In her short story “The River,” Flannery O’Connor depicts a child who actually drowns when trying to baptize himself in a river. After this startling story was published, someone asked O’Connor about this grotesque depiction of baptism. O’Connor’s critics thought this story was too extreme. But her goal was to remind her readers of how vividly powerful baptism is, that the Bible really does tell us it involves the death of the old self and the resurrection of a new self in Christ. So when people criticized her for such a startling depiction, O’Connor replied, “In the land of the nearly blind, you need to draw really big caricatures.”
In John 6, and particularly in this snippet of verses, Jesus is also drawing a really big caricature to make his point. Jesus seems quite determined to magnify the shock value of his words here via the specific vocabulary he used. Up until verse 54 he had used the more ordinary Greek word for “to eat” (phagein) but in verse 54 in reaction to the questions being raised by the crowd. Jesus toggles over to the lesser used verb of trogein, which appears to have carried with it the connotation of “chewing with your mouth open.” Picture a cow chewing his cud. Picture an elementary school child smacking up a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, her mouth yawning open widely between each smacking chew. As other kids would say to such a child, “That’s gross!”
Commentator Raymond Brown says that across the centuries, a few commentators have disputed the idea that there was anything particularly distinctive about trogein over against the more common phagein. But Brown and others are convinced that this is very intentional on John’s part, magnifying the vividness of the real “feeding” that takes place in the Eucharistic meal and that Jesus and John so clearly intends here. If you chew with your mouth open, there is no doubting the food that is in your mouth. You cannot pretend to be chewing something if people can see into your mouth. That kind of eating shows you the real deal, the actual substance of what’s in a person’s mouth.
So in one sense Jesus may have been purposely exaggerating the “Yuck!” factor here. He has already knocked people off kilter by suggesting something that sounds vaguely cannibalistic and now seems intent on making that already gross-sounding scenario more intensely repugnant. Jesus is not bandying around empty words or rhetoric.
No, what Jesus is talking about really is a matter of life or death. To have any Life worth talking about, you really do need to enter into the Life of the Father through the Son. What Jesus is offering here is nothing short of an access to the Life of the Triune God. Think of that! Jesus is saying that union with him, signified by Eucharistic participation in Christ, allows us to enter into the rhythms of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, into the Life that existed before anything like the Creation existed and that even now is the bright center to everything in the universe.
Most weeks when we come to church and when we take to ourselves the bread and the wine of the Holy Supper, our thoughts are far too small. We cannot exaggerate what we’re getting through that meal. Mostly our imaginations are simply not big enough, our expectations are pedestrian and trivial. What Jesus is offering us is a slice of Eternal Life, of the very Life force that pulses as the heartbeat to everything that exists, that ever existed, or that ever will exist.
In his commentary on John, Frederick Dale Bruner points out that Jesus does not want to entertain us with interesting ideas or thoughts. He wants to touch us, to become part of the whole human person because making us into whole new human beings is precisely what Jesus is all about. This in turn led Bruner to remember the John Denver love song “Annie’s Song” in which Denver croons about having his senses filled up, giving his life to his lover, drowning in laughter and being consumed.
You fill up my senses, like a night in a forest
Like the mountains in springtime, like a walk in the rain
Like a storm in the desert, like a sleepy blue ocean
You fill up my senses, come fill me again.
Something of that total filling-up and getting engulfed by something or by someone is just what Jesus means.
That’s why he didn’t cash out his own rhetoric here by smirking a bit before finally saying, “OK, OK, folks, I know you are scandalized by what I seem to be saying here. I know you’re thinking I am talking about a big backyard barbeque at which people will be gnawing not on chicken wings and pork ribs but my own arms and these here ribs under my tunic. But listen here: I am talking symbolically. Haven’t y’all ever heard of a metaphor? What I want you to envision here are little wafers of bread and little cups of wine that will stand for my flesh and blood. So calm down. I’m not talking about anything real here.”
No, that wouldn’t have helped. Not really. In truth, the last thing we’d want Jesus to do is scale all this back so as to make it neat and tidy and acceptable. Of course, it came with a cost. As some of us know, in the verses that round out John 6 we learn that a lot of the people who made up Jesus’s wider group of disciples walked away from Jesus in disgust. This was just too much, too over the top. I mean, who talks like this?
In the Simon and Garfunkel song Mrs. Robinson, we hear the line, “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you. What’s that you say, Mrs. Robinson? Joltin’ Joe has left and gone away.” Originally part of the soundtrack for the film The Graduate, the song became one of the 1960s’ best-known iconic ballads.
But in a 60 Minutes interview years back the songwriter Paul Simon mentioned that some time after the song was released, he received a letter from Joe DiMaggio in which DiMaggio expressed his befuddlement at what in the world that song could mean. DiMaggio wrote, “What do you mean ‘Where have I gone?’ I haven’t gone anywhere! I’m still around. I’m selling Mr. Coffee machines.” Then Mr. Simon smiled wryly at Mike Wallace and remarked, “Obviously Mr. DiMaggio is not accustomed to thinking of himself as a metaphor.”
