You Are What You Eat

Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you…John 6: 51-58

Whoa!!! Imagine hearing these words for the first time without any previous knowledge of the Eucharist.  We know that some of those gathered in the crowd were startled by what Jesus was saying, to the point that they stopped following him. Jesus doesn’t tone down his rhetoric or even hint that he might be speaking metaphorically. No, he said what he did in the way he did so that his words would not be easily forgotten. He wanted to challenge his followers to process his words so that they would resonate in a place beyond the intellect. I wonder if after years of listening to so many Gospel readings and sermons on the Eucharist, have we become jaded to the true essence of their meaning?

Imagine you are attending church for the first time as this passage is read!

Imagine hearing Jesus say these words. How would you react???

Once again John relies on mystical words to speak to each of us in that place in which the personal images of reality and life itself reside. John invites us to close our eyes and picture what being in a relationship with God really means. Note, I use the word “picture,” not “understand,” in an effort to prompt our imagination and senses to feel the words as a palpable, sensory experience, and know what being in a relationship with God actually feels like, tastes like, and smells like. This is at the essence of our being and what we mean when we say “and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” God fully shared our humanity through Jesus as we through Jesus, fully share in God’s divinity. Anything less than that relationship with God would be reduced to mere acquaintance.

St. Augustine used the phrase “visible words” to help explain the connection between the sacraments and our daily lives. Baptism and Communion are visible, physical manifestations of our faith. In other words, the sacraments are the embodiment of the gospel in the material form of water, bread, and wine. They serve as the physical presence of what we have heard and believe because we are physical creatures. And so the gospel is proclaimed so that we may hear it, and this very same gospel comes alive to us in the Eucharist as we taste, touch and feel it with our hands, our mouths and our bodies.