The angel of the LORD came a second time, touched him, and said, "Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you."

Tonight’s Gospel passage is part of a long sermon given to the 5000 that just ate of the loaves and fishes; or at least as many as followed in boats across the lake that Jesus walked on to cross. Why did Jesus walk on water? To get to the other side.

This sermon is so long that it’s broken up over several Sundays. It’s John’s version of the institution of the Eucharist, which John omits from the last supper. Tonight we get to the point where he says the bread from heaven is his flesh. Next week, he gets even more specific by saying unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood; you have no life in you.  For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink.

There was a time when Christians were accused of cannibalism. While not literally true, the Eucharist is a form of ritual cannibalism. I suppose you could argue that it’s not even ritual cannibalism because we’re eating God’s flesh and not a human’s; however God wouldn’t have flesh at all if it wasn’t for the human Jesus. As I’ve said before, we know God now has flesh since the resurrected Christ still retained Jesus’ wounds, sharing in our wounds.

Back to our Gospel, I’d like to unpack the meaning of the bread of life, and in doing so unpack an aspect of the Eucharist. As Kate often says, we can interpret the Bible though the Bible, and so I’ll look at tonight’s Gospel through the lens of the first Letter of John.

The letter opens with a similar hymn to the one in John’s Gospel. In it John refers to the Word of life, for it was through the Word that God created life. He emphasizes life again when instead of saying the word was made flesh he says LIFE was made visible. Christ Jesus IS life itself; and further life was made by Love. For God, the first person of the trinity is love.

Beloved, let us love one another, because love is of God; everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God. Whatever it exactly means to love is the topic of a whole other sermon, probably on First Corinthians, but I bring it up now, because so often when we talk theological matters we forget to mention love.

In fact John in his letter lets us know that the promised eternal life is love. For this is the message you have heard from the beginning: we should love one another.  If what you heard from the beginning remains in you, then you will remain in the Son and in the Father. And this is the promise that he made us: eternal life.

We’ve talked a lot this last year about living as if you’re already dead and risen into the Kingdom. I’ve mentioned that I see this as a form of Christian detachment from the ways of the world; the ways of mankind, really, because creation itself is beautiful.  You see the Western mind often confuses detachment with heartlessness. I’m talking about a detachment that allows us to truly love.

We can see more and more that the values of this world are not loving at all. There’s only one love allowed in an austerity world where people are reduced to economic units (capitalism and communism both do this.) Pop song and Soap Opera love, a slavish love that keeps women in their place. Christ tells us to even love our enemies, and that can only be done with a certain amount of detachment. We need to remove the way we think and relate to people from the corrupting values of this world. Especially when we rightfully condemn those values, we need to recognize that God loves even those that act on them-just as god loves us when we sin.

I’m not saying this should replace romantic love or love of friends and family, Jesus had his inner circle of close friends too. I’m saying that when we find people that are hard to love, it’s important to remember that God loves both you and them. Even more, contrary to the values of humankind, we need to love ourselves, otherwise we sin against Jesus’ summary of the law, love your neighbor as yourself. For some of us, that may take a similar detachment, to see ourselves as a loving God does, not as we judge ourselves.

All of this is hard, very very hard. But very soon we’ll be doing as Jesus asks, eating His flesh and drinking his blood. We will nourish ourselves with life made manifest and we will abide in God’s love. "Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you."