Eat. Pray. Squirm.
[Jesus said to them,] “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.” – John 6:56 (NRSV)
Let’s just get this out of the way: this text is creepy. I love Jesus, but this verse is pretty cringe. Right? And if it feels awkward now, imagine how it sounded back then.
The words that make us squirm today once made the Roman world suspicious enough to brand Christians as cannibals. They heard “eat my flesh and drink my blood” and took it literally, starting to paint believers as grotesque and dangerous. They heard Christians refer to each other as “brother” and “sister,” so when believers married each other, the Roman world cried incest. They observed Christians greeting each other with a “holy kiss” and called them a sex cult. And with all of those smears, fear and resentment grew.
Fear unchecked very easily turns to hate. It always has. And hate is too blunt an instrument to understand nuance. Oppression has no time for metaphor. It hears “eat my flesh and drink my blood” and can only imagine the worst. It flattens mystery and forges it into a weapon. And flattening Jesus’s words here misses his entire point.
Which was this: Jesus’s friends were quite familiar with hunger and food insecurity. They went from town to town with Jesus, depending on strangers for their next meal. They were subsistence farmers, day laborers, fisherfolk, taxed down to next to nothing by the Roman Empire. Everyday people experienced chronic scarcity while the tiny elite lived in gross abundance.
So when Jesus said, “I am the bread of life,” he was meeting people right in the ache of their hunger. He was saying: your nourishment doesn’t have to depend on the rich or the powerful deciding to help you. Because I am your bread. I am your drink. With me, there is a part of you that will always, always be full. No matter the famine around you, Jesus is the feast within you.
Prayer
Bread of life, meet me in my hunger and thirst, and be the fullness that endures. Amen.
About the AuthorKaji Douša is the Senior Pastor of The Park Avenue Christian Church, a congregation of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and the United Church of Christ, in New York City.