We Are What We Eat
Daniel Rentfro Jr.
Thirteenth Sunday After Pentecost
Aug 18 2024
“We Are What We Eat”
Few metaphors are more common than those that equate learning with eating and drinking. Francis Bacon (fittingly) said “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” The trope is now so familiar that we don’t even think of it as metaphorical: We consume a book. Our bibliophile friends read voraciously. Thirsting for knowledge or entertainment, or both wrapped up together, we gorge on Dickens, David McCullough, or Harry Potter. We prefer spicy romance novels and delicious prose, sweet verse, detective stories full of salty language. We eat up a brilliant speech. The attentive student drinks in every word of a lecture. A well-constructed sermon is meaty, giving us food for thought, something to chew on. A shallow argument, by contrast, is half-baked (or, in the UK, thin gruel). (In the unlikely event you remain hungry for more examples, Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading has a whole chapter on the topic.)
What, then, are we to make of Jesus referring to His flesh as “true food” and His blood as “true drink,” of His saying “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you”? His audience didn’t think that He was just speaking figuratively. “This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?” they say. Many of them walk away. Did Jesus mean to be taken literally, aiming for maximum shock value? If so, He succeeded. But was Jesus only intending to outrage? (Perhaps the passage alludes to eucharistic practice, which by the time John wrote would have been well established. John’s gospel, after all, does lack the Maundy Thursday pericope of institution, so perhaps this story is a somewhat gruesome alternate telling.)
Time and again, when something Jesus says puzzles us, it pays to look back to what Jesus knew best, the Hebrew Scriptures. Lo and behold, they are full of the learning-as-eating metaphor. In Proverbs 9, one of today’s alternate readings, Wisdom says “Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed. Lay aside immaturity and live, and walk in the way of insight.” Isaiah 55, which just as easily could have been part of this week’s lectionary, says “Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. Incline your ear, and come to me, listen, so that you may live.” Then there’s Sirach 15: “Whoever fears the Lord will do this, and whoever holds to the law will obtain wisdom. She will come to meet him like a mother, and like a young bride she will welcome him. She will feed him with the bread of learning, and give him the water of wisdom to drink.”
Closer to today’s gospel passage are these mystical stories. There’s Ezekiel’s vision of the scroll, in which the Lord tells him: “‘You, mortal, hear what I say to you; do not be rebellious like that rebellious house; open your mouth and eat what I give you.’ I looked, and a hand was stretched out to me, and a written scroll was in it. He spread it before me; it had writing on the front and on the back, and written on it were words of lamentation and mourning and woe. He said to me, ‘O mortal, eat what is offered to you; eat this scroll, and go, speak to the house of Israel.’ So I opened my mouth, and He gave me the scroll to eat. He said to me, ‘Mortal, eat this scroll that I give you and fill your stomach with it.’ Then I ate it, and in my mouth it was as sweet as honey.” (Ezek 2:9-3:3) John the Evangelist, in the Book of Revelation, relates a similar experience: “Then the voice that I had heard from heaven spoke to me again, saying, ‘Go, take the scroll that is open in the hand of the angel who is standing on the sea and on the land.’ So I went to the angel and told him to give me the little scroll, and He said to me, ‘Take it and eat; it will be bitter to your stomach but sweet as honey in your mouth.’ So I took the little scroll from the hand of the angel and ate it; it was sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it my stomach was made bitter. Then they said to me, ‘You must prophesy again about many peoples and nations and languages and kings.’” (Rev 10:8-11)
The latter, of course, was written by the same author as the magnificent prologue on the Word that starts the fourth gospel. Jesus, John tells us there, does not simply come to preach wisdom to the world. He is Wisdom, “the Word made flesh.” Perhaps, in the same way that Revelation echoes Ezekiel, when Jesus refers to Himself as “the bread that came down from heaven” John intends to remind of the prologue. To be graced by the Wisdom of the Word, it is not enough to hear it, or even to believe it. We must literally in-corporate it, and thereby embody it -- make it the sum and substance of who we are. If we do, we will “become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.” (Jn 1:12-13). We will abide in God, and God in us, forever. (Jn 6:56) And from there, we look farther back to the many times the Hebrew Scriptures urge us to feast on Wisdom.
Is this one of those ideas that suffers from familiarity? We hear it all the time, in the lectionary and in the eucharist. The truth is that the message here should make us bolt up out of our chairs, hair standing on end. Jesus says that each of us can literally take on His identity. This is more, much more, than an offer to make us the best humans we can be (although it is that.) The bread Jesus offers is not the equivalent of some spiritual energy gel, elevating us to gold medal holiness. The drink He offers will not merely balance our moral metabolic panel. It is the offer of an utterly different existence, life in the spirit. Think about this for a moment. An unseen, transcendent wholly other God, whose name (the tradition holds) should not even be spoken, comes to earth fully embodied, sharing all our creaturely glories, flaws, strengths, weaknesses. Everyone who encounters Jesus is intrigued by Him, attracted to Him, and (if they allow it) transformed by Him. (Even Herod and Pilate knew they had come onto something they had not met before.) We are all offered the same chance, if we surrender our identity to His, until we are, as Yeats puts it, as indistinguishable as the dancer from the dance.
Does Jesus speak outrageously here? Of course. But it’s not the only time. He’s told us that to follow Him we must reject everything we’ve been taught. We must be weak, not strong. We must hate our mother and father. We must chop off a disobedient hand, poke out a wandering eye. We must even be prepared to lose our lives, in order to save them. Now He says that all of us – all of us -- can achieve perfect unity with Him. In today’s gospel, the imagery He uses to assure us of that offer manages to both draw from the well of Hebrew Scripture and to offend the religious authorities. No wonder they wanted to kill Him, or, in a few cases, to die for Him.
Brillat – Savarin, in The Physiology of Taste, said ‘Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are.” And the people of God say “Amen.”