Those Gritty Physical Metaphors

The gospel for Proper 14B is John 6:35, 41-51.  This isn’t an exposition of that passage, but something that passage brought back to my mind.

Jesus starts with the bread metaphor.  Now for many of us, comparing spiritual food to bread comes quite naturally.  We’ve read this in the gospel many times, and we’ve heard it in churches.  Such expressions as “fresh bread for the people” or “break the bread of life” are still quite common.  But at the end of this passage Jesus touches on a theme that will become much more common through this gospel and is harder to take:  his flesh (v. 51).  This metaphor gets quite heavy in verses 52-58, as Jesus tells people they must eat his flesh and drink his blood.

The metaphorically challenged get some kind of cannibalism out of all of this.  Yet even many Christians are uncomfortable with strong “blood” metaphors these days.  “Are you washed in the blood of the lamb” is a song lyric that is less popular than it used to be.  We want soft metaphors.

We are also often less anxious to compare the physical and the spiritual.  There’s the saying, “so heavenly he’s of no earthly good.”  The problem with that is that if we read Jesus correctly, being of no earthly good is not, in fact, very heavenly.  Sure, we know what that saying means.  There are many people who are very “spiritual” and don’t really comprehend the things of this earth, or at least so it appears.  But I’m going to suggest that if you don’t comprehend the things of this earth, you’re not going to comprehend the things of heaven.

I have a friend who has led many mission trips.  He’s all about providing dental care to needy people.  He gives generously of time and resources to make it happen.  But once when I was on a mission trip with him, he told me and others that he didn’t think he was very spiritual.  Now in the sense of soaring off into heavenly places over a hymn or a praise song, I would agree he’s not.  But if Matthew 25:31-46 is to be believed, he may well be the most spiritual person of us all.

The doctrine of creation tells us that God is the creator.  The greatest thing that heaven has done in relation to us is physical.  Now somebody is sure to point me to salvation as the greatest thing.  But that is another instance of the same sort of thing.  Salvation, recreation, was a restoration of what was supposed to be in the physical universe. No matter how spiritual we make God, if we stick with scripture, he is the creator of the physical universe.  Nobody could be more “heavenly” than God, yet God creates and uses the physical.

Those who think we should retire “blood language” as out of date and out of tune with the modern age should consider what the idea of eating human flesh and drinking human blood would have sounded like to a Jewish audience in 1st century Judea and Galilee.  It would have been very shocking language then.  And the fact is that sometimes we need shocking language to make us take a subject seriously.

You see, we are not sort of spiritual beings who need a little elevation; we are fallen beings who need serious intervention to restore the image of God and bring us back to our spiritual place.  Sin isn’t a mild infection; it is a virulent, deadly plague.  Shocking language is needed about our shocking condition and activities.

And sin occurs here on earth, in the physical universe.  A few shocking physical metaphors are, I believe, good for our souls!