Treasuring words of eternal life

‘Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.’. (John 6:68)

John 6:56-69 (Year B: Trinity+12)

                                     pic: paulawiseman.com

All of human life is there..

After five Sundays we come to the end of the sixth chapter of the Gospel of St John.   To use a much clichéd term ‘all of human life is there’. Indeed. Hope, puzzlement, joy, wonder, betrayal, confusion, trust.  We can find ourselves in one of the crowd or one of the 12 closest disciples of Jesus or one of the bystanders. The words are challenging. It sounds very much like a meditation from an early Christian community already familiar with a primitive form of the Eucharist or Holy Communion. Whatever the exact circumstances in which this was written and what lies behind it we can trust that, somehow, as with the rest of the scripture it represents God speaking to us today – not by means of some direct transcript or video clip but through the mediation of memory, story and evolving understanding. We are in holy company listening to the living word and this word is at work in our hearts each time we seek to listen and to be open to the word of God.

The Bread of Heaven which Jesus gives is his body. But, this also includes his words because they are full of spirit and life (verse 63).  This can give a new meaning and freshness to the phrase ‘Give us today our daily bread’ in the prayer Our Father.  Our daily bread is the life-giving and spirit-filled word of God that we carry around with us in our heads and in our hearts. This word can shape and make us no matter what has happened before in our lives and what might turn up in the time that remains to us on this earth.

Clinging to the Word

Let’s be practical.  What words make a difference to our lives and those of others? We speak and we listen every day. By some reckonings the average person speaks between 7,000 and 20,000 words a day (with a clear gender difference which may cast light on life expectancy differences!). That’s a lot of words in a lifetime – perhaps half a million or so in a long lifetime. How many of these words that remain to us will be T.H.I.N.K.?

True

Helpful

Inspiring

Necessary

Kind

In the flow of conversation, thinking and moving about, particular words have a strong resonance. And this is all the more obvious when words are put to music. Among some seniors memories of songs and their words can be the last remaining words when other memories fade.  Words are powerful and life-giving. It would not be incorrect to say that we live and move and have our being in words and, for us Christians, in Jesus Christ who is the living word of God and in which all life has its being.

God lives in us through his word.  Elsewhere, scripture tells us that we can live in God and God in us through belief in Jesus and through the practice of love (1 John 3:23-24). A mutual indwelling is possible like the vine and its branches (refer to the passage John 15:5 and No Lone Rangers for a previous blog on this site). Grafted on to the living vine we live, grow, flourish as we are joined to the whole living vine.

John 6 and later controversies

At the end of this important chapter we have encountered Jesus in his word and in his sacramental signs of living bread which is his body. This not an easy teaching to grasp or an easy one to explain and accept as witnessed by the tone of controversy in verses 60-69.  It might be all to convenient to turn this passage into a harbinger of reformation and post-reformation controversies many centuries later. We would be missing the point if we were to focus on a relatively modern controversy about how to explain the mystery of the Lord’s table. At the centre of this discourse is the unity of life, word and living bread. We do not know just how but we believe all the same.

To grasp the meaning of Jesus’ words requires more than academic erudition. It requires an open heart and mind and even a certain type of ‘spiritual intelligence’ or imagination. This is a gift and not everyone has it.  Along life’s path we have choices to make and we are free to walk away or stay. But staying involves its own challenges and pain because to stay faithful means renouncing other options and living with some measure of uncertainty, questioning and struggle.

At the risk of venturing into a disputed area where I am not fully competent there follows a brief ‘scientific’ detour in the next paragraph.

Applied to the case of the eucharist and, especially, some of the controversies that arose in the Christian family some 1,000 to 1,500 years later we need take a leaf from this discourse of John.  The irony is that St Thomas Acquinas borrowed terminology form Aristotelean Greek philosophy to correct certain ‘physical’ interpretations of the eucharist that were threatening at the time. The term used by Acquines was transubstantion (or transsubstantiatio in latin) – the idea that the elements of bread and wine undergo a change into the body and blood of Christ in such manner that we merely see, taste and touch bread and wine but in reality these are no longer bread and wine. Other explanations include ‘consubstantiation’ (Luther – although he didn’t quite use this term). And among the Eastern Catholics the term metousiosis is used (literally means a change in ousios or inner reality in the Greek term).

At this point it is no harm to remind ourselves that (a) Jesus probably spoke in Aramaic to his disciples and listeners while the stories about Jesus and what he said were written down in Greek many decades later, (b) fortunately or unfortunately Jesus did not speak in English – not even 16^th century English as found in the King James version of the Bible, (c) a doctrine about what happens to the physical content and structure of bread and wine is not outlined either in the Gospel of John or anywhere else in the New Testament, (d) to my knowledge the actual term and expression of transubstantiation is not used anywhere in the liturgies of the Roman Catholic or uniate Churches in full communion with Rome just as metousiosis as a term is not used in the Divine Liturgies in the East.

None of this is to deny the significance and usefulness of theological and personal intellectual inquiry about these matters. However, we risk missing the point of John 6 and the entire Gospel by going down the wrong track into mysteries that remain mysteries. The author of ‘In the Imitation of Christ’ probably got just about right some 600 year ago when he warns: ‘Beware of curious and vain examination of this most profound Sacrament, if you do not wish to be plunged into the depths of doubt’ (Book 4).  

And there lies the scandal and the offence among the hearers of Jesus in John 6:60-65 – to accept the challenging words of Jesus which link his spiritual food with his word, his life and that life that we are asked to share with the whole world.