FLESH AND BLOOD

The Four Gospels begin their narratives in four different ways. Mark begins with an adult Jesus who is baptized by John in the Jordan. Matthew has a birth narrative that features Magi who spent about two years searching for the child. Luke's has shepherds who visit Jesus as a baby. John's origin story begins in "The Beginning." The Word became Flesh and lived among us. God has stopped watching from a distance.

Stories of Gods taking on human form abound in many of the world's mythologies. Many of the heroes of ancient peoples were demigods or super humans. For the Gospel of John, when the Word became Flesh and Blood, the Word was totally and fully Flesh and Blood. In other words, God was not Superman disguised as Clark Kent--God was Clark Kent.

For the Gospel of John, God Incarnate gets tired and thirsty; eats and drinks with family and friends; experiences love and loss, and cries, like all of us. God Incarnate takes the side of the poor, feeds the multitudes, experiences betrayal, and suffers torture and crucifixion by empire. Like many among us.

And then God dies. Like all of us will. Like all of us who are Flesh and Blood.

My Friends, to believe in the incarnation is to embody justice, accompaniment, solidarity, and life-giving, like Jesus did. The incarnation always requires warm bodies, flesh and blood: yours and mine.


*art: Christ Child, also known as In the Beginning or the Millennium Sculpture, is an outdoor sculpture by Michael "Mike" Chapman, located under the portico of St Martins-in-the-Fields at Trafalgar Square in London, United Kingdom.

WE ARE THE ANSWER TO OUR PRAYERS

There is a virus that has killed more people than any pandemic. It is hunger. And the "vaccine" has always been available. It is food. Historians tell us that up to half of the population during Jesus’s time was slowly starving to death. This deadly virus has only ever affected the poor. The rich are immune to it.

The story of the Feeding of the 5000 reminded us that one poor and hungry child's offering of five barley loaves and two fish brought about the miracle that fed the multitudes.

This Sunday's lection reminds us not to focus on the manna, nor on the bread and fish, but on the source of the offering: The poor child; God; and Jesus who says, "I Am the Bread of Life."

My friends, it is time we realize that, like the child with five barley loaves and two fish, like Jesus, we are the answer to many of the world's pleas. And the gifts we can offer today, right now, are more life-giving than the ones we plan to give tomorrow.

We often forget that we play the primary role in the realization of our dreams, that we are the change that we desperately need, that we are the answer to many of our prayers, and that the tomorrow we always look forward to is already here, since today is the tomorrow we prayed for yesterday!

*image from Christ Episcopal Church at Eagle Lake. 

YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT

Sunday’s lection from John is about eating Jesus’s flesh and drinking his blood. This passage has been interpreted in so many different ways throughout the centuries. It serves as a basis for the Roman Catholic church’s theology of transubstantiation. Others call this John’s version of the Last Supper or Eucharistic ritual found in the latter part of the Synoptic Gospels. Others locate this as a part of the “I Am” discourses of the Johannine Jesus.

The Gospel of John declares: the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. God became human. In the fullness of time, God decided to become one of us. Oftentimes we say that the Gospel of John is the most spiritual of the gospels. It is, since spirit (which is ruach in Hebrew, pneuma in Greek, and anima in Latin) actually means breath. “Hininga."

Simply put, spirit is oxygen for people and carbon dioxide for plants. Spirit, in other words, is matter. Thus, the Gospel of John abounds with powerful metaphors which are material, physical, and earthy: water; bread and fish; shepherds, sheep, and lambs; tears and death; wombs, births, and rebirths. Now, we are commanded to eat the Word made flesh and drink his blood. And we will live.

There are people whose daily lives revolve around coffee. There are those who cannot function well without rice. Then, there are those who share an intimate relationship with pan de sal and Reno liver spread, with mami and siopao, with San Miguel Beer and adobo peanuts. Finally, there are those who are addicted to Jesus.

Loving, craving, eating Jesus on a daily basis, like manna, is dangerous. It is life-changing, transformative, and very, very risky! It requires giving up one’s life for another.

It means eventually becoming what you eat, being like Jesus—love in the flesh, food for the hungry, drink for the thirsty, clothing for the naked, a friend to the stranger and the sick, freedom to the captives, salt of the earth, light in the darkness, bread for the world.

To offer one’s “flesh and blood” is to offer the whole self. Jesus did. This is the path to abundant life for all. Self-giving. Offering “flesh and blood” so that others may live. Jesus said, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” And he did. And we are invited to do the same.

Sisters and brothers, people say, you are what you eat. For those of us who call ourselves friends of Jesus, I pray we really are!

*art, "The Last Supper," painting from Cathedral of Sancti Spiritus, Cuba (from vanderbilt divinity library archives).

