The sun is warm,
The wind is wild
The grass is green along the shores,
Here no bull can hide
The teacher held up his staff and waved it before his monks.
"If you call this a staff," he said, "you deny its eternal life.
If you do not call this a staff, you deny its present fact. Tell
me just what do you propose to call it?"
And here’s one you’ve heard many times:
What is the sound of one hand clapping?
These are koans from the Zen masters. A koan is a riddle without a logical answer. To the casual reader some of these riddles will seem utter nonsense.
“The purpose of the koans,” one Zen teacher writes, “is to break the mind of logic. What the master wants of the pupil is not understanding in any usual sense. He wants to "burst the bag," and drive the pupil with whole-souled precipitation into [enlightenment].”
Jesus is using a similar teaching method in today’s gospel, but instead of koans, he scandalizes his disciples. The Greek word scandalon means a stumbling block, something you trip over as you pursue your spiritual journey.
“Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them...whoever eats me will live because of me.” His words here are a scandal, a stumbling block. Many people, once they hit that stumbling block, give up the journey.
Those of us who grew up in the faith are hearing this after centuries of teaching and practice of the Eucharist, so we’ve gotten used to this imagery, but for those hearing it for the first time, you can’t blame them for doing a 180 degree pivot. The words are a stumbling block.
But as with a Zen koan, if you can hang in there, that very stumbling block will lead you to a deeper understanding and a fuller life.
Jesus does this. He scandalizes people. A lot.
He’s like Georgia O’Keeffe, the artist known for her amazing paintings of flowers. The paintings are huge and colorful and in your face. She says why she paints them this way:
When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.
And like O’Keeffe, Jesus in today’s gospel wants to make sure we, in all our rushing around, really, really come to understand a profound paradox, whether we want to or not.
This particular stumbling block points us beyond an either-or kind of consciousness common among Greek thinkers in John’s day: time versus eternity, the good versus the bad, truth versus falsehood, life versus death, male versus female, past versus future, darkness versus light, earth versus heaven.
One of these oppositions in John’s time was flesh versus spirit. Many Greek philosophers saw flesh as evil, spirit as good. The spiritual path required disciplining and denying the flesh for the sake of the spirit. We in the West are heirs of this philosophy. It helps explain today’s cultural distrust and disregard of the body and many of our taboos against sex and women.
Over against this split, John says starkly: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” The Creator spirit who existed before time entered fully into our human flesh. Now there’s no more split, and this is the paradox Jesus wants his disciples to grasp here: that flesh is charged with spirit, earth is wedded to heaven.
You can no longer say that becoming spiritual is at the expense of your body--your bones and muscles and ligaments, your pleasures and pains, your delight in good food and music and sex, your physical health, your veins and arteries, your breath and heartbeat. All these bodily things are charged with spirit because the Word has become flesh.
This opens a new spiritual appreciation. As one spiritual writer puts it,
As our senses sharpen, we pick up the buzzing of the bees and the rustling of the wind through the leaves. We become aware of the remarkable artistry in the veining of every leaf and bird feather. Inevitably, at some point, we sense the musculature beneath our own thin skin that miraculously holds us at 98.6 degrees in both snow and blistering sun. We wiggle our toes and stretch our arms and enjoy the sun or perhaps the taste of a raindrop on our tongue. This is God’s gift of sensuality awakening--becoming more sensitive and appreciative.
This oneness of flesh and spirit has implications for how we live, because this spiritual path demands a profound love for our bodies, a concern for what we eat, the substances we put into our bodies, how we exercise, make love. It involves not subjecting ourselves to the absurd Barbie-doll and Ken-doll body images the media present to us. It involves creating living environments for ourselves and each other that are healthy and beautiful. This spiritual path is very fleshy.
And this oneness of flesh and spirit has implications for life in our larger society.
- In a gentrifying city like ours, with the bodies of so many families and seniors being evicted from their homes and ending up on the sidewalk, this oneness insists on the basic human right to decent physical shelter.
- In a culture of rape, this oneness of flesh and spirit involves women stepping forward to demand respect for their bodies, and the rest of us honoring that demand.
- In a racist culture, when black and brown bodies are confined to ghettos and prisons and detention centers and many times beaten and killed, this oneness of flesh and spirit involves people of color demanding respect for their bodies as well, and our society honoring and protecting those bodies.
Te-nehisi Coates, a black writer, reflects on what honoring his body has meant for him as a black man:
You preserved your life [as a black person] because your life, your body, was as good as anyone’s, because your blood was as precious as jewels… You do not give your precious body to the billy clubs of Birmingham sheriffs nor to the insidious gravity of the streets. Black is beautiful--which is to say that the black body is beautiful, that black hair must be guarded against the torture of processing and lye, that black skin must be guarded against bleach, that our noses and mouths must be protected against modern surgery. We are all our beautiful bodies and so must never be prostrate before barbarians, must never submit our original self...to defiling and plunder.
Because the word has become flesh, spirit and flesh are now one. In scandalous words--eat my flesh, drink my blood--Jesus guides us to embrace and honor that oneness.
At the end of this passage, after many have left, Jesus turns to his apostles and says, “Have I scandalized you? Will you also leave?”
This joining of flesh with spirit, with all its implications and demands, can be for us, as it was for them, a stumbling block, leaving us with a choice: to leave what seems on the surface a very strange and grotesque spiritual path, or to continue with just enough trust and a wild hunch that these scandalous words of Jesus just might lead us to life.
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