the church of the
ascension
in the city of
new york
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Thursday, March 26
Psalm 69:1-23 / Jeremiah 22:13-23 / John 6:41-51
In the age of airplanes, it is not easy to understand a religion whose founder got around by donkey. To me, the problem of grasping the Gospels' concepts is twofold:
There's the challenge of understanding how the people lived and the meaning of their stories and their figures of speech. I mean, how much do we really know about sheep? When I was teaching a second-grade Sunday school class, one of my favorite ideas was a unit on sheep. We talked about how stupid they are, how a shepherd protects them and keeps them moving. We manipulated samples of wool, ate lamb sausage, attended a sheep-shearing. And so one comes to understand this, from today's Jeremiah passage: "The wind shall shepherd all your shepherds." How much more desolate can it be?
The second is more difficult. I have trouble understanding the concept of sacrificing live animals to our God. The practice is bloody and violent. Even more violent to me is the idea that our God insisted on the very, very bloody death of his own son as a sacrifice. And the idea that Jesus knew that he was to be that bloody sacrifice. The only sacrifice story I relate to is the one about Abram and Isaac, and in that one God let the sacrifice escape. So why did His son have to die?
The passage from John makes so much more sense to me: Jesus is not the flesh and blood of the bloody sacrifice, but his flesh is the Bread of Life. Once again, we are called upon to understand a metaphor based on life two millennia ago. Bread was not just something to spread butter on: it was the staff of life. And when we read that the Israelites died even though they ate the manna from heaven, we understand that this is not just literal bread but "the spirit that gives life."
— Isabel Spencer
In the age of airplanes, it is not easy to understand a religion whose founder got around by donkey. To me, the problem of grasping the Gospels' concepts is twofold:
There's the challenge of understanding how the people lived and the meaning of their stories and their figures of speech. I mean, how much do we really know about sheep? When I was teaching a second-grade Sunday school class, one of my favorite ideas was a unit on sheep. We talked about how stupid they are, how a shepherd protects them and keeps them moving. We manipulated samples of wool, ate lamb sausage, attended a sheep-shearing. And so one comes to understand this, from today's Jeremiah passage: "The wind shall shepherd all your shepherds." How much more desolate can it be?
The second is more difficult. I have trouble understanding the concept of sacrificing live animals to our God. The practice is bloody and violent. Even more violent to me is the idea that our God insisted on the very, very bloody death of his own son as a sacrifice. And the idea that Jesus knew that he was to be that bloody sacrifice. The only sacrifice story I relate to is the one about Abram and Isaac, and in that one God let the sacrifice escape. So why did His son have to die?
The passage from John makes so much more sense to me: Jesus is not the flesh and blood of the bloody sacrifice, but his flesh is the Bread of Life. Once again, we are called upon to understand a metaphor based on life two millennia ago. Bread was not just something to spread butter on: it was the staff of life. And when we read that the Israelites died even though they ate the manna from heaven, we understand that this is not just literal bread but "the spirit that gives life."
— Isabel Spencer
