by Russell Rathbun
Gospel Reading: John 6:51-58
For Sunday, August 19, 2012—Ordinary 20
A friend of mine who studies traditional foods from tribal cultures told me that the notion that you are what you eat is common across many Native American and eastern traditional peoples. If you eat a lot of chicken, you have chicken energy. You move around quickly in a scattered state. If you eat a lot of beef you have heifer energy. You move slowly, powerfully and deliberately.
Soul Food
This idea is not so far from ancient Jewish law. Leviticus 17 forbids the eating of blood or flesh containing blood; the blood of a slaughtered animal must be spilled out on the altar as a sacrifice to God.
Ramban, the thirteenth century French rabbi and physician, explains that animals have souls and the life of a creature is in the blood. So if a human consumes the blood, the human consumes the soul of the animal. The animal’s soul will become one with the humans and the soul will become thick and course and the human will begin to resemble the animal whose blood they consumed.
Therefore the blood must be offered to God. When it is spilled on the altar the soul of the animal will atone for the human’s act of killing the animal. So, you might mistakenly become what you eat unless you offer your dinner’s soul-containing blood to the Lord.
Watch the Fat Too!
The prohibition on consuming blood also extends to fat, especially the fat around the liver, because the life/soul of an animal exists also in the fat and the liver is filled with blood.
Another tradition of interpretation says that Israel is forbidden from eating flesh and blood (flesh here meaning fat and liver) because to do so would be to consume life and only God, who gives life, can consume life.
The blood must be spilled on the altar and the flesh/fat must be burned on the altar as an offering to God. Flesh and blood is God’s food and to eat God’s food is to strive to become like God. Which the law says you shouldn’t do or you will be cut off.
Radical Transgression
So what is Jesus up to in this week’s reading when he changes the metaphor from bread of life to blood and flesh?
He tells the Jews that have been following him that they must eat his flesh and drink his blood. I believe he is referencing the probations in Leviticus and Deuteronomy forbidding the consuming the flesh/fat/liver and the blood of animals. It would be a radical transgression of the law for him to tell them to eat the flesh and blood of an animal—so he is taking radical transgression to extremes by telling them they must eat his flesh and blood. He is telling them to eat the food of God, further more to ingest his soul, which according to Ramban will become one with their own soul and they will begin to resemble him—they will have eternal life like God.
Further more, becoming like God requires no ethical or moral will on the part of the consumer of Jesus—they just eat and they begin to resemble the one whose life/soul they have consumed.
The Hardest Question
Is John’s Jesus telling us that we should become God? In the Eucharist do we rehearse the consuming Jesus’ life, binding his soul to ours, making us like God? Which begs an even harder question: What is God like?
Russell Rathbun is a preacher at House of Mercy in St. Paul, Minnesota, the author of Midrash on the Juanitos (Cathedral Hill Press, 2010) and the curator of The Hardest Question.
Is it wise to take a 13h century French Jewish framework re: flesh and blood and apply it to the Gospel of John, from over 1000 years earlier?
On facebook I asked for responses to Jesus’ line, “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” What I got were good thoughts but ones that skip right to the metaphor. I keep reading that it is obvious that Jesus’ words here are not meant literally, but I can’t escape the idea that maybe we need to just sit with his statements and abide in their deep, uncomfortable, macabre weirdness. At least I feel like I need to.
If Jesus is attempting to shock his listeners (and It seems to me that he must be), why? To what affect? What about today: if I can get past Zombie Jesus and Vampire Jesus am I left with Bakery Jesus? Is it all just a way to fight gnosticism? A way to keep us grounded in the nitty-gritty, messy, dirty realities of life on earth?
I wish I had more answers than questions.
Chris, I don’t know about wise, but I do like layers of interpretation. As for the thousand year distance, it seems that the implication is that there is some recoverable event and not just the text that we have access to. I like to look at sources that are distant from my perspective in hopes of seeing differently and finding unexpected meaning.
Dave, I have the same impulse to sit with the macabre-ness of this text. I don’t want people to move too quickly to the metaphorical. Because, like you imply, even if it is meant to be taken metaphorically, it is a pretty weird metaphor. I think it is valuable to confess the weirdness to the congregation and let them chew on it–especially if you are having communion this Sunday.