August 16, 2009
(Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost; Proper 15)
(From The Lectionary Page)
You Are What You Eat
by The Rev. Joe Behen, Clergy Assistant
Have you ever heard anyone use the phrase, “You are what you eat?” Of course, it’s a sound bite, to borrow Bryan’s phrase from two weeks ago, referring to the connection between a person’s general health and their diet. The point is that the food we eat has a bearing on our state of mind and health. I often hope that the truth in this statement is minimal, as anyone that knows me can easily picture me wolfing down huge slices of pizza and chocolate cake and such, on a fairly regular basis. I suppose that I’m in trouble though, as the connection between the two seems to be pretty well documented.
In John’s gospel today, Jesus is using this idea to make his point. His suggestion that his body is food causes no small amount of confusion among his followers. Nearly everyone, disciples included, misunderstand his teaching about being bread that they must eat. They misinterpret his teaching, and therefore they misinterpret what Jesus means by life. Just two weeks ago we heard Jesus telling those following him not to “work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life.” Two points at least are available to us here about eternal life:
- First, eternal life is both future, something hoped for, but also present, affecting us now
- And second, while this eternal life is God’s gift, we have a part in its creation in our lives
Today, it seems that Jesus is building on these ideas: Should life, he is asking, be defined by observable evidence, or by meaning? Is life understood to be a biological process of breathing and eating, or is life somehow associated with Truth? If life is somehow bound up God, Jesus suggests, then it follows that our own daily experiences are alive with God’s meaning. Jesus wants his followers to understand that belief in God and in himself necessarily gives life meaning. And if they will take this in, then the choices they make each day will reflect that. All through John’s gospel, Jesus is said to perform signs rather than miracles. A miracle could be something in and of itself, but a sign is something that points you to something else. These signs that Jesus perform have the purpose of pointing toward a greater reality. That reality, it seems, is Jesus’ point in today’s gospel: true life is life that points toward God.
But for God’s life to be what comes out of us, it must be that God’s life is what goes in. “Unless you eat the flesh of the son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” Here we come up against perhaps the difference between professing belief in something, and living that reflects belief. The difference might be summed up in one word: habit. Ethicist Michael Hanby writes that, “Christian ethics is more fundamentally about habits, and thus about producing certain kinds of people, than about decisions, or producing certain kinds of consequences. Because habits determine what choices you think you have to decide from.”[1]
What if our habits of taking God into our lives,
- our practices of prayer, mercy, and justice
- our practices of loving God and loving our neighbor
What if these habits of taking in God, over time, create in us what we would call virtue? This virtue then, would be the quality of discerning God in our lives, the quality of taking in God such that God is what comes out of us. A virtue could be said to be a habit of abiding in God, and God in us, in particular ways. For example, if we are just, if justice if a virtue through which we take in and live out God’s presence, then “we should be in pain if we perform an unjust act, precisely in that something of us has broken; we have broken the habit of being just.”[2]
Have you seen or heard of the film, “Slumdog Millionaire”? It is the story of a street kid (a “slum-dog”), who manages to become a contestant on the popular television show, Who Wants to be a Millionaire? Against all odds, he answers the questions correctly, and is then, before the final episode of the game-show, thrown in jail. It is assumed that he is somehow cheating. Without giving it away in case you haven’t seen it, I want simply to look for a moment at Jamal, the main character in the film, and his brother, Salim.
We see them both, from a very young age being witness to cruel injustices, both to themselves and to others. We also see them considering various ways of responding to that injustice. Salim is shown to be a pragmatist, responding by grasping, gently at first, at methods that produce immediate and obvious results, even when the means of achieving these results are less than virtuous. Jamal, however, tends more and more to be the idealist – his refusal to use the tools that the unjust have used against him sets him apart. His idealism nearly always costs him a great deal. But he seems to see something, something that his brother does not.
The phrase, “It is written” continues to emerge, but never explained. It could simply refer to some sense of destiny. But I don’t think that they would spend so much effort, to show the evolution of Jamal’s choice-making, if the point were simply one of predestination. But I think there’s more there. There seems to be a sense in which his habits of living out justice and truth expose to others their injustice and their untruth. In him, they are confronted with a truthful image of who they themselves have become, and they don’t like it. It is this quality that seems to change everything. There is a scene in which Jamal offers information to the questioning detective, unprompted, that could be used against him. The quite surprised detective points this out to Jamal, who effectively says, “Why would I not say it – it is the truth.” The habits of abiding in and living out Truth, have produced in Jamal a kind of virtue. It is this virtue that helps him to discern his responses to life.
In other words, it is virtue that allows us both to discern and to choose the more difficult, the more long-term good. Habits produce a way of living in God, and together with God’s gift becomes our virtue, our characteristic, that in turn enables us to see and to choose those actions that point toward the higher good and rather than those that point nowhere but to themselves.
The question before us today, then, is this: what are your habits of taking in God, your practices of abiding in him? “Unless you eat the flesh of the son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” It would seem that there is much riding on this question. There are numerous ways of creating the habit of taking in God in our lives. And there are countless ways in which God’s purpose can be lived out, limited, I am guessing, only by our imaginations. But somehow, this process needs to be part of our life. This verse might also be worded like this: If you take in and live out God in your life, you have life in the fullest sense.” And, as several of the early Fathers of the Church were known to say, “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.”
[1] Hanby, Michael. “Giving Grief to Management” Hauerwas, Stanley and Wells, Samuel editors. The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004) p. 238
[2] Harak, Simon G. Viruous Passions: The Formation of Christian Character (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 1993) p. 30