If that sounds offensive to us, perhaps we have to realize that some people do have difficulty with the Gospel of John on any number of grounds and that one of the most common is its wordiness.  Its redundancy.  Sometimes the writer of John, whether providing words that Jesus speaks, or trying to explain clearly what he himself is trying to say, seems to over speak.  But I think there’s no way to get around that.  That’s the writer’s style, and if we become frustrated with his repetitiveness, we also savor his beautiful poetry and rich metaphorical imagery.

Aside from the writer’s style, there are other good reasons for John’s many words.  One reason he may say the same thing several times in only slightly different ways is that what he’s trying to say is difficult to articulate.  But by the time our passage for this morning begins I think we’ve gotten the idea that when Jesus says that he is the bread come down from heaven he is not talking about flour, water, and yeast.  He is saying that he himself is God’s nourishment for us.  That if we follow Jesus as the way, the truth, and the life – and those are words only from the Gospel of John – we will come to know God as we never would have otherwise.  Bread is a metaphor for Jesus’ life-giving nourishment for our souls.

In verse 51, however, the image takes a new and sharper turn.  Jesus begins by saying again, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven.  Whoever eats of this bread will live forever.”  But then he moves in a new direction with a somewhat startling proclamation: “and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”  What does he mean by this?  And, further, what does he mean when he says that his followers must eat his flesh and drink his blood if they are to be true to him?  To our ears this sounds like cannibalism, like something outrageous and beyond comprehension. 

Well, it was even more outrageous for those who heard the words in Jesus’ time.  Remember Nicodemus, a Jewish religious leader who had come to see Jesus at night so that no one would know that he was a secret follower and wanted to know more?  Remember when Jesus told him that he would have to be born again and Nicodemus thought Jesus was being ridiculous, suggesting that he’d have to do the impossible and be born physically again from his mother’s womb?  That’s a story from John that carries, of course, a symbolic meaning.  Jesus meant that Nicodemus would have to be born anew in the spirit in order to follow him in the flesh.  But Nicodemus had thought Jesus absurd and ridiculous.

And this morning’s passage tells us that other leaders of the religious establishment began to quarrel with each other and with Jesus when he told them that they would have to eat his flesh and drink his blood.  That was ridiculous, beyond the pale of common sense and reason.  What craziness was this man talking about?

But even more than his craziness was his offensiveness.  By talking about eating flesh – and especially drinking blood – Jesus offended the heart of the dietary laws integral to the Jewish tradition.  Blood from animals sacrificed in religious rituals, for instance, was to be buried in the ground.  People were not to touch blood and certainly not to ingest it. 

We know now, of course, that Jesus was not speaking literally of eating his flesh and drinking his blood.  These words, in effect, are the words of institution of the Lord’s Supper in the Gospel of John.  The fourth Gospel doesn’t tell the story of the Last Supper the way the other three Gospels do.  In John when Jesus talks about eating bread and drinking blood he is talking about the Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper, Communion, the gathering around the table of their Lord in remembrance of him and in hopes of his coming again to save them.  It’s the same thing we do two thousand years later.  And few people today hearing our liturgy would suspect that we are engaging in acts of cannibalism. 

But when the Gospel of John was written – near the end of the first century, about seventy years or so following Jesus’ death – his loyal followers in various places were experiencing a crisis of separation from their neighbors and families.  Within synagogues those who followed Jesus were more and more being pushed out by the stronger, more traditional, followers of Judaism.  What might have appeared at one time to be a reform movement within Judaism was in the time of the Gospel of John becoming more clearly a religious schism, a split in the tradition.  The followers of Jesus would come to be called Christian, and they would move from the synagogues and eventually form their own churches.  Traditional Judaism would retain control of the synagogues. 

What we are witnesses to in the Gospel of John is the beginning of this separation.  That’s why the writer often uses the term the Jews to mean those holding the reins of power in the synagogues.  Many who struggled against the Jews were Jews themselves whose allegiance to Jesus Christ had caused them to part company not only with many aspects of the tradition but even with their own families and friends.  Can you only imagine the depth of emotion that surrounded this transition?  Few of us have lived through that kind of pain in which a religious belief or conviction we follow leads us to separate from our own family.  But that’s precisely what happened over and over again in families of Jesus’ time when some stayed with the old and others went with the new.

