Sometimes the problem isn’t whether to read the Bible literally or metaphorically. It’s the asking us to pick which distorts the point.
Jesus gets gross with the bread of life.
Proper 15B | John 6:51-58
To be honest, I don’t actually remember the episode. It was so long ago, but I’m sure I’ve seen it. The one where Arthur Fonzerelli jumps his motorcycle over the shark.
That phrase, jumping the shark, has outlived the episode, as these things usually do. The kind of pop reference that takes on its own life. A strange life, actually.
Because when we say that something has jumped the shark, we are saying something very specific. Something that has nothing to do with jumping or sharks or even the show Happy Days.
We’re saying we’ve stopped believing.
We believed before this moment and now we don’t.
We’ve stopped believing. But somehow we don’t take any responsibility for our belief. We admit that we’ve stopped believing, but because of something someone else did. So we usually blame the filmmaker for our new disbelief. We say they jumped the shark. They created something so preposterous we can no longer follow.
In art, however, we say it the other way. We start with the willing suspension of disbelief. We suspend our disbelief and give belief a chance to prove us wrong. But when disbelief comes back, it must be the bad special effects or the illogical outcomes.
We all know this feeling, of course. When something just stops being fun. Or the magic disappears and we finally look around and see that the heroes are just people. The effects just don’t look real enough.
Yet none of us is willing to truly own that moment of disillusionment. They messed up the perfect show. But it’s our disbelief we were suspending. It’s our belief we stop offering.
Even that our default is disbelief should bother us. We, the people who claim to believe.
Jesus Makes It Weird
Hearing Jesus talk about the Bread of Life for the last few weeks has been interesting. But now it’s starting to get weird.
Remember that his closest followers, who he called disciples and apostles, are learning from him and doing what he does.
Large crowds have started to form, surrounding, following, watching, hounding. At first, people started coming to him because of his teaching. Then later, not so much. It became all about the miracles. Everyone seems to want a piece of Jesus.
Now the crowd is filling with skeptics. It isn’t just the true believers anymore, but those who don’t really want to believe. And their questions aren’t entirely fair or honest.
We’ve seen this growing over the last few weeks. Jesus is trying to teach and there’s such confusion. It’s like they’re not even listening.
He’s talking about being bread, come from heaven. And they’re hearing it so literally. How is this man also bread? What is he even saying?
But Jesus keeps pushing. I am bread! He is saying. I am bread and those who love me will eat me!
Our own skeptical postmodern brains get all chill with this metaphor, but they shouldn’t. Because Jesus isn’t winking and nodding at us knowingly. There’s no “I’m ‘bread’ wink wink.”
They’re missing the point and we’re missing it from the other side.
He literally tells them to eat his flesh
Jesus is quite literally telling them that he is bread. And then he says again and again that they are going to eat him. They’re going to chew on him. And it’s even weirder than that. He starts with the Greek word for eat and then switches to another word—like feeding or gnawing or devouring messily.
It seems as if the skeptical response from the doubters has Jesus doubling down on this metaphor. Not just making his image even more literal, but gross and disturbing. Somehow less intellectual and more real and earnest.
It’s like he’s saying You’re not understanding me. When I say eat, I mean it! Like take big chunks and tear it off and chew with your mouth open so that everyone can see that you really are eating my body.
And good, quiet Episcopalians read this passage and think “Well, isn’t that nice! Look at that great metaphor! My, Jesus can be so colorful! What a kidder!”
Or else we’re saying “Yuck! That’s disgusting!”
But I think Jesus is calling us to listen to him. Don’t you? Don’t you think he wants us to actually hear the words he says? But we don’t really want to!
He says
“Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.”
And we think
He’s talking about communion!
And Jesus starts talking again about eating flesh and smacking lips. Like he’s going to tell us to find some barbecue sauce and Texas toast. Who has the smoker?
Community
I just rewatched the Halloween episode from the second season of Community. If you’ve never watched the show, it was a wickedly funny and absurd comedy about a community college named Greendale. And a common theme of the show was that it liked playing with this same line between belief and disbelief, literal and metaphor, true and absurd.
