John 6:51-59
“Gross”
August 15, 2021 – Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost
My mother enjoyed quoting the first couple lines of Dixon Lanier Merritt’s limerick about pelicans,
A wonderful bird is the Pelican.
His beak can hold more than his belly can.
In the middle ages, Christians revered pelicans for something more than that big pouch under their bills. A female pelican was a symbol of Jesus. There was a common belief that, in times when food was short, a mother pelican would pierce her breast with her large beak and feed her children with her own blood. It made people think of our Lord saying, as He does over and over in our text today, “eat my flesh and drink my blood.”
Both the pelican story and what Jesus said sound a little gross to modern, Protestant ears. We’re quite ready to spiritualize the whole idea and move quickly from actual eating of flesh and drinking of blood to some metaphorical thought of Jesus nourishing our souls, or something like that. But it would be well not to forget the original grossness of it all. So, drawing on a little meditation by Lutheran pastor Walter Wangerin, Jr., [1] I’m going to talk about spiders today, as well as pelicans.
Spiders have unpleasant eating habits. They have no stomachs, no place within to digest food. A spider is equipped by our mysterious Creator to digest food on the outside. When it captures an insect like a fly in its web, it punctures its captive and injects the digestive juices a spider has no stomach for. The spider’s meal digests itself, liquefying within. Then the spider pierces that fly again and sucks up that nourishing juice.
Spiders are often lonely creatures, especially females. Female spiders can be solitary for the unpleasant reason that they eat the male after mating. Many female spiders also abandon their young. They lay their eggs in a sac, maybe leave some food nearby in the form of a paralyzed insect, then go their merry widow way.
Most of us have a natural revulsion to the very form of spiders. Many people find them gross, horrible, terrifying. If talk of how spiders eat makes you queasy or disgusted, you’ve got a good idea of how the congregation in the synagogue felt as they listened to Jesus speak in the synagogue in Capernaum. According to verse 59, the conversation had moved from an initial encounter by the lake back in verse 25 to a dialogue taking place in the synagogue in town.
In synagogues, visiting rabbis were invited to read the Scripture for the day and then to comment on it. Jesus did that in Luke’s Gospel, chapter 4. Here He likely read the text from Exodus that’s been in the background of this chapter all along, the account of Moses and the manna. But His comments were offensive to the congregation. He said stuff more gross than talking in church about the mating and feeding habits of spiders.
Once again, we started our reading with where we left off last Sunday, repeating verse 51 in which Jesus told them that “the bread I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” That didn’t sit well with the synagogue congregation. In verse 52 they began to ask themselves what Jesus could possibly mean: “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”
Cannibalism is repugnant to most human beings. The thought of eating human flesh makes us gulp and swallow bile, nauseated at the thought. That was true for those Jews in Capernaum and for their Greek neighbors, who were in the habit of labeling far-off, barbarian people as cannibals in order to highlight their own superiority. A spider who eats its mate does not disgust us near as much as a person who eats another human being.
Jesus upped the disgust factor. Verse 53 begins with the fourth time Jesus says, “Very truly, I tell you.” The original words are “Amen, amen.” It’s Greek derived from Hebrew which means something like “so be it.” In Hebrew it was used to affirm the truth of what’s just been said. We say it now at the end of prayers. But Jesus was the only one to put the word first, to highlight what our English translation gets at. He was about to speak the very truth, the Gospel truth, truth which mattered beyond all else.
Jesus said that truth-intensifying “Amen, amen I tell you,” then disgusted His Jewish audience by continuing, “unless you eat the flesh of the son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” Old Testament law stringently forbade Israel to eat blood of any animal. More than once, particularly in Leviticus 17:10, they are told that any Israelite or visiting foreigner who eats blood is to be banished, “cut off” from the rest of the people. If the suggestion that His own flesh was to be bread for consumption were not enough, Jesus totally grossed out those Jewish people with talk about drinking His blood.
It’s all about life. Leviticus 17:11 says “the life of the flesh is in the blood.” So blood of animals is not to be consumed, but poured out in an atonement offering. The life of the sacrificial animal is exchanged for human life. Jesus said that without eating His flesh and drinking His blood, “you have no life in you.” In verse 54 He puts it positively, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life.”
