fellow give us his mortal flesh to eat?”  In order for John’s Gospel to continue to speak to post-modern minds, we must break out of the strongbox that Christian orthodox dogma has been reinforcing for two millennia.

Because of the usual cherry-picking by the Elves, we do not read about the struggle for the throne of David between the sons of David’s other concubines and Bathsheba, the mother of Solomon (1 Kings 1).  Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet play major roles in assuring the ascendence of Solomon.  But it is Bathsheba – backed up by Nathan – who reports that David’s son Adonijah has usurped the throne with the help of David’s own general Joab and the priest Abiathar.  Then David remembers a promise he made (off stage) to Bathsheba that “your son Solomon shall succeed me as king.”  Maybe that was part of the “consolation” he gave to Bathsheba after the death of their first child (2 Samuel 12:24).  Once again, a woman has orchestrated the fulfillment of God’s will.  (See Genesis 16; Genesis 21; 30; 31:19; Exodus 2:1-11; Ruth; 1 Samuel 1-2, etc., not to mention Luke 1 and 2.)  David proclaims Solomon King as soon as Nathan confirms Adonijah’s treachery.  The feminine contribution to the story should not be ignored.  In the Book of Proverbs, attributed to Solomon, “Wisdom” is personified as woman. “Wisdom” is Shekinah – the feminine aspect of the Hebrew God – created at the beginning of God’s work (Proverbs 8:22).  

The Elves have us skip all that background and go directly first to the death of King David, and then to Solomon’s Prayer for Wisdom.  Solomon confirms his participation in the Covenant and worships on the highest of the high places.  Personified Wisdom calls from those same highest places:  You that are immature – who have not yet realized the consequences of your actions – Come here.  Lady Wisdom has mixed her wine and send out her servant-girls to invite in the wise ones who will “eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed.”  Eat the bread of wisdom, drink the wine of Covenant, and walk the path of understanding.  But by the time whoever wrote the letter to the Christians in Ephesus set ink to vellum, wisdom had become conventional:  “Be careful then how you live, not as unwise people but as wise . . . Do not get drunk with wine . . . but be filled with the Spirit.”  Finally, Jesus says, I am the bread of life . . . my flesh is real food, and my blood real drink.”  

This is not about the establishment of the “Lord’s Supper.”  It is about Jesus the Christ as the Wisdom of God.  

In 1 Corinthians 1:18-25, Paul says:

        “‘T]o those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ [is] the power of God and the wisdom of God.’  In other words, to those who agree to participate in the restoration of God’s realm of distributive justice-compassion, regardless of who they may be, the crucified Christ symbolizes the power and the wisdom of God’s kenotic  action in the world. . . . Wisdom is personified as the feminine spirit who was with God from the beginning, who pitched her tents among the people, who calls from the heights beside the way.  When Paul says that ‘Christ [is] the power and the wisdom of God,’ he is drawing on ancient and revered Jewish tradition.  In 1 Corinthians 2:8, he says ‘Yet among the mature we do speak wisdom . . . But we speak God’s wisdom, secret and hidden, which God decreed before the ages for our glory.’   ‘Lay aside immaturity,’ Wisdom says, ‘and live and walk in the way of insight’ (Proverbs 9:6; see, especially, Proverbs 8).

        “God’s wisdom is revealed through God’s kenotic, radically self-denying spirit, which was embodied in Jesus.  When Jesus died, that same spirit was then extended to those who can accept it.  This is craziness to people caught up in the normalcy of social hierarchy and control.  It is liberation to those who are able to discern that it is spiritual truth.  They (we) ‘have the mind of Christ.’” (Repent!  It’s the Law!  3d Sunday in Lent.)

Before David died, he charged Solomon with keeping the Covenant with God (1 Kings 2:1-4): “Be strong, be courageous, and keep the charge of the Lord you God, walking in his ways and keeping his statutes, his commandments, his ordinances, and his testimonies, as it is written in the law of Moses, so that you may prosper in all that you do and wherever you turn.  Then the Lord will establish his word that he spoke concerning me: ‘If your heirs take heed to their way, to walk before me in faithfulness with all their heart and with all their soul, there shall not fail you a successor on the throne of Israel.’”

Behind the Covenant stands Wisdom, calling from the highest point in the City.  Eat my bread, she says, drink my wine, and become wise instead of foolish.  In other words, “Get with the program!” In Proverbs 8 Wisdom calls: “Listen closely, for what I say is worth hearing, and I will tell you what is right; . . . To revere Our God is to abhor evil.  I despise pride and arrogance, corrupt behavior and deceptive words. . . . I walk the upright way, the path of justice. . . . Our God gave birth to me at the beginning, before the first acts of creation . . . And so, . . . happy are you when you keep my ways!  Take my instruction seriously and grow wise; don’t neglect my lessons. . For  you who find me find life, and earn the favor of Our God; but you who lose me lose your own souls, for all who hate me love death.”  The Inclusive Hebrew Scriptures (Priests for Equality, 1999) .

John’s Jesus calls for that Covenant to be renewed by making it part of our own flesh and blood.  His words echo the words of Lady Wisdom:  “I swear to God, if you don’t eat the son of Adam’s mortal flesh and drink his blood, you don’t possess life.”  When we (Christian or not) take in the life and teachings of Jesus, it is a whole-life, whole-being commitment to bringing God’s kingdom – God’s rule – God’s realm of distributive justice-compassion into everyday human existence.  “Those who feed on my mortal flesh and drink my blood are part of me, and I am part of them . . .”

Eucharist is a radical, archetypal, transformational act.  It is not a sign or a pledge to feel sorry for petty sin, such as “greed . . . obscene, silly, and vulgar talk” which has no “inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God” (Ephesians 5:3-6).  Eucharist is no less than participation in the ongoing Great Work:  the radical abandonment of self-interest – willing sacrifice – of mind, heart, blood, and bone in order to keep the Covenant.

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