But then, who is? Most, if not all, of us see ourselves as real people with literal, descriptive identities. For instance, I am a pastor, a professor, a husband, a father, a committee member, a volunteer, a son. These are all straightforward descriptions of who I am in relation to the people around me in life. Like most of you, I cannot readily conceive of myself as a symbol for something, as a kind of metaphor that represents something beyond myself. And if I started to say something like, “I am the antibody that shields my family from the virus of secularism.” If I said that you might start to back away slowly from me and try not to make any sudden movements.
Well Jesus talking this way caused some who had followed him to go back home and throw in the towel on this odd rabbi. But again, we need to be glad Jesus did not back-pedal or soften his rhetoric to make it all, well, more palatable. We do a pretty good job of that on our own as it is. As I said a bit ago, just witness the average communion service today. A lot of the time the sacrament has about all the wonder of making out a grocery list. What we need is to be stretched, to be pushed out of our comfort zone, to be shaken out of our complacency so as to see again the radical nature of faith and of the union with Christ it makes possible by the grace of God.
I wonder if there is a lesson here for preachers like me but really for all of us. It seems that we are forever doing exactly what we should be glad Jesus did not do here. Namely, we domesticate the gospel, we make what is hard apparently simple, we reduce the grace of God to a little helper added to our own efforts. In the legal realm, a cardinal rule for lawyers in a courtroom is “Never ask a question to which you don’t already know the answer.” That might be a good idea for lawyers but I myself do not think that is a very good idea for preachers. In the mysteries of faith, I believe we do now and then need to ask questions to which we don’t know the answer because there are some things we need to leave in the hands of our sovereign God.
Or as Fred Craddock noted in one of his last sermons some years ago before becoming ill with Parkinson’s Disease. Craddock said, too many sermons give the distinct impression that the preacher has walked all the way around God and had taken pictures. Too many sermons are neatly folded, all the ends tucked in, no mystery, no grandeur. And hence such sermons leave no one scratching their head or with mouth agape over the awesome nature of God’s glory. I would rather, Craddock noted, I would rather have a faith with some size to it, with some grandeur, with some awe-inspiring mystery.
Those of us who preach maybe need to pay more attention to the Savior whom we proclaim and take a cue, at least now and then, from his own willingness to radicalize the gospel in words chock-full of the mind-boggling things of God.
As we conclude, I want to relate what I believe may be the most amazing piece of cinema I’ve ever seen, and my friend, Roy Anker, who is an expert on cinema, agrees. It is the final scene of Robert Benton’s lyric film 1985 film Places in the Heart.
Set in Texas in the 1930s, the movie portrays Edna Spalding, who is suddenly widowed in the film’s opening scene when a drunk young black boy named Wylie accidentally shoots Edna’s husband who is the town sheriff to death. Wylie is quickly lynched by the white townsfolk even as Edna is left with a load of debt thick enough to choke a horse and two very young children to raise.
Eventually Edna meets Moze, a black migrant farmer who knows how to raise cotton and is hired by Edna to make enough money to save herself from foreclosure at the hands of the local but very heartless banker. And it works. Edna does make enough money to save her farm. But the white townsfolk are not happy that Moze is around and so, dressed up in their Ku Klux Klan outfits, they come to the farm one night, beat Moze up, and force him to flee.
As Edna watches Moze leave—and as the question of whether she could be successful again next year without Moze’s help hovers in the air—it looks like the movie is over. But then there is one last scene, in church. It’s Sunday morning. The pastor delivers a sermon on I Corinthians 13 and then they serve communion. And that’s where the film becomes surreal and deeply, deeply theological. First you notice that the church that had been at best half full in earlier shots of the congregation is now quite full. But then, to the startlement of us viewers, suddenly we see the bread and wine being taken by a woman who had died in a tornado earlier in the film. The town prostitute is there, too, sitting next to the banker who had been so unfeeling in the face of Edna’s fear of foreclosure.
Then we see members of the KKK taking the Lord’s Supper and, what’s more, they pass the trays of bread and wine to no less than the black man, Moze, who is suddenly sitting there in church with Edna and her family. Finally, Edna takes the bread and wine and passes it to her husband who is suddenly sitting next to her again and, next to him, Wylie, the young black boy who had killed him and been killed himself as a result. As the sheriff and Wylie eat the bread and drink the wine, they look at each other and say, “The peace of God.”
It’s a mystical and mysterious but moving glimpse of the “eternal life” of which Jesus speaks in our text. When these people share in the Lord’s Supper, they begin to experience something of the eternal life Jesus promises to those who somehow eat his flesh and drink his blood. And yes, the film seems to be saying, this sacrament really just is this amazing, every time, if only we have the spiritual eyes to see it. “I am the bread of life” Jesus said. Thanks be to God! Amen.