I think it’s difficult enough in our time – even in the best of circumstances – when people who have grown up in one tradition move to another.  We have any number of members in this congregation, for instance, who grew up in the Roman Catholic Church.  Perhaps they have become Presbyterian for the sake of their marriage or perhaps because they fell away from their tradition at some time along the way and rediscovered a spiritual satisfaction here.  Whatever the reason, there’s a part of us that often feels forever split between old and new when such movement has taken place.  As pastor I hope always to be sensitive to that and to extend compassion for the pain.

In Jesus’ time it must have been excruciatingly painful when families split over allegiance to Jesus or to the faith of their ancestors.  And with that pain and difficulty arose also great conflict.  It seems to me that what we’re hearing in the Gospel of John is the first sound of anti-Judaism in the Christian community.  What Amy Jill-Levine talked about when she was with us last spring.  And curiously – sadly – some of this feeling emanates even unintentionally from some Jewish converts to Christianity.

Let’s back up just a bit and look at it this way.  What Jesus says in John is, even to some of his own disciples, difficult.  What Jesus says about being born again or eating his flesh and drinking his blood constitutes a kind of riddle.  The answer we Christians now give to the riddle is this: the way Jesus will give “bread” or “flesh” – that is, how he will give himself – for the life of the world is to be “lifted up” on the cross.  In that apparent defeat is his victory, his glorification by God, whom he calls his own Father. 

There were those who understood this then and began to live their lives accordingly.  And there were those who didn’t get it or did not change ways that needed changing.  There were also those who may have understood but remained where they were.  Those who felt the need to separate from the past, however, were those who began to see the world in a different way.  Many began to see it somewhat strangely, as if they were alienated from it.  That’s part of what Jesus meant when he said his followers are in the world, but not of it.  They live there, but their ultimate loyalty lies elsewhere. 

Take this one step further and you see people who feel alienated from the world and begin to hate the world that they feel hates them.  This is particularly easy to do when you’re the guy on the bottom.  You begin to hate those whom you feel hate you and use their power against you.  You begin to define yourself negatively.  Others are against you.  As an early Jewish Christian, for instance, you can lash out against the Jews, your family and friends who hold the dominant power in the synagogue and in the tradition.

The temptation to define yourself as against the outsider is one thing when you’re the one on the bottom without much power.  It becomes quite another thing when the power shifts and you use your power to assault those whom you have learned to hate.  The Christian movement over the centuries – let’s be honest – has often given in to the temptation to label as enemy the outsider over whom it can wield its own considerable power.  Unfortunately, for Christianity grown from small sect to powerful church, the Gospel of John often labels as its enemy, simply and now vaguely, the Jews. 

Wayne Meeks, a respected contemporary Christian theologian and social thinker, says it this way:  “Once the followers of Jesus were no longer a tiny sect within the larger Jewish communities, their stories took on new meanings.  Their identification of their enemies as ‘the Jews’ had a different resonance when used by communities that were themselves mostly Gentile, and when those communities became the beneficiaries of imperial power, rather than its victims, that resonance could become deadly.  The history of Christian anti-Judaism hangs over every modern reading of the Gospel of John, requiring that we ask – in the context of the whole canon of Scripture and the whole story of God’s love for the world epitomized for many by a verse from this very Gospel – how its sectarian telling of the story can be made liberating rather than confining.  The challenge this Gospel puts to us is to allow its paradoxes to make us, as Jesus made his disciples, ‘not belong to the world,’ while, precisely by means of this skeptical estrangement, to manifest in that same world the strange truth of God’s love.”

The verse Meeks refers to, of course, is John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that [God] gave [God’s] only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

Let us accept that gift and follow in the way, the truth, and the life that gift brings.  Let us feast on the flesh and blood of God come among us.  Let us receive with gratitude and joy the promise of eternal life for there is yet more bread to come our way if we will but look up and embrace it as it falls from heaven itself.

Amen.