A Religion of the Flesh

Homily for Sunday, August 25, 2024
The Fourteenth Sunday After Pentecost
John 6:58-69

“It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless.
The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.”

Writing in the 3^rdcentury, Origen of Alexandria once compared the scriptures to a mansion in which the key to open the door to one room might well be found in another.  For example, the key to open the door to the Gospel of Matthew might be found… in the room of Deuteronomy.  Or the key to open the door to the letter to the Hebrews might be found… in the Psalter.

We have been hearing from John chapter 6 since the end of July.  If we would begin to understand John chapter 6, the key to begin to understand it is found in the book of Exodus. As in Exodus the people followed Moses in the wilderness, so in John chapter 6 do the people follow Jesus in the wilderness.  As in Exodus God miraculously fed the people with manna from heaven, so in John 6 does Jesus miraculously feed the people.  As in Exodus Moses gave the people the“bread” of the Ten Commandments (e.g., Deut 8:3; Prov 9:5), so in John chapter6 does Jesus offer himself as “the true bread” whose “words… are spirit and life” (6:32, 63).  

Exodus might help us to begin to understand John chapter 6; but if we would find a fuller understanding, it helps to look also to the room of Genesis. The key from Genesis helps to open the door to passages in John such as the opening Prologue: “In the beginning was the Word,” John writes, echoing the first words of Genesis.  “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it,” writes John, in words that echo the first day of creation in Genesis.  And John’s words, “He came to what was his own,and his own people did not accept him” (John 1:10-11), echo the fall in Genesis chapter 3.

This key from Genesis also helps to open today’s lesson from John chapter 6. “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them,” Jesus says, a mutual “abiding in”that echoes our being created in God’s image (Gen 1:26).  “The one who eats this bread will live forever,” Jesus says –  which is how God intended human life to be before the Fall. And, “Because of this many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him,” John writes in words reminiscent of Adam and Eve turning away from God and being expelled from the garden.

And then there are Jesus’ words in today’s passage that at first glance are troubling and sound as though Jesus is saying that our bodies are corrupt and sinful.  “It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless,” Jesus said.  But if we can open this passage with the key of Genesis, perhaps Jesus’ words will take on a different and deeper meaning.

First, though, it seems unlikely that by these words Jesus is telling us that our bodies are corrupt and sinful.  Recall how Jesus’ first sign in John was the changing of water into wine at a wedding –  weddings are celebrations of the flesh.  Recall in John how Jesus brought the royal official’s son back from the point of death (John 4:47), how he enabled the man who had been ill for thirty-eight years to take up his mat and walk (5:9), and how he gave sight to the man born blind (chapter 9) – in John, Jesus healed people’s bodies.  Remember, too,how in John Jesus washed the disciples’ feet and also allowed Mary to anoint his feet with nard and to wipe them with her hair (chapters 13 & 12).  When Jesus says, “It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless,” it seems unlikely that Jesus is telling us that our bodies and corrupt and sinful. Indeed, as John asserts in his opening prologue, even God took on a human body:  “The Word became flesh and lived among us,” John writes (1:14).  Given the wider context of the human body in John’s Gospel, it does not seem that in today’s passage Jesus is telling us that our bodies are corrupt and sinful.

But if we open today’s Gospel lesson with the key from Genesis, we find that Jesus’ words echo the Genesis creation account.  Just as “the words I have spoken to you are spirit and life,” said Jesus, so in Genesis at the Creation did God speak, and God’s words gave life.  If in John Jesus says, “It is the spirit that gives life,” so in Genesis, just before God made life, the “spirit” of God moved over the face of the waters (Gen1:2).  And Jesus’ words, “The flesh is useless,” bring to mind the body of Adam, molded from clay, lying limp in God’s lap before God breathed life into his nostrils (Gen 2:7).  In John when Jesus refers to “spirit,” it could be that he is referring to the same “spirit” that is in Genesis, God’s spirit that creates and gives life.

As we seek to better understand this passage, the “keys” of Genesis and Exodus can help us remember that the “gist” of John, the thrust of his Gospel, is that for John it is through Jesus that God re-creates the world and makes all things new.  If in Genesis God created the world, John writes of Jesus that, “All things came into being through him”(1:3).  If in Genesis humanity fell, John writes of Jesus that, “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son” that we might be saved (3:16 & 17).  If in Exodus the Hebrews moved through the desert with the glory of God in a tabernacle,so John writes that Jesus became flesh and “tabernacled” among us  (John 1:14). If in Exodus God fed the Hebrews in the wilderness, so in John is Jesus the true bread which comes down from heaven. And if in the Old Testament the “energy” or “seed” of a new creation was the words of the Law kept on tablets in the ark of the covenant (in the Holy of Holies in the tabernacle), so (insists John) is Jesus the ark who contains not the Torah but who himself has “words of eternal life,” so is Jesus the high priest who enters the Holy of Holies to make atonement,so is Jesus himself the tabernacle that is the center of God’s re-creating and restoring the world to God’s self.  

“It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless.  The words I have spoken to you are spirit and life.” When we hear Jesus’ words, I hope we do not hear Jesus telling us that our bodies are corrupt and sinful.  For in John, Jesus becomes flesh like us, he ministers to flesh like ours, he lives and dies in a body with us.  So that – as we see from the “keys” of Genesis and Exodus –  [so that] Jesus himself in his body might be the living Torah whose words give life; so that Jesus himself in his body might be the bread that comes down from heaven and gives life; so that in his body, “by his one oblation of himself once offered,” Jesus might make atonement for us and reconcile this world to God’s self.  

I pray that we – as did Adam and Eve before the fall in Genesis, and as Mary Magdalene did at the resurrection in the Gospel’s final chapter – [I pray that we] will not seek to hide from but rather do our best to be open to encountering Jesus, the living God.  And I pray, too, that as we week by week receive the Eucharist, we remember that ours is a religion “of the flesh” in which Jesus gathers up in his body the entirety of the Old Testament and gives himself to us so that we may have its riches, its promises and its possibilities of creation and new life, and may indeed know the “life abundant”that Jesus desires for us.