Church of the Redeemer | Iglesia del Redentor

The Lessons Appointed for Use on the Sunday closest to August 24
Proper 16 Year B RCL

1 Kings 8:(1, 6, 10-11), 22-30, 41-43
Psalm 84
Ephesians 6:10-20
John 6:56-69 click here for texts  

In an ever fiercer cockfight for ratings and rising cost, the American TV networks have presented us with an onslaught of TV participation programming. America's Next Top Model, Dancing With The Stars, The Apprentice, "Fear Factor" and Big Brother are just some of them. Rather than using actors these programs use a “standardized for TV” version of ourselves to stand in for the couch potatoes who watched them, in that way vicariously we can be either in far away islands, ball room dancing with the stars or competing for million dollar prizes all from the comfort of our living rooms while we obediently munch and add more to our waistline.

As I was reading this passage from the Gospel, a program called Fear Factor came to mind. The show pits contestants against each other to complete a series of stunts better and/or quicker than all the other contestants, by doing this in the fastest time, for a grand prize of US$50,000. The second stunt usually is meant to challenge the contestants mentally. It usually involves ingesting a revolting insect, such as a cockroach, or being covered in tarantulas.

Similar repulsion was to be expected from any Jew in the Johanine community for whom the passage was written, or among Jesus own disciples when he offer them to eat his flesh. Not only the obvious cannibalism implied but also the mention of blood as part of the meal offering, since it is expressively prohibited by Leviticus 7:26-27 "Moreover you shall eat no blood whatever, whether of fowl or of animal, in any of your dwellings. Whoever eats any blood, that person shall be cut off from his people.".

  The words of Jesus, even if some of them understood them as metaphor, were incredibly in their abuse of cultural boundaries since the image rather than building on accepted behavior calls for an abandonment of what the disciples and the early community considered culturally tolerable and beyond. (cultural violence)

 It is not surprising that this moment is presented as a parting of the waters for some of the followers. The popularity of Jesus built as a healer, miracle worker and source of food for the impoverish multitudes, as something that actually works, will start to wane from now on. Exit of the popular Jesus and entry of the Jesus of Passion.

Peter as spokesperson for the rest, gives Jesus the reason for their staying -where are we going to go? You have words of eternal life.

It is precisely what places Jesus in the disciples’ eyes beyond a Palestinian teacher, an ethical master, a smart rabbi or even a miracle worker and healer -you have words of eternal life-. You have the answer to life’s meaning and purpose.

Before I left for my conferences in New Zealand and Australia, I preached a sermon here, in which I said that I have received in my spirit the need to say that Jesus is Lord. I know it is for Christians common place, but one that nevertheless needs to be reaffirmed sometimes. It is in this passage that the disciples felt the need to reaffirm or confess Jesus Lordship. -you have words of eternal life- because for him Jesus of Nazareth was many things, but above all he was Lord.

In the modern period, Jesus has been reinterpreted culturally with disastrous and constructive consequences. Some Christians during the Nazi regime in Germany attempted to turn Jesus, a Jew from Palestine, into an Aryan superhero. Karl Barth recognized the travesty and declared, in the "Theological Declaration of’ Barmen," that the true Christ is the one revealed in scripture and is Lord of culture, not subject to it.

In a similar way, Dietrich Bonhoeffer lost in his life in the last days of the III Reich when he saw the attempt of the government in co-opting the church in then known as the “German Christians” by separating the church from its Jewish tradition. Pastor Neimoller founder of the “Confessing Church” movement opposed it as well, sadly this was a just a large minority, but minority nevertheless. The church was unable to counteract the popular feeling among Protestant Germans and the pressures of the Hitler government to prevent successfully electing the Fuhrer's former religious adviser as Reichbishof in 1933. Soon thereafter the church adopted the Aryan paragraph in their constitution effectively defrocking all clergy with Jewish blood or married to Jews.  .

 There is no question of Jesus Jewishness, one who reads any of the Gospels finds it no just filled with references to Jewish culture but firmly embedded in Judaism's ethos, but by the same token it is also Jesus the one who was not afraid of trespassing the boundaries of the religion and culture in which he was raised.

 One such boundary occupied us today here, to admit that Jesus is Lord is to admit that he is not only a great teacher, or a great guy, or an interesting historical figure, but that he is also God. He is the one that has words of eternal life and therefore the one that responds to the most crucial of all existential questions, the question of the meaning of life. Underlining it, as ancillary questions like why are we here?, where do we go?, what happens to us when we die?, for them they were answered by Jesus -you have words of eternal life-. The response to these questions kept the disciples in Jesus' camp in the face of the cultural violence perpetrated against his own faith, meanwhile the crowds that shortly before followed him and feted in his healing and miracles, left.

Speaking with someone who was sent home to die the person said “Father I feel helpless, and I have never felt this way in my entire life”. American culture does not like helpless, does not do well -I cannot-, the whole American experience is predicated on the given of unlimited possibilities, last election was one on the bases of -yes we can- seems to prove my point. One of the unintended consequences of this faith on the unlimited potential of the individual is to miss or avoid the ultimate questions, like sickness, aging, dying and death.

We not only have learned to cure many illnesses, but we have extended life beyond its own quality. We seem not to want to understand that the community has responsibilities for all its members without distinctions and we place the entire burden on the individual, such view ignores the diversity and variety of society and with it, the limited potential of each one. We are seeing this clearly in the debate over health care reform.

So this teaching has to be difficult to receive, both for the followers of Jesus in the first century as it is for many today. Namely, that Jesus has words of eternal life.   

What is life eternal? A life after death? A tiny soul flying away from the grave to be preserved somewhere as an immortal as movies and many books of “light at the end of the tunnel” type tells us? That was the hope of the pagans of Jesus’ time and I suspect that in many ways is the secret hope of our contemporary paganism. The Creed says “I believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting”. Eternal life is not the continuation of this life in some other dimension, but the completion of this life (K. Barth). We were born into eternity. From God we came through the womb of our mothers, we came to live in God our earthly life and in death we complete the circle of our own personal meaning in the plenitude of God. Whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s.

Apostle Paul in his letter to the Corinthians says: 51Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed— 52in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. 53For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. 54When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: "Death has been swallowed up in victory."55"Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?"

Life eternal is one we have to start living in the here and now, Christian hope is the uncovering of the truth on which God sees our life, it is the conquest of death but not the flying into the beyond. It is the freedom from the primary fear of annihilation of meaning that death presupposes for many in our society.

Or as Teilhard de Chardin, priest and scientist put it:  First, we become aware of being contained in a World whose two halves (the physical and the mystical) are slowly closing in with planetary force upon a Mankind that is born of their approach to one another. And then we realize that we are moving into a hyper-milieu of Life, produced by the coincidence of an emergent Christ and a convergent Universe.

It is precisely our dual condition of being physical and mystical that creates this ontological, this design flaw in you wish of our existence, because  born of one, physical halve,  we move with planetary force to the other, the mystical halve. Like the immigrants in the city, we know that we live here, but are not really from here. Our divine “stuff” is made of heaven; our lives are made of “dust”. We are permanently in the genetic liminality of the world. We are part of what Theilard has called the “amorization of the universe”.

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