Twelfth Sunday After Pentecost (B) – John 6:51-58
On Friday night, I went for the first time in five years to hear the Boston Symphony Orchestra. I don’t know how it took me so long to go do this; after all, you all know my interest in music, and at one point in my life, I had wanted to be an orchestra conductor when I grew up. It was a fun evening, if not exactly what I’d hoped it would be. I, of course, had cheap lawn tickets, and I found out why they were so inexpensive when it began to rain. And I mean rain. The water came down in sheets. Happily, they didn’t make us plebeians sit out in the weather; I got to stand under the dry roof of Ozawa hall, hoping my chair and blanket didn’t get too badly ruined.
The concert itself was wonderful. It began with a Mendelssohn violin concerto. Mendelssohn is generally a lot like cotton candy. You see it and think it’s a good idea, and then while you’re eating it you want more, and more, and more. But when you’re done, you’re still hungry, and a little sick to the stomach from the cloying sweetness. This concerto was just like that. Skillfully played by the soloist, a delightful piece, but somewhat lacking in the rich and meaningful department. Which was okay. It made a nice companion piece to the heavy Mahler symphony that followed it.
But as the violin concerto was going on, it was all I could do to stop myself from laughing aloud. There was truly nothing serious about this piece of music. It was a bit of fluff. And yet, the look on the musician’s face, his eyes closed in rapture, his mouth downturned in concentration, made it appear as if this thing he was doing was the most important thing in the world. His expression was mirrored by the focused looks on the faces of those in the orchestra. Now, I get that, despite outward appearances, playing in an orchestra is difficult, and even serious, work. And those people were settling in for two-and-a-half hours of strenuous playing.
But it’s that last word that matters. “Playing.” Hard work though it may have been, the Boston Symphony was performing one of the most playful, delightful bits of music ever written, and yet, nobody seemed to be enjoying themselves. So caught up in performing, nobody was playing. I must admit, I remember feeling that way about music at one point in my life, too. When I was in college, learning all I could about music theory and history, amassing a wealth of musical vocabulary as I grew to know each composer and work, I took this stuff pretty seriously too. Music was meaning-making, stuff of dignity and import. Even so, I don’t think I ever got to the place where the fun had gone out of it. Where the importance of the music overtook the playfulness of it. Because what’s the point of making music if you’re not having fun?
In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus tells us that he gives his own flesh to us, and when his opponents hear it, they are disgusted. “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” It’s a fair question. And Jesus ups the ante by saying that, “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” The words don’t sound shocking to us because we, in the church, have been sharing Holy Communion for two thousand years. But for the Jews who first heard Jesus say these things, they were outrageous and appalling.
Of course, the very idea of eating someone’s flesh and drinking their blood is disgusting. But beyond that, Jewish law was very clear, prohibiting the consumption of blood. In fact, it one of the few laws in the body of the Old Testament for which we get a reason. We’re told that all of the blood must be drained from meat before it is eaten because the life of the animal—the best analogue we have in our language today is the animal’s soul—is contained in the blood. To eat the soul of an animal instead of returning it to the dust from which it was created was an evil, destructive act. For Jesus to say we must do so to him, is both horrifying and, frankly, a little bit crazy.
The thing is, Jesus’ opponents are a bit too much like the musicians in the BSO. They take him seriously, very seriously. So seriously there’s no room for the playfulness of God in their lives. They cannot see through the surface meaning of what Jesus has to say, in order to discover the delight of what God is doing for them through it.
Throughout the ages, the Church has been guilty of doing just the same. This Eucharistic meal, this sharing of the body and blood of Christ that we do here around this table, we take too seriously, too. Which is not to say that it isn’t a serious thing, worthy of our attention and reverence. It certainly is. But we have spent a great deal of time philosophizing and theologizing about it, trying to figure out exactly what happens, and how it happens, and what we get out of it, and what it all means.
In the middle ages, for example, philosophers like Thomas Aquinas spent a great deal of time working on the idea of exactly what happens to the bread and wine in Communion. Aquinas made a distinction between the substance and the accidence of the elements, saying that while they “accidentally” appeared to remain bread and wine, the substance of these things actually turned into meat and blood as the priest spoke Jesus’ words over them, recounting the night in which He was betrayed. It’s a leftover from that era of thought that you’ll occasionally see a Catholic priest bending toward the elements as he speaks those words, as if he were speaking to the bread and wine themselves; he is doing exactly that! I’ll admit, even I have a bit of a holdover from those practices, when I make sure the bread and juice are open so they can “hear” the words of institution.
Lutheran and Reformed theologians alike rejected this idea of transubstantiation. But one of the main reasons we have separate Lutheran and Reformed churches is that German Reformer Martin Luther and Swiss Reformer Ulrich Zwingli could get together on just about everything else, but they couldn’t agree on what the Eucharist really was. Can you imagine? Fracturing the church over something like that! But for those reformers—and for many of us as well—believing the right thing was extremely important. Today, though [both our Congregationalist and Lutheran communities] lean toward affirming that Jesus is physically present, somehow, in the bread and drink we share, we all have a variety of opinions and understandings of what is really going on here.
And how can we not? Jesus never takes it as seriously as we do. Jesus never insists that this bread is actually, physically, His flesh, and that it becomes so through a series of chemical processes that we don’t really see going on, but happen nevertheless. Jesus doesn’t say that this cup may be full of grape juice but really, through the miracle of consubstantiation the molecules of grape juice here suddenly become copper-based and can carry oxygen like red blood cells. That’s never what Jesus says. He’s not interested in explaining things to us. Instead, he’s interested in our experiencing them. He’s interested in promising us that he will be here. He’s interested in giving us new life, in filling us full of life, in leading us to resurrection, in nourishing us, in feeding us, in encountering us, in being present with us. For Jesus, this is like a game. It is fun! It is experiential! It is powerfully important, but it is also joyful, and delightful, and full of life.
When I returned to Pennsylvania after college, I joined the Reading Philharmonic Orchestra. I have, in the past, jokingly referred to it as “the world’s worst orchestra.” There were times when the stuff that we played only began to approach “music.” It was not, I must say, quite the musical ensemble I’d always imagined myself being a part of. And yet, somehow, I found myself pretty quickly serving as a member of the board of directors of the orchestra, working occasionally as a substitute conductor for the group, instituting new programs and initiatives, and overall making quite a number of friends. We may not have been great, musically, but we sure had a lot of fun.
My last summer before heading off to seminary, the directors invited me to play a solo piece with the orchestra, marking my contribution to the organization over the half-decade I was part of it. I thought about playing, perhaps, the Mozart concerto or Burrill Phillips’ Concertpiece for Bassoon. But the conductors had already chosen something. They handed me the music for a comic polka by Juilus Fučik entitled, “The Old, Sore-Headed Bear.” Somehow, I can’t imagine anything more appropriate.
I have played with and quit music groups with more expertise, but the Reading Phil will always have a place of prominence in my heart. Because they were fun! And in the playfulness we shared, we may not have made as good music as the Boston Symphony, but we made more meaning for ourselves and our audiences than they ever will.
Jesus offers you His body and blood here, as we gather around this table. There is no gift more important, more valuable in the whole universe. In this gift there is joy, and love, and life. May you receive it in the delightful spirit in which it is given. Because Jesus loves you, and he calls you to come and play. Amen.