Year B – Season after Pentecost – Proper 16 (21) : Revised Common Lectionary

Because of this many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him.

ECAUSE OF This? Because o what?

In the preceding verses Jesus walks through the most essential teachings of sacramental Christianity: eating of his flesh and blood. Jesus, God in the Flesh, gives us his flesh to eat. And we are what we eat: we become him, present and active in the world. We are him, when we love each other and love the world as he loves it, giving ourselves (him) up for the life of others.

And one other thing…

When even this teaching offended his listeners, he made an exclusive claim. And people walked away. How, they wonder, could the Gospel be offensive? Did they walk away because of the Body and Blood thing? Did they walk away because of the exclusivity? The text it unclear. Most sermons I’ve heard indicate the early Jewish followers would have stumbled on the “body and blood” passages. But we post-modern people are bothered by the seeming exclusion.

Earlier this week on my blog, I asked a question:

If you are familiar with the most basic forms of popular Christianity in the USA, you know that we’re all going to hell because we’re sinners, descended from sinners (Adam and Eve). We’re tainted with “Original Sin”. God’s laws are broken by our sins. God’s honour is damaged by our sin. And his purity is offended by our sin. And so we’re all going to hell. Except for Jesus – who alone is pure – and in his self-sacrificing death, he offers payment for our sins.

Now, accept Jesus Christ in your heart as your personal Lord and Saviour and your sins will be covered by his blood.

God loves his laws and his honour so much, that he had to sacrifice his only begotten son to himself in order to not see our sins. And so we can spend eternity with him. Glory, Halleluia!

Now, this is not the teaching of the historic faith. The ideas I stated above are relatively recent in the evolution of theology. There are fragments of them, yes, in the historic faith. But they are woven in and through with other theology that speaks with a stronger voice. Only recently has it been removed from that theological context and become the end-all and be-all of some small sects with very loud voices.

(If you would know more about these other, more important strands of theology, I heartily suggest these lectures by Kallistos Ware. That’s a large zip file of three lectures.)

Now I know very few people any more who believe the sketch I created above. But there are MANY who do believe them. The theology is even codified into what is called the “Four Spiritual Laws“. But among my friends and family and social circle, the Four Spiritual Laws are of no consequence. So I asked…

If you reject any or all of the following:

1. God will punish us with eternal hell for our sins.
2. God will judge us for even the slightest imperfection.
3. Salvation means only having your sins “forgiven” and not being sent to hell after you die.
4. Jesus is the only means of “getting saved”.
5. Once saved God will count your debt “paid for” and you can get into heaven when you’re dead.

If you reject that equation or a majority of its points what’s the point of being a Christian? What did Jesus come to do or do for us?

I admit I offended some of my regular readers for they recognised this as a straw man of an argument and they quite properly stated the more-traditional understanding of Jesus mission and journey, most succinctly summed up in a rather famous line from St Athanasius: God became as we are that we might become as he is.

But that wasn’t the point.

Those who rightly reject these non-traditional teachings do so on the quest for something else. They may end up (as many of my friends) in the camp of Eastern Theology – Eastern Orthodox or Oriental Orthodox or Eastern Catholic or Eastern Indy Catholic or even just as Byzantine-flavoured Anglicans or Methodists or what have you. I’ve met all of these.

But most that I know end up rejecting the whole package entirely. These may convert to some other faith, or, as with some of my other friends, still sitting in pews, but rejecting the whole package, unable to come up with another theology at all, they create a spayed Jesus – one with no balls. This guy is only a “Good Teacher” but, ironically, the largest body of his teachings (as recorded in the Gospels) have to be discarded as useless. Any place where the text has Jesus claiming something exclusive or particular to himself is glossed over, or ignored, or avoided.

The Gospel is offensive. It was so to some early Jewish followers and also to some Gentiles who heard it. So it is to many of us. But if you’ve heard it wrong, I suggest the problem is with what you heard: not with the Bible, not with the faith as it is.

The Jesus they are left with says some things rather akin to the American (non-traditional) version of Buddhism that is marketed at the local Borders Books. This Left Wing Jesus bears a remarkable resemblance to themselves, conveniently teaching their politics and theology. He makes a lot of challenging statements but, usually, only challenging to others.

In other words, this Spayed Jesus looks surprisingly like the Jesus preached in the Four Spiritual Laws who also mirrors his preachers’ likes and dislikes.

So when Jesus says, “Eat my body. Drink my blood.” Using perfectly decent and clear words that clearly mean exactly what they sound like the Fundie Folks usually assume that here the scripture clearly can’t be 100% literal. The Liberal folks just excise the entire passage. It’s certainly the addition of later followers of Jesus (in fact, they treat most of the Gospel like that). Ditching the clear meaning of the text (like the Fundies do with the Body and Blood passages), they assume Jesus never claimed he was Divine, never did anything like instituting a ritual meal and, when they hear that some believe otherwise, they scof and call us benighted pre-moderns.

So if you call yourself a follower of God in the way of Jesus and you reject the things we taught about Jesus, I’m wondering: what purpose dose Jesus serve in you world? If he’s not the Son of God, the Second person of the Trinity, the Messiah of God who came to return us to God, then what or who is he, this Jesus of yours with no balls?