by Nanette Sawyer
Gospel Reading: John 6:56-69
For Sunday, August 26, 2012: Year B—Ordinary 21
It bothers me that this pericope begins with Jesus talking about people eating his flesh and drinking his blood. I’ve been so trained to hear biblical verses in a literal way that I cringe at the gruesome nature of these words. 
The Obstacle of Literalism
This should be a clue that we are not meant to hear these words in literal ways. But it’s challenging to get past this obstacle of literalism and into the broad open fields of rich symbolic teaching that Jesus does.
Fleshiness is important to Christian theology. Incarnation is central to how we think about, encounter, and (try to) understand God. The incarnation is about living in flesh, and Jesus says that those who eat his incarnate holiness actually take him inside themselves. He lived in flesh when he spoke these words, but now he lives in the flesh, the bodies, of his followers.
Imbibing the embodied Christ, taking him into our core experience—this is how we step into the life Jesus lived, trying to follow God in the Way Jesus did.
Useless Flesh?
This flesh that Jesus talks about is very important and very useful indeed. So why does Jesus turn around a few sentences later and say that “the flesh is useless”? I must say that I find my flesh very useful, and I believe that Jesus found flesh useful too, when he was walking around in it.
Despite the centrality of incarnation—the embodiment of holiness—to Christian understanding, statements like “the flesh is useless” have been taken out of context and used historically to devalue the fleshiness of human existence.
Did Jesus mean that spirit=good and flesh=bad? After all, in this very text Jesus has been teaching about the importance of his own flesh and blood, as well as the importance of his human followers embodying him and abiding in him.
A Rehearsal of Transformation
Of the four gospels, John’s is the only one in which Jesus does not sit at table on the night of his arrest and speak the words that institute communion. He doesn’t say, “this is my body, given for you, take and eat of it all of you, do this in remembrance of me…” Instead he says, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.”
Here Jesus doesn’t speak of remembrance; he speaks about transformation of identity. He talks about the nature of reality, the meaning behind the meaning, the essence of things.
While Greek philosophers had a strongly dualistic understanding of the world, contemporary physics and spiritual understandings diminish the sense of distinction between the physical and spiritual aspects of existence. As Barbara Brown Taylor wrote in An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith, “My life depends on ignoring all touted distinctions between the secular and the sacred, the physical and the spiritual, the body and the soul. What is saving my life now is becoming more fully human, trusting that there is no way to God apart from real life in the real world.”
The Hardest Question
It is through our bodies that we encounter God’s creation. It is with our bodies that we can stand for justice, as Jesus did. It is in our bodies that we experience God’s love and through which we can share God’s grace with the world.
It seems to me that flesh is very important and useful in the spiritual life. Which leads me to the hardest question this text raises: In what way is flesh useless?
Nanette Sawyer is the founding pastor of Grace Commons (formerly known as Wicker Park Grace), an emerging faith community that gathers in an art gallery on the west side of Chicago. Ordained in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), she has blogged at The Christian Century’s lectionary blog, the Emergent Village Blog at Patheos, and at nanettesawyer.com. She has a Masters of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School and an MDiv from McCormick Theological Studies, where she has also taught as adjunct faculty. She is the author of Hospitality: The Sacred Art.
