Becoming what we eat

Are you full yet? I mean, full of bread… or the image of bread. Are you full yet?

If you have been following the Gospels in our Eucharistic cycle of readings, you’d have noticed that we have taken a month-long break from the Gospel of Mark and are three-fourths of the way through the long discourse in the Gospel of John where Jesus talks about himself as living bread.

Jesus says, “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life. … Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.”

For the past four weeks, we’ve heard—in response to Jesus walking across the stormy lake and getting in the boat with us—that Jesus is bread of life. So… are you full yet?

Not by a long-shot!

I know, I know…. Jesus could well have said, “You are what you eat” and that would be that! To tell the truth, I am betting that nearly every preacher on the planet today has or will use that old saying, just as I did last week and the week before that and the week before that! But just because the idea is repetitive doesn’t make it any less true.

This is familiar territory for us Episcopalians who value Holy Communion so much. We might be tempted to say “yeah, yeah” or “are we there yet.” But I am going to invite you look closely at this part of John’s Gospel that we have been journeying through to discover what God is up to here.

If you take up that challenge, the first thing you will notice is something strange. John, unlike Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Paul, does not contain an account of the Last Supper. He does not describe how on the night before he died, Jesus took bread and wine and told his disciples to eat and drink of it, calling it his body and blood, and to keep doing it until he comes again in glory. Instead, when John talks about the part of Jesus’ Passion in the Upper Room, he recalls Jesus washing the feet of the disciples—which is not found in the other three. Does that surprise you?

So where did that Last Supper go?

Right here. Of course, the writer of the Gospel of John certainly knew, along with the rest of the Church, that Jesus’ people lived in eucharistic community, and every week did exactly what Jesus’ commanded; but instead of rehearsing the Eucharistic story again (as the other Gospels and Paul the apostle does), he gives us a commentary on what it all means!

In John, we hear Jesus talking about a profound but mysterious spiritual truth: that in the Eucharist bread and wine, through the power and spirit of God, becomes Jesus’ living presence.

John tells us that just as Jesus gave his followers physical food, as in the feeding of the 5000 a few weeks ago, he gives us spiritual food as well. The living bread that Jesus spoke of in John’s sixth chapter is something that has woven itself deeply into our everyday Gospel stories. In eucharistic community, we become people who show off the Eternal Word of God in all we do. In short, we really do become what we eat.

Dom Gregory Dix, the English priest whose scholarship on the Eucharist helped get the ball rolling on the recovery of the liturgy that we use today, once wrote,

“At the heart of it all is the eucharistic action, a thing of an absolute simplicity—the taking, blessing, breaking and giving of bread and the taking, blessing and giving of a cup of wine and water, as these were first done with their new meaning by a young Jew before and after supper with His friends on the night before He died….

“Was ever another command so obeyed? For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable human circumstance, for every conceivable human need from infancy and before it to extreme old age and after it, from the pinnacles of earthly greatness to the refuge of fugitives in the caves and dens of the earth.”

When you come to the table today, think of all the places where you have taken communion, and all the people with whom you have taken communion—people in this congregation, people you know in this diocese or elsewhere who are gathered in their own communities, people still living but you don’t see anymore, people now long dead and seen only by God. Imagine all the places in which God has been experienced through this Eucharistic meal. Jesus is the “bread that came down from heaven,” whose presence sustains people in every place and situation, who over and over again follow Jesus’ command to take, bless, break, and give.

We need this strengthening of the Body and Blood of Jesus encountered in the Eucharist now more than ever. We live in a time that prizes the self-reliant, where people confuse the snarky for the clever, and where we think we can power through life by sheer will power. We live in an era where everyone has a right to their own opinion and where people will not hesitate to get in your face to tell you how wrong you are. We live in an age that is suspicious of community and who think all the answers are found in the self. But all the noise and snarkiness and righteous rage all over cover a deep, gaping hole in our souls.

The truth is that when we are apart from God, we find it all too easy to remain apart from God and to rely instead on other, lesser answers to our deep hungers and thirsts—hungers and thirsts which only Jesus can satisfy.

It turns out that we really are what we eat; so, we must mind carefully what we eat and digest spiritually, for the health of our souls. The world offers us a lot of unhealthy diets – diets of materialism and greed and selfishness. Feeding on the word of God and partaking of the body and blood of Christ ensures life-sustaining nutrition for the spirit – food for the soul. By faith, eating the bread and wine of Holy Communion, in community steeped in prayer, scripture, and service, we take part in the process by which Christ penetrates our beings and nourishes our lives. In this sacrament, God’s very life comes to us through the elements of bread and wine so that we can have union with God. Time after time, the Eucharist re-calls us to union with God through Jesus Christ, and guides us to see and know all that is good and true and holy in us, each other, all people, and in all creation.

The early church writer Irenaeus said it this way: “The word of God, Jesus Christ, on account of his great love for [humanity], became what we are in order to make us what he is himself.”

We can never be full enough of the bread Jesus offers! The incarnate, crucified, and risen Jesus gives himself to us and through our baptisms and Eucharist; through our common life, our study of scripture; through our prayer and ministry and care for each other and creation we take him into ourselves. Eating Christ’s body and blood in the Holy Eucharist and sacramental community nourishes us and transforms us so that we become more and more what he is. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again…because it’s true! We truly are what we eat.