It’s all about life. Without the flesh and blood of Jesus, we’re dead. As Wangerin suggests, we’re more like spiders than we’d like to admit. Spiders inject their victims with a paralyzing venom. We are good at injecting others with a paralyzing word, or a killing look, or abuse or neglect that enters into another soul and eats them up inside. Our mutual venomous activity leaves us like spider victims, whole and almost life-like on the outside, but dead and liquefied on the inside. We do it even to those we love. They do it to us.
Without eating the flesh and drinking the blood of Jesus, there is no life in us, even if we look pretty good on the outside. We are dead in our sins, in both the sins we have done to others and the ones they have done to us. We need another infusion, not of venom, but of life, if there is to be any hope for us. That’s what Jesus offers here.
The old expression is that it’s a “dog-eat-dog world.” Our normal way of life is to compete, and to consume one another in the process. In business, in education, in sports, even in relationships, it’s eat or get eaten. The strongest take what they need from others and leave the empty skin and the gnawed bones behind. It’s the philosophy of Ayn Rand whom some politicians admire. More than we might admit, it’s the philosophy of us all.
Jesus came to offer something different. That’s why He keeps repeating His point here. When He said it again in verse 54, His word for “eat” changed. Instead of the usual expression, it’s something like “munch” or “gnaw” or “chew.” It’s a gross word, a word that describes animals eating. It’s how you and I are to eat the flesh, the life of Jesus.
Jesus wouldn’t let up. He knew perfectly well He grossed out the Jews in that synagogue, but He kept talking, like I’m going to keep talking about spiders. So in verse 55 He said, “for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink,” and then verse 56, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.” Four times Jesus repeated that thought of eating His flesh and drinking His blood. Maybe, like the synagogue crowd, we ought to be sitting up, paying attention, trying to get over our disgust, and thinking how this can all be true.
There’s a different kind of spider. In Britain there’s the lady bird spider. In the southern Mediterranean there is stegodyphus lineatus. In both species the mothers don’t abandon their young. The lady bird spider makes a burrow and carefully tends her egg sac. She moves it to the top of the burrow during the warm day, and brings it to the bottom at night, to regulate its temperature. Stegodyphus carries her egg sac around on her back, fighting off aggressive males who try to destroy the eggs.
For both these unique spiders, the mother does something greater for her little brood. As lady bird’s children are about to hatch, she lies down in the bottom of the burrow and dies so that her body will be her children’s first meal. Stegodyphus, upon which Wangerin reflected, releases venom into her own body, liquefying herself so that baby spiders hatching from the sac on her back can swarm over her and suck her dry. Wangerin wrote, “She becomes the stomach for her children, and she herself the food.” These spider mothers give themselves for the lives of their children.
Jesus’ message is that He is a different kind of man, a different sort of human being. Jesus came into this “eat or be eaten” world, and refused to do it. He never spoke a word designed to inject poison in another heart. He didn’t nourish His own well-being by consuming the lives of those around Him. Jesus didn’t come to eat, but to be eaten, eaten up in love. Jesus is God giving up Himself for the life of His children.
That’s why Jesus said, “I am the bread of life.” He meant His own flesh to be food for us, His own blood to be drink for us. He meant to give up His life on the Cross, to let all the venom and sin of our lives pierce Him through with nails and a spear. He made Himself into a meal so we can hatch out of sin and death, be born again feeding on Him.
We hear “eat my body and drink my blood,” and think of Holy Communion, which is exactly right. No Christian, whether John’s first readers or we today, can read those words and not think of what Jesus said in Matthew, Mark, Luke and I Corinthians 11 as He handed around bread and wine at the Last Supper. “This is my body.” “This is my blood.”
Unfortunately, like the crowd in Capernaum, Christians argue about what Jesus meant. We try to make this passage solve our theological questions about Communion. Like fundamentalists claim to do, Roman Catholics take Jesus’ words here absolutely literally. Catholics believe the bread and the wine actually become the body and blood of Jesus while still appearing as bread and wine. On the other hand, some Protestants wish so much to deny the Catholic view that they insist absolutely nothing happens to the bread and wine. They are merely signs to help us remember what Jesus did for us.
In the middle are a lot of other Christians who believe there is more to it than mere symbol, like many in the Covenant Church. Though we can’t say exactly how, we believe that in Holy Communion Jesus comes to us, that we are nourished by Jesus, that we are doing what He asked us to do when He said, “eat my flesh and drink my blood.”
