Have you ever eaten something, only to think to yourself, shortly afterwards, “I shouldn’t have had that”?  I vividly remember some tamales in Dallas, once.  Has it occurred to you that what is supposed to keep us alive—food and drink—seems to be killing us?  I don’t need a show of hands, but how many of you are diabetic?  How many people do you know who are diabetic?  My mother and father each had several health problems, but my non-professional opinion is that it was diabetes that killed them both.  We know there are different kinds of diabetes; we know there are risk factors for diabetes.  One risk factor for one type of diabetes is what we put into our bodies: food and drink.  Food and drink are supposed to keep us alive; now, they seem to be killing us.

Real food, and real drink.  True food, and true drink.  Food and drink for life.  What is real food, true food?  Whatever it is, it must at least be that which promotes and sustains life and does not make us sick.  Jesus has been doing something staggering, these past few Sundays.  Jesus is saying that he himself is true food, true drink.  If we want to know what it is to feed upon and drink that which truly promotes life, truly sustains life, and does not, cannot, make us sick, let us eat the bread of Christ and drink the drink he offers.  He isn’t referring to his teaching.  The bread is his flesh, the drink his blood.  Jesus tells us we must eat his flesh and drink his blood, if we wish to live.  Wow.  What?!

Have you ever tried to talk about Jesus with someone who wasn’t actually Christian?  Have you encountered anger when trying to talk with someone about Jesus?  There aren’t too many people who are just neutral about Jesus.  Some refuse to hear anything about him.  Others listen with smug contempt, sometimes on the inside as well as on the outside.  There are those who feign boredom and total lack of interest, as if we were talking about the biathlon or 4^th dynasty Chinese macroeconomics.

There is not a lot of neutrality when it comes to Jesus.  There are those who say yes, and those who say, “I don’t think so,” less or more aggressively.

If Jesus just said things like love one another, be nice, don’t tell others how to live their lives, we could probably tolerate him.  Today, Jesus has pulled the pin on an angry argument.  Give us his flesh to eat?  We have to eat his flesh?  Drink his blood?  What nonsense is this?  What insanity is this?  Jesus doesn’t back off or tone down what he is saying.  He insists upon it, quite simply, quite plainly, as though he were telling the truth.  People either believe that Jesus is telling the truth, or that he is sadly mistaken, or they aren’t quite sure.  I suppose it all depends on the gap between what someone wants to hear and what she or he is hearing.

Some are looking to hear where true life can be found, real life.  They know that politics isn’t going to deliver, nor economics, nor law, nor wealth, nor technology, nor pleasure, not even those isolated epiphanies of art, and certainly not the many things we do to ourselves that end up making us sick, poisoning us, killing us.  Shoving things into our bodies hoping for something those things can’t accomplish.

“I am telling you the truth,” Jesus says—don’t you just hate it when he says that?  How does he know?  Who is he, that he talks like this?  Who talks like this?—“if you do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you will not have life in yourselves” (6:53).  Then, as now, the very thought of eating human flesh, and of drinking human blood, was repulsive.  He must mean something else!  The way of life he demonstrates, for example.

The problem is that they are not taking Jesus spiritually.  They have not perceived spiritually, so their minds and hearts are not yet able to receive, spiritually, what Jesus is saying.  Those hearing Jesus talk like this are still stuck, angrily wondering who talks like this—“truth,” “flesh, “blood,” “Son of Man”—who is this man who talks like this?  Who is Jesus?

That is the question each of us has to answer.  He is not an exceptionally enlightened man.  He is not leading the march for redistribution.  He is not calling the oppressed to revolution.  He is not an earthly king, although he is king, king of the cosmos.  He is not a prophet; he is the Word of God.  He was in the beginning, with God, and he is God.  St. John tries, as best he can within the limits of language and our understanding, to tell us about this at the beginning of his account.  Not long after, another John, John the Baptist, upon seeing Jesus, speaks of him in this way: “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” (Jn 1:29, see also 1:36).

The Lamb of God.  Now what does that mean?  In ancient Israel, there were many flocks and many lambs.  Lambs were often used for one special purpose: sacrifice.  If you have read in the Old Testament, you have probably come across some description of sacrifice to God.  When John the Baptist speaks of Jesus as the Lamb of God, that would mean only one thing to people in the ancient world: here was a sacrifice, one given in sacrifice.  Only, who is doing the giving?  Lamb of God . . . of . . . belonging to God—of course, because we offer the sacrifice to God, it becomes God’s, Lamb of God; only, we didn’t offer Christ up as a sacrifice, we just executed him as a common criminal.  Who does the giving, then?  Beloved, John calls Jesus the Lamb of God because John perceives that this is the one whom God gives, gives to take away the sin of the world.

