To Whom Would We Go?

 

John 6:60-71

“To whom would we go?”

Exactly.

This story is about the time that a whole bunch of Jesus’ disciples choked on the idea that they would have to eat his flesh and drink his blood to be included in eternal life. The idea was too hard, and they abandoned him.

I choked on this idea too. It took a long time for me to realize that Christ wasn’t talking about a decision we have to make about whether or not to be spiritual cannibals. It isn’t like that at all.

We all eat and drink God every minute, whether we are aware of it or not. That’s what “in God we live and move and have being” means.

That also means that we eat each other. It’s how the universe is made. We are all connected at the deepest level. We sustain one another, we understand one another, we flow in and around and through one another in this noumenal medium we are pleased to call God.

There’s another way of looking at it that results from observing the metaphor of bread and wine. Both are fermented, and Jesus pointed out several times how fermentation is a mystery in and of itself, and even went so far as to say that the effect or action of the Realm of Heaven is like that of yeast.

Yeast is alive, yeast is everywhere, yeast alters the composition of food, and when we eat and drink fermented things we discover that they delight us, and do our bodies more good.

When I hear “eat my flesh” I understand that nothing is ever lost, that the yeast of love and freedom continually moves through creation. The seed becomes the ear of wheat, and the grain is ground to flour to become the bread that we eat. So, we become the Bread of Life, and it becomes us.

When I hear, “drink my blood,” I understand that no matter how much is spilled, it never runs dry. As the rain falls to water the earth and rises to the heavens to spill itself again, the wine of the Word runs through our veins as the lifeblood of Creation.

Peter had it exactly right: there isn’t any other place to go.

I imagine the hollow feeling in Jesus’ chest when he realized that people had misunderstood him so profoundly that they felt like they had to run away. I see the look on his face as he turned to his closest friends and asked them if they were going to abandon him too. It took bone-headed Peter to reduce it down to the most basic level:

“It doesn’t matter whether we understand what you meant— all we know is that everything we used to understand is long gone, and you’re all we’ve got now. It doesn’t even matter whether we’re happy or not. It’s too late for us now— there’s no going back. All we’ve got left is trust.”