August 11, Ordinary 19B, (John 6:35, 41–51)
We need to wrestle with the meaning of Jesus’ flesh as bread, bread we are to consume.
Mayra rivera dedicates a full chapter of Poetics of the Flesh to the ways the word and concept of flesh appear in the Gospel of John. In the theologian’s reflection on John 6, she refuses to let readers turn away from the various visceral connections that Jesus draws between bread and life and his own flesh, noting our temptation to avoid the scandal of these strange words and their meaning—not by rejecting them outright but by rendering them “mere” symbols, metaphorical stand-ins for abstract and immaterial truths. Perhaps those who rejected Jesus on account of this extended bread discourse did so not because they misunderstood him but because they were willing to take him at his word. And perhaps the many Christians who have accepted these words have done so by refusing to allow them to mean anything like what they say.
What they say is this: his flesh is bread. We are to eat the bread that is his flesh. Eating his flesh is eating the bread of life; in order to live forever, one must eat the bread that Christ gives for the life of the world. Which is, as we’ve established, his flesh.
Yet despite our being given so many different versions of the statement, it remains so easy to try to make it say something else, a vaguer and more generic truth. Jesus sustains us. We yearn for what Jesus offers. What Jesus offers is something we need daily, not just once. But in so many of these cases, where Jesus says “flesh,” over and over and over, we substitute his teachings or his life or the idea of him. He is surely both Word and flesh, but here it is not words with which he promises to feed the world, it is with his body. To try to get around it is not to find a way to accept it, it is to give up on accepting it. Jesus will not offer us the words we would prefer to hear or ideas that are easier for us to make sense of and be comfortable with. There is a reason that it is this speech that causes him to lose so many of his followers, to the point that he asks the Twelve if they, too, intend to leave him.