In ancient Israel, sacrifice was a sacred, holy occasion, a solemn occasion, to be sure, but also an occasion to celebrate and rejoice in God, who provides forgiveness, who shows grace, mercy, and love.  It isn’t as if the Old Testament knows nothing of such things.  The books of the Old Testament are continually praising God for His forgiveness, grace, mercy, and love.  God gives the lamb that God offers to God.  Jesus, the lamb, the sacrifice who takes away the sin of the world, is God, the eternal Son of the eternal Father: Son, Father—words God gives us to help us to begin to understand, which is as much as we can do, on this side of eternity, begin to understand.

But that’s not all we can do.  We can receive the sacrifice; we can partake.  Our life here leads to death.  The death of Christ, the lamb of God, leads to life.  The eternal Son, the Word of God, is the one by whom all things came into being.  In Christ is life.  We receive that life when we perceive Christ.  We perceive by faith, not by sight.  We receive that life when we have it, when we have him, inside us, spiritually, incorporated, spiritually, by faith.

What it sounds like Jesus is saying to his astonished, disbelieving listeners there that day is that it is not enough, and has never been enough, to have God over us or even beside us: God must be in us.  If God is not in us, we do not have life in us: all we have is sickness unto death, and no “healthy eating” or “healthy living” will change that.  Not healthy eating or healthy living—and how many billions are spent on that, every year?—but holy eating, holy living.

Something that does not come through in our translation is the emphasis Jesus is putting on himself in what he is telling us.  In what John has written down, Jesus is placing distinct emphasis upon himself: “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood lives in me, and I live in him” (6:56).  “[W]hoever eats me will live because of me” (6:57).  The only way you will have life in and with the Father is in and with Jesus Christ.  Not by being a good person.  Not by having all the officially approved views about things.  “For just as the Father has life in himself, so He has granted the Son also to have life in himself” (5:26).  Jesus later tells those gathered around him in wonder and in anger: “know and understand that the Father is in me and I am in the Father” (10:38, see also 14:11).  If the Father is in the Son, and if the Son is in us . . . God is truly writing His Word upon our hearts.  That Word, that life, this God, is real, true food, and real, true drink, that gives life, promotes life, and sustains life.  Good master, what must I do to inherit eternal life?  Live in me and you will live because of me.  How do I live in you?  Eat my flesh; drink my blood.

So far as I know, no one took a bite out of the body of Jesus, once it was taken down from the cross.  No one, so far as I know, drank the blood from his gory wounds.  As, by faith, we receive and accept his sacrifice, as, by faith, we participate in the sacrifice through eating the bread and drinking the wine—juice—we have life.  We receive and accept, we feed and incorporate what we have tasted and swallowed, by the Spirit and faith.  Jesus isn’t looking for us to follow the rules.  He beckons to us to follow him.

In our times, much is made of the life of Christ, and rightly so.  As he walked and taught among us, he was showing us the way to live for the kingdom.  Jesus did not come to be the Lecturer of God; he came as the Lamb of God.  He came for sinners to die.  Sinners such as you, and I.  Sinners have a bad habit of looking to the world to fulfill them and to give them life; they continue to hope that the world can do this.  We have eaten of what the world has to offer; we have drunk what the world has to offer, and we see all around us, and feel in our own bodies, that what the world offers is death, painted pretty, perhaps, promising us so very much, all we could possibly desire, and failing us so often so miserably.

Above all, the world wants us to believe, demands that we believe, that the world is all there is.  The world.  What is this “world” you’re always talking about pastor?  People, people without God, life without God, pain and despair without God, death without God.  The world is like junk food—oh, we crave it, crunch crunch, munch munch, glug glug; we expect it to feed our hunger, hunger which is never finally, of the body, always finally of the heart, but the world doesn’t feed us.  It gives the illusion of feeding us.  Our lives, like our bodies, desperately try to get some nutrition from it, but there’s none to be had, there, and we sicken and we die because we do not eat true food, we do not drink true drink.  And Jesus came to us, came for us, to change that.  What does that tell you about Jesus?  What does that tell you about God?  And what does that tell you about us?

And to Jesus Christ, who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests of his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever.