Grace, mercy and peace be to you from God the Father and our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen!
A number of years ago, one of the photographers in our town had taken these amazing close up macro photos of a caterpillar becoming a butterfly. As I was scrolling through the images, I was just like a little kid again, staring in wide eyed amazement thinking “This is incredibly amazing! How can a fat & gluttonous worm transform into such a delicate and elegant winged creature!?” It seems totally beyond belief and nearly miraculous that such a total and complete change is possible. But I would suggest that life is chock full of these kinds of experiences. Astounding, extra-ordinary and mind-blowing things are happening all the time around us. But more often than not, we don’t perceive them. Or when we do hear of the miraculous, we are quick to simply write them off as fairy tales that are ridiculously impossible.
“I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh” (John 6:51). Do you remember these words from last Sunday? Our Gospel reading concluded with them. These are Jesus’ “butterfly words.” That is to say, these are the words He speaks but they are so amazing and miraculous and beyond belief, that many people think they are impossible, that they don’t make any sense or, in the very least, they are a hard saying that not many people can accept. He spoke them in a Synagogue in Capernaum, surrounded by Jews and needless to say, Jesus creates quite a stir. “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” they scoff. That’s gross, freaky and weird!
But it is exactly as Jesus says it is – “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him” (53-56). … I spent a year studying these words of Jesus - in Greek. I read over 200 books and articles about them and wrote a 107 page paper on it that became my Master’s Thesis in Seminary. A lot of it was pretty darn tedious reading to be honest. Most of the scholarly books written about these words are written by people who simply refuse to believe what the words actually say. They can’t believe that Jesus’ true body and true blood can be present in the bread and wine of Holy Communion. They, like the original Jewish hearers and the Pharisees, write these words off as crazy, ridiculous and impossible!
The eye opening thing to me was that the majority of even Lutheran scholars and even Luther himself came out with the same kind of understanding and interpretation: these words are spiritual, but not sacramental. They don’t actually refer to the true flesh and blood of Christ in the bread and wine on the altar and God’s people receiving the gifts of Christ in faith. I read these books and articles and this conclusion was like looking at the caterpillar metamorphosing into the butterfly and saying, “Nope! Can’t be happening! Can’t be real! ’Tis a figment of the imagination!”
But, it is what it is. The words say what they say and Jesus meant every single one of them. So much so that when they are scoffing at Him for even saying this, Jesus doubles down. In English we don’t see it, but it is clear as day in Greek. Jesus uses a different verb for eating when He says in verse 54 “Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day” ‘Feeds’ gets used to translate the word meaning “audible gnawing.” You can envision a gaggle of starving teenaged football players smacking their chops and devouring a pizza after a lengthy practice! It’s loud. It’s boisterous. Gnawing and munching on this food noisily! Long gone is the ‘spiritual eating’ from 2 Sundays ago when we began the Bread of Life discourse. It has been replaced with this real-deal chewing and consuming! It’s the next step in our Lord’s logic. Spiritual eating is faith and believing. Then He moved into the mysterious nature of all this that we talked about last Sunday and how the Lord draws us up into this conversation. And today, He defines the meaning of eating His flesh and drinking His blood.
Jesus means that His flesh is true food. His blood is true drink. And unless you eat and drink His flesh and blood, you have no life in you. It’s quite clear. But whoever does eat and whoever does drink at our Lord’s table, will dwell and abide in Christ and He in us. Something incredible is going on in these words of Christ. But will we perceive them? Or will we, like the Jews, shun His words? The caterpillar becomes a butterfly whether we think it does or not. Revenue Canada comes for their tax dollars whether we want to pay them or not. We fall down, not up, every single time on planet Earth! It’s true and it’s the way it is.
One fine day, a Pastor was walking along a beach with youngest son. The boy had been talking to his dad about his latest sermon on Sunday about Jesus being Immanuel, God with us, and living in His people by faith. The boy said “Dad, I just don’t get how Christ can live inside us and we in Him at the same time. He’s in heaven. This idea seems weird and impossible.” As they walked further down the beach, the father noticed an empty bottle with a cork in it. Taking the bottle, he filled it with water, re-corked it and threw it back out into the ocean. He said, “Son, the sea is in the bottle and the bottle is in the sea. As it bobs up and down, it is a picture of life and motion. It is a life in Christ, and Christ in us.”
“56 Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him.” And this is the chief blessing of Holy Communion. God Almighty, the maker of Heaven and Earth, the One who formed the stars and counted the grains of sand on the seashore, comes to us and makes His home within His baptized people. We become One with God in Christ. And that union produces life. It produces salvation. It produces forgiveness for sins. It produces resurrection to life everlasting. It’s super powerful and amazing stuff! This should be on our hearts and minds as we come forward to our Lord’s Table. In our sins and wrong doings, we ought to be terrified of coming to Holy Communion! None of us are worthy of this gift. Yet by God’s grace, He invites us. He makes us worthy by faith. He tells us to call Him “Our Father” and here, in His gracious presence He takes our sins away. And it is by eating and drinking our Lord’s true body and blood that our own metamorphosis takes place. We go from being fat, gluttonous sinful worms into beautiful new creations! Notice how this fits so nicely with the butterfly illustration?
But how can this be? How does it work? In short, we don’t know. It’s just one of the great mysteries of the Christian faith. It certainly has been a stumbling block too, right from the get go. Immediately after Jesus speaks these words in Capernaum, the people start getting rowdy. Not only do Jesus’ opponents think He’s crazy, but so do many of His own disciples! They say “This is a hard teaching; who can listen to it?!” And it absolutely is a hard teaching, a difficult saying. Our brains like logic and numbers and boxes and quantifiable results. This is why in many protestant denominations they believe that Holy Communion is a mere symbol, a symbolic eating and drinking in remembrance of Jesus. That makes more sense. It eases the tension of the mystery. But this isn’t what Jesus says or means. If it was, do you really think that the outcome of His words would have produced this: “After this many of His disciples turned back and no longer walked with Him.” They simply would not concede that Jesus’ words say what He means. They simply couldn’t hold the mystery and the sacramental meaning that Jesus conveys. Somehow, in the bread and in the wine are the Lord’s flesh and blood for our forgiveness, life and salvation. God dwells in His people and we in Him. To not believe, to not eat and not drink is to walk with Jesus no longer.
To this end, St. Paul writes his warning about Holy Communion in 1 Corinthians 11. He writes “27 Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty concerning the body and blood of the Lord. 28 Let a person examine himself, then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. 29 For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself.” You need to read the warning label on this medicine of immortality! It requires hearts that believe the mystery. If not, the blessing becomes judgment. The right dose of the medicine is needed. You need to know what’s going on with Holy Communion. That’s why the Church has always had the practice of ‘close’ or ‘closed communion.’ It requires hearts that believe and hold the mystery.
On the outset, this may all seem rather lofty. And it is. On purpose. It’s the hard-to-market, miraculous aspect of the Christian faith that many have chosen to ignore, ‘symbolize’ or delete all together. But that is truly a tragedy because we so desperately need the gifts of grace that our Lord gives us. “For Jesus said to the Twelve, “Do you want to go away as well?” Simon Peter answered Him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God” (67-69). Jesus alone has the words of eternal life. And nothing is impossible with God. He comes to us and unites Himself to us and by His cross and resurrection, we have life everlasting. His words of eternal life transform us from the inside out and make us into the people God wants us to be. The miracles of our Triune God continue to happen in the bread and in the wine of Holy Communion, right in our very midst. “Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him!” (Ps 34:8). Amen!
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