This text isn’t going to settle those questions. It only teaches us beyond all doubt that we cannot live, there cannot be any life in us, unless we feed on Jesus. Holy Communion is the sacramental act of worship which makes that truth visible and real more than anything else we do or say. Ultimately our job is not to explain the mystery of Communion, but to feed on and be nourished by our Lord who gave Himself as the Bread of Life.
Jesus said, “Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me.” There’s a real chain of life being expressed here. Jesus lives because of the Father, and we live because of Jesus. The eternal, holy life of God is passed on to us through Jesus Christ when we feed on Him. And more.
Baby spiders grow up to be like their mothers. That’s the truth of genetics. Those infant lady birds or stegodyphi will carry the traits they inherited. The females will become mothers themselves and in turn give their flesh for their babies, for their children.
When we believe in Jesus and feed on Christ, we are meant to grow and mature into people who do like He did, who give our own lives to nourish others. Jesus carried a Cross, and asked us each to carry a cross and follow Him. He said that students are to be like the Teacher, servants like the Master. We are to live lives of sacrifice and love. We are to give our lives away, because He gave us His life.
You could boil our mission as a church down to just that: to be nourished by Jesus and to nourish others. Jesus feeds us and we feed each other and the world. We do so literally, with bread and other food, as well as with service like health care, clean water, counseling.
In verse 58, Jesus finished His remarks in the synagogue by recapping what He’d said before, “This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever.” Jesus came as a different kind of bread to give us a different kind of life. Not the “eat or be eaten” sort of life that ends in death, but a new life, a life of love, love that lasts for eternity.
As Walter Wangerin taught me, there are spiders that are different from all the rest, who give their lives for their children. There is a Man who is different from all the rest, who gave His life for the life of the world. When we follow that Man, when we believe in Him, when we feed on Him, we become people who are different from all the rest.
In our sanctuary, a Communion Table is at the center of our worship to remind us we are there to be nourished by Jesus whether or not we are receiving Communion that day. We come to eat and be transformed, to grow more like Him, like Him as He gave Himself up, like Him in sacrificing our lives for Him and for others.
As Jesus came not to eat but to be eaten, we do the same. We come not just to be fed but to feed others. We do that literally in gifts to the food bank or by serving a meal to unhoused people or to someone who is sick in our own congregation. In a couple weeks some of you will stand and fill cups of water for children and families waiting to receive backpacks and shoes during Project Hope.
You feed others more figuratively with offerings that allow our church to offer electricity and water to a mother and daughter living here on our property. You do it by volunteering in a community event, or by taking care of someone else’s child. You nourish others by providing a listening ear, a shoulder on which to cry, an encouraging or comforting word when someone’s world is coming apart. You offer a life-giving meal to those around you by wearing a mask and getting vaccinated, not just for yourself but for people you protect from whatever infection you might carry.
Bit by bit, day by day, we eat the food that is Jesus and His life changes our lives, making us more like Him, less selfish, more generous, less inclined to look for our own mouths to be filled and more ready to help fill the lives of others who are hungry.
It’s not easy. It can feel as gross as spiders to not get what you want and to put the needs of others first. It may be gross, but it’s also beautiful. As I said, in the middle ages, the church imagined a lovelier, gentler image than spiders, that gentle pelican piercing her breast and feeding her babies with her own blood. Thomas Aquinas called Jesus our “Good Pelican” in his poem, Adoro te devote. Here is how Gerard Manley Hopkins put two verses of it into English poetry:
O thou our reminder of Christ crucified,
Living Bread, the life of us for whom he died,
Lend this life to me then: feed and feast my mind,
There be thou the sweetness [we were] meant to find.
Bring the tender tale true of the Pelican;
Bathe me, Jesu Lord, in what Thy bosom ran
Blood whereof a single drop has power to win
All the world forgiveness of its world of sin.
It’s not true about pelicans. They don’t feed their babies with their blood. But it’s absolutely true about Jesus. And it can be true about us, if we will only let it be. Come and feed on the life of Jesus Christ. Believe in Him and be nourished by His sacrifice for you. And in the strength of that food, may you grow more and more like the Good Spider, the Good Pelican, who gave His life for you so that you could live forever like Him.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2021 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
[1] “Modern Hexameron: De Aranea” in Ragman and Other Cries of Faith (Harper Collins: San Francisco, 1994), pp. 25-27.