 

ONE CHILD'S OFFERING

There are many people who imagine this story-- which we find in all four canonical gospels--as an actual event in Jesus's ministry. Then there are those who argue that it is a parable. All the parables we have looked at so far are stories that Jesus told. This one is different. It's a parable from the early church. Jesus is a character in the parable.

He sees the multitude hungry and, following the teachings of the Law and the Prophets, he tells his disciples to feed them. In the Synoptics, his disciples make up excuses. Send the crowd away. Let them feed themselves. In Sunday's lection from John 6, they tell him: we don't have enough funds to address the situation.

The excuses then sound so much like our excuses today.

Then a young child, possibly 12 years old or younger, offers what he has. Five barley loaves and two fish. And the miracle of feeding of the 5000 begins. There is a tradition that says barley tastes good... to cows, sheep, and horses! The poor, the anawim, ate barley. It was all they could afford. The rich had storehouses of wheat, and fattened themselves with it.

Do not forget this. Ever. The barley loaves and the fish that led to the feeding of the poor and hungry multitudes were offered by a POOR AND HUNGRY child. Many times we forget that the answer to our prayers is already among us. Many times, God's liberating acts begin when one--just one we usually do not expect--takes that step forward, that leap of faith, that offering of bread and fish.


*art, "Jesus multiplies the loaves and fish," (JESUS MAFA, 1973) from vanderbilt divinity library digital archives.

SLEEPING IN CHURCH

Many people sleep during Sunday services. Many people find such behavior unacceptable. Many other people understand the reasons why many people sleep during Sunday services.

In Genesis 1, God works for six days and rests on the seventh. Even God needs a break. Even God needs to take a nap.

Sunday's lection offers us a glimpse of Jesus declaring a break for himself and his discples. Mark 6:31 reads: Then, because so many people were coming and going that they did not even have a chance to eat, he said to them, “Come with me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest.”

They did go away to a quiet place and got some rest.

My friends, almost everyone needs a break. I say "almost everyone" because one-third of the world's wealthiest people are born wealthy and they will die wealthier without ever working one minute in their entire lives. This post is not about them.

This post is about people who live from payday to the next; those who do not even get the minimum wage; those who have never had a restful sleep in years; those dead-tired people in the pews who take naps during the pastor's sermon.

Please rest. Even God needs a break. Even God needs a nap.


*image: Rowan Atkinson as "Mr Bean" sleeping in church

PRINCESS AND PROPHET

Kakay Pamaran's work on Salome is a brilliant thesis using Historical Jesus Research methods. She argues that the "princess's dance which led to the prophet's death" tradition is part of a much bigger extra-canonical Salome Corpus that is still waiting to be collected, catalogued, and celebrated.

Salome and Mary Magdalene are two of the most attested interlocutors of Jesus in extra-canonical Christian literature. There are scholars whose research have shown how Mary Magdalene has been systematically erased from orthodox traditions. Kakay's research pursues a similar trajectory. There are copies of Mark where Salome completely disappears from the list of the women who discovers the empty tomb. Matthew’s and Luke's accounts do not mention Salome.

Many people today would call Magdalene a prostitute or adulteress and Salome a temptress or seductress. All these are false. Fake news. Kakay's work calls the church to repent of its violent sins of systematic erasuring and institutional forgetting.

More importantly, Kakay's work challenges the church to open the canon and discover the diverse, pluriform, and multivocal Christian traditions that make up the 99% that orthodoxy have marginalized.

Friends, please read Sunday's lection. Please read it in Greek if you are able. Salome, in the passage, was a GIRL. A LITTLE GIRL.

*Kakay Pamaran, Salvae Salome: Corpus, Myth, Canon, and the Quest for Salome (Union Theological Seminary, Philippines Master of Theology thesis, 2021). 

THE BASTARD FROM NAZARETH

Homecomings conjure up positive images for a lot of people, especially graduation and vacation days. For many, homecoming is almost synonymous with reunion.

But Sunday's lection on Jesus's homecoming paints a different picture. His townmates ask, "Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?" Mark's 'The carpenter from Nazareth, the son of Mary' (read, bastard) was a hard sell. It was certainly a hard sell for the other Nazarenes; in the Lukan version of this story, they tried to throw Jesus off a cliff.

I always ask my co-learners to imagine a daughter or sister or friend--who is barely out of her teens--being pregnant and telling everyone that the father of her child is the Holy Spirit. Mark's 'The carpenter from Nazareth, the son of Mary' (read, bastard) was a very hard sell. Then and now.

To this day, the bastard from Nazareth who lived his life with and for those whose only hope was God; who preached good news to the poor; who challenged the rich to sell everything they have and give the proceeds to the destitute; who defied empire and its life-negating systems; and who commanded everyone who followed him to offer one's life for a friend; remains an extremely hard sell.

You can't exactly sell a way of life that carries a high risk of being executed by the state, can you?

*art, "Jesus as a child in Nazareth," (JESUS MAFA) available at the Vanderbilt Divinity Library digital archives.