“This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?”
We’ve been walking through John 6, and the “hard saying” in question is the teaching that we can have life only through eating the flesh and drinking the blood of the Son of Man. This morning, we might also add the “hard sayings” of St. Paul in Ephesians 5 on wives submitting to their husbands and husbands loving their wives. That one is so hard that the lectionary permits us to cut it out. But just avoiding difficult scriptural passages rarely creates a healthy spiritual climate, so I think we’d better take it seriously.
I’ll come back to Ephesians in a moment. For now, let’s consider again what exactly is so “hard” about the Lord’s teaching on the Eucharist. Last week, we recalled how the Jewish consciousness would likely recoil at the idea of drinking blood. So this is the first and most obvious difficulty. Many centuries later, after long meditation on the Eucharist, we can speak with precision about the Blessed Sacrament—about what it is, about what it isn’t. For example, it is the real and substantial body and blood of the incarnate Son of God, but it is not ordinary human flesh that is ordinarily bloody and . . . well, fleshy. Its reality is hidden. But none of that is known by the disciples. When Jesus suggests, in today’s section, that no one can come to him unless drawn by the Father, part of what he means is that receiving this teaching requires a supernatural faith, which can only later come to deeper understanding. All of this in some ways may have deepened the scandal. First, this guy tells everyone to drink his blood. Next, his insane disciples all just accept this statement as if it were no big deal.
To be fair, if you follow the personalities of the disciples, it’s pretty unlikely that they accepted it in some kind of naïve and blind way. I suspect that there were a lot of questions, and even more confused facial expressions than were recorded by John. But even if they had questions or doubts, they knew at this point that Jesus was worth it all, that somehow the only way to understand was to plunge deeper into the mystery of this man and his teaching.
The second difficulty or hardness about the Lord’s “saying” centers less on the immediate offensiveness of flesh and blood and more on the suggestion, from a spiritual leader, that true spiritual life has something definite to do with the body.
Not that mainstream first-century Jewish culture was afraid of bodies. It was no mere “spiritual” religion, but a set of complex bodily and social practices. Yet, despite inhabiting this world, Jesus does persistently push against it, especially in his interactions with the scribes and Pharisees. His famous sermon on the mount can be summarized as a radical spiritualization of the law—don’t just worry about murder; worry about hatred. Don’t just avoid adultery; avoid all lust. Time and again, he speaks about the inner, spiritual life that was at times, especially among the teachers of the law, lost amid the quarrels about obscure points of ritual and textual tradition.
Today, we seem to have the opposite problem. Modern people chafe at “organized religion,” as if it were somehow coherent to insist that a way of life be “unorganized,” delighting in any spirituality that rejects rules and embraces the mysterious inner voice. These are the people who post memes insisting that if Christians really followed Jesus, they wouldn’t actually, you know, follow Jesus or do any of the stuff that he said, much less be a part of the Church that he founded, because the important thing about Jesus wasn’t Jesus, but a vague sense of spirituality detached from ordinary realities.
So what I’ve described as the second “hard” aspect of the Lord’s saying is maybe on average harder today than it was for most people in the first century. We really love the idea of a spirituality, or religion, or whatever, whose demands are entirely intellectual, or at the very least whose “religious” demands simply enable us to live in a way that makes sense to our other tribal identities and not stick out too much. The idea that we might have to participate in some particular rite or ceremony or sacrament, and that this is central and necessary, and not merely occasionally useful, comes across as offensive, and exclusive, and threatening to our sense of individual liberty.
But hold on—doesn’t Jesus go on in today’s passage to say that “the spirit gives life,” not the flesh? Last week, I said I didn’t remember hearing a Protestant explanation of the “flesh and blood” language in John 6, but I recall now hearing the argument that according to Jesus, we have to understand “my flesh” and “my blood” as spiritual metaphors for his teaching. This is a tempting line of thought—partly because, again, it frees us from the burden of “religion” and its external forms, which seems a necessary thing for modern man. Yet we face the odd problem that, if this is really what the Lord meant by his flesh and blood, presumably it would not have caused so many followers to walk away scandalized. In fact, “flesh,” in John and other writers, is often shorthand for nature corrupted and enslaved by sin. But John also speaks of the Word becoming flesh. So surely not all flesh is bad. Flesh is enlivened by spirit. And anyway, the flesh of the Son of God cannot be said to be “of no avail.”
Apart from the reminder that the disciples need divine assistance to understand his teaching fully, the Lord presents here what we might call an uncontroversially traditional understanding of human nature. Human beings are body and soul. Our spiritual nature is the higher part, the part that gives flesh its meaning. But this meaningfulness is meaningless without its matter. So fully human, rational life must be spiritual life, not life lived merely in the body and merely serving bodily needs. But we cannot be human and be pure spirit. The spirit gives life… to the body, not just in general.
So again, I think we face this “hard” teaching that, actually, the true spiritual life is not a complete separation from bodily life, but rather a bodily life empowered by and directed by the spiritual life. We should therefore insist that the “spiritual” interpretation of Christ’s flesh and blood is “spiritual” exactly because it insists on a real, substantial, fleshly set of actions: take, eat, this is my body which is given up for you. If you really want to be spiritual, you have to be in the body.
This is one way of summarizing the set of teachings from Pope St. John Paul II on the “theology of the body.” The Holy Father writes, in Veritatis Splendor, “The person, by the light of reason and the support of virtue, discovers in the body the anticipatory signs, the expression and the promise of the gift of self, in conformity with the wise plan of the Creator.”
All of this brings me back to Ephesians and the idea of submission. Many of the difficulties that people have in this passage stem from a failure to read the overall context, which is Paul’s command to “be subject to one another” (5:21) out of reverence for Christ. Within this broader culture of mutual submission, we find that, in marriage, wives should “submit” to their husbands, and that husbands should love their wives “as Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her.” So if there’s anything lopsided there, it is arguably on the side of the husbands, who are basically commanded to die for their wives. Though this passage has undeniably been used in history in a misogynistic way, that use is far from its meaning.
The fact that, even so, people balk at it, comes down to that same antagonism toward “organized religion,” and to any kind of spirituality that dares to tell us what to do with our bodies. The hard saying is that Christianity isn’t just a bunch of nice feelings mixed with provocative social media posts. It is hard work, because it requires that we do certain bodily things, that we discipline our actions and our feelings, and not just in our heads. Marriage is a great sacrament, according to Paul, precisely because it is a bodily sign of the universal way that the human person finds his joy not in service of self, but in service of the ultimate other: God.
We meet that other, the heavenly bridegroom, at this altar, where he lays down his life for us, his bride. His love is no phantom idea, but expressed in a body given for us. Dare we submit, and receive the gift? Dare we persist when the world walks away, unsettled by the demands of faith? “Will you also go away?” Jesus asks. May we answer with St. Peter: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”