In this episode, the students gather for a Halloween party. And soon after the party starts, one student bites another student and they seem to be turning into real-life zombies. So the main characters start treating it like they’re living in a zombie movie.
It’s actually really good. Because the creators of the show know how we treat that suspension of disbelief. So even within the world of the show, we need a seemingly rational reason for the strange, cannibalistic behavior (spoiler: it’s rabies). But it doesn’t want you to stay in that rational mind. Because these are mutant rabies from an absurd secret government project.
We demand rational and instead of giving us a rational reason, it gives us more absurd!
And reading this text about eating flesh the morning after watching this episode about people biting each other was amazing! Because the question the show raises is a lot like the one Jesus is raising. We’re obsessed with what’s real—so we ask ourselves: did the show jump the shark?—how much am I willing to believe? Or more, how much am I willing to accept so I can not disbelief?
And Jesus, like this episode of Community, seems to be asking us What are you talking about? I’m talking about my being bread and you feasting on me like hungry bandits (or flesh-eating zombies). You’re the one trying to make it something else.
So Is Jesus Jumping the Shark?
Is this that moment? He keeps reinforcing what seems like a metaphor by using even more literal language. He wants his hearers to stop translating him into something else. Like they’re all putting words into his mouth. They’d rather avoid Jesus than listen to him.
That’s why this isn’t just another opportunity for the church to talk about communion. Why? Because of how the skeptics responded to this weird moment.
“The Jews then disputed among themselves”
But according to Raymond Brown, it was more than that. The Greek, he argues “suggests a violent dispute.” The skeptics aren’t innocent people grossed out by Jesus’s disturbing talk. They’re threatening, maybe pushing or hitting people. At best, they’re picking fights and at worst, maybe preparing to riot.
This supposedly simple metaphor of eating flesh seems to suggest that Jesus’s followers all participate in a corporate abomination; breaking sacred laws around blood and flesh and ritual purity. Yeah, Jesus sounds like Kevin Bacon in Footloose to us, but to a lot of people, he’s the bad guy!
Jesus is trying to teach students who don’t want to learn. And they’re getting violent. And in a few chapters, they’ll blame Jesus for it. They’ll kill him and blame him…for their killing him. They’ll suggest that He jumped the shark. Really, we wanted to keep suspending that disbelief, but you know, he brought it on himself.
Jesus keeps teaching them, even as they draw their swords and grab some stones. He keeps teaching them about God coming to free the enslaved and topple the despots, in the flesh. In these imperfect, carnal bodies. These baskets for the bread of life.
He teaches, revealing the beautiful embrace of God, and they respond with the violent fists of humanity.
Do We Dare Believe?
I cannot tell you what this teaching “really means”. It would be a sick distortion or worse, the full embodiment of what Jesus says not to do.
Instead, we’re invited to sit with the disturbing: this thing that isn’t a metaphor but can’t be literal. It can’t be literal, but we must treat it as if it were in the hearing. At this moment, let it be that.
Let it be real just as it is. Without interpretation.
Perhaps like the truth we know is true. Like seeing Hamlet and learning courage is true, standing beneath a tree full of wind chimes frozen in pure peace is true, climbing a mountain or a steeple and seeing the whole world is true.
It is far more disturbing that we disbelieve the truth so easily and believe it so reluctantly.
Jesus doesn’t jump the shark. We do. We take belief hostage. All he’s doing is showing us what real living looks like.
Climbing mountains and running marathons, raising kids and teaching them everything we know. Loving, living, trusting, believing.
The question isn’t Is this real?
It isn’t how or what or when?
Truth isn’t definable, it is only livable.
The question Jesus raises isn’t: do we really eat his flesh and blood — the question is this: Jesus asked us to eat. Do we dare eat?
Do we dare to feast and embrace who we are being called to be?
To make this real in our lives regardless of the metaphysics?
To trust ourselves to do what Jesus says?
Do we dare believe?
Believe so that we might let go of that suspended disbelief and feed it to the sharks?