“I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
Just as his first listeners had a hard time with what Jesus said, even today his words may seem difficult, if not gross. It will get yet more graphic next Sunday when you will hear Jesus declaring this: “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” We know he is not advocating cannibalism, but still…Christ’s words give us pause. What was he talking about?
Here’s a story to get us started in our exploration of his words. A terrified four year old woke up in night convinced that in the darkness monsters were waiting to grab her. She ran to her parent’s bedroom, wailing in fear. Her mother calmed her down, and taking her hand, led her back to her room, and tried to comfort the child by saying, “You don’t need to be afraid, you’re not alone here. God is in the room with you.” And the child replied, “I know that God is here, but I need someone in this room who has some skin!”
Perhaps then, we could think of Jesus as God with skin on. John’s gospel insists that the Word (that is the Second Person of the Trinity by whom and through whom all things were made) became flesh (in Greek, the word is sarx). Sarx is more than a matter of, say, meat. Sarx is a word for the human condition, a plunge into and acceptance of humanity just as humanity was and still is: entering flesh and blood, to be sure, but beyond that taking on the glorious things humanity accomplishes with awesome intelligence and creativity, and the nastiness, cruelty, hypocrisy, immorality, and arrogance, we practice in utterly godlessness ways. The whole plateful—or the whole loaf—of the human condition, all wrapped up in Christ, deeply accepted by him: that is what we are also asked to accept--to stomach.
Jesus’ early critics could not swallow the concept of God in a real flesh and blood human being. They began to complain about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” They were saying, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” In other words, “Hey, we know his family and his background. Sure, we see that he is a gifted speaker and leader—but come on, he is not a Messiah, not some kind of god. He is just like us.”
Unlike his first critics, we church folks find that we can believe that Jesus embodied the eternal Christ, the Word, the Second person of the Trinity, and we find in his life and teaching great hope and wisdom. What may be harder for us to swallow is that after Jesus suffered, died, was buried, rose again and ascended into heaven the Christ plunged into the human condition all the more. In giving up the body of one man, the resurrection life of the Christ is now extended and present through time and space in the church, which, as St. Paul so clearly taught, is the body of Christ. In other words, the actual church, the gatherings of the faithful everywhere, like here, right now, is God present with skin on. For many people then and now, that, too, is hard to swallow! Too much sarx!
The very, very incarnational “sarxy” quality of the church as the body of the resurrected Christ leads present day outsiders and sometimes even we insiders rather to conclude of any ordinary congregation: “Hey, I know what I’m like and I know what other members are like—not exactly very Christ-like most of the time! How can we be the skin of God, how can we literally be the body of Christ?” We put Christ on a pedestal, pure and above all ordinary human stuff. Yet the gospel says, Christ is in precisely the all too human stuff.
The gospel calls us to be honest. The actual human condition—both the faithfulness and the rebellious sarx motivated behaviors—is inescapably present in the very real church which, as Luther so brilliantly stated, is always and everywhere the gathering of people who are simultaneously saints and sinners. For that reason anyone who’s been with the church for any time at all knows that it simply a fantasy that if you join a congregation you are going to live happily ever after. To quote Luther, “This is most certainly true!”
The problem is, it’s the ordinary sins and failings of the church that draws too much of our attention, instead of the faithful ministries and mission and compassion God’s people practice everyday. Dwelling on the dark side may cloud our perception of that deeper life—which prompted one smart aleck, to say in a moment deep cynicism: “The church would be great if weren’t for the people!”
The truth is this: if we want God, want Christ, then we must not only join the church, but we must also come to accept it as it is and, especially when things get rough, what can sometimes be the hardest thing of all: stay in the church, when everything inside us cries out, “I’ve had enough! I just can’t stand this anymore!”
But the church is always something both incredibly glorious and incredibly damaged. There never has been and never will be on this earth a perfect church, a problem free church, a church with no hypocrites, a church where no one is ever mean or nasty or gets hurt.
Even so, if we’re here, it’s because God has drawn us here, and the Holy Spirit has made us parts of the body of Christ. We journey and serve together, both wonderfully and imperfectly. In this sarx, in this our altogether human condition, this common-union becomes a loaf of the bread of heaven, fragrant with Christ’s resurrection. In this church we are forever joined to Christ, and in him we die and rise to new life daily—broken again and again to be offered as nourishment, hope, and Life for the world.
If we can swallow that, if we accept as reality that Christ is truly present because we sinner-saints are present, then by God’s grace we truly taste the bread of life—this sarx of the Christ. Then during the communion, hearing the words, “This is my body, given for you; this is my blood, shed for you,” we may look around and see, feel, and know that beyond the signs of the bread and the wine, are the bodies, faces, hands, feet, and voices in which God dwells. God present with skin on. Here and now and always--until the last day.
