A young man was searching for the secret of wisdom, and heard that there was a guru high in the Himalayas who knew. So he set off to find the guru, going through much hardship and travail until finally, high in the mountains, he found the Master sitting in the lotus posture.
“Tell me, oh Master!” he cried. “What is the secret of wisdom?”
The Master replied: “Good judgment.”
“But how do you get good judgment?” asked the young man.
The Master replied: “Experience.”
“And how do you get experience?” the young man persisted.
”Ah,” said the Master: “Bad judgment.”
As I reflected on this week’s scripture, the thought came to me that wisdom may be nothing much more than the ability and the freedom to change one’s mind.
In this we have God as a model. In stories and prophecies throughout, God is frequently said to change his mind, as he responds to human choices and actions. He is frequently described as “doing a new thing.” Could this be God’s wisdom?
I have a hard time changing my mind, don’t you? The world made me who I am. My mind, my thinking, my perspective, is all part of my mental emotional reaction to things that have happened to me, both good and bad. My ongoing experience then is mostly about avoiding the things I experienced as bad and seeking out the things that I experienced as good.
But the world is a pretty messed-up place, to be honest. As beautiful and amazing as the created world may be, the world we humans have made is shot through with selfishness and fear, a function of our human natures, what the Bible calls sarx, translated as “flesh.”
As we said last week, we can discern between flesh and spirit, body and mind, but we cannot separate them. A living human is both, inseparably. All the things we experience we experience in our flesh. Our body is our mind, and our mind is our body.
But flesh is driven by nature, all of it, biblically speaking, God-created and good. We hunger, we thirst, we long for love, self-esteem, security. But as the world does its thing to us, any of these natural desires can become inflamed or sickened, leading us to become self-centered and fearful. Our minds become trapped in a rut.
But even if we are relatively happy and at peace, we might find it very hard to really change our minds. For me, I know, it usually takes some kind of trauma, some kind of disaster. As the old guru says, the consequences of bad judgment can sometimes shake my thinking loose.
Right now in our common life, all around the world, we see rigid, unchanging minds, creating conflict and misery of all kinds. What can liberate us from these ruts, this enslavement to our locked-in thinking and feeling?
We see the first principle in Solomon, who is handed an exalted and powerful position, but chooses to see himself as absolutely unfit to inhabit it. Solomon’s wisdom begins in the humility to see himself as nothing but a little child, unable to tell right from wrong without help. Humility is the first and the most important element in the freedom to change one’s mind.
Our psalm echoes and enlarges on this truth: that the recognition of our smallness before God is the beginning of wisdom, the beginning of the willingness and the freedom to change our mind.
Some old Roman wrote the famous line “in Vito veritas”, or “in wine is truth.” Alcohol loosens our inhibitions so that our secret selves are more exposed. Paul, in his letter to the Ephesians, encourages us to fill ourselves with the Spirit of God instead, matching our outward songs with the inward melody of our love for him, which is the truest of our secret selves.
In the end, though, the problem of our rigid minds is in our bodies, in our flesh, with its fears and its attachments.
In todays troubling passage from John, Jesus rubs our noses in this truth, as he identifies himself with the passover lamb, the unblemished lamb God commanded his people to sacrifice and eat on that central night of the Passover, its flesh food for their journey into freedom, its blood a sign to God of their faith and hope in him.
Jesus had identified his body with the manna from heaven, as we heard last week, a real food that kept God’s people alive as they journeyed to the land God had promised them. But he goes farther in identifying with the lamb.
Jesus’ flesh alone was unblemished by the fears and attachments of the self that trap us all in self-defeating spiritual ruts. The Spirit of God was woven into his flesh, just as our human spirits are woven into ours.
In my own life, I have experienced a radical change in perspective, a radical change of mind, through the incorporation of God’s Spirit into my flesh. Yes, I suppose that Spirit was already there, as Scripture seems to suggest, but not until my bad judgment led me to the experience of its consequences, and I was driven to fall to my knees, like Solomon, and acknowledge I was nothing but a little child, with no true understanding of right and wrong.
While I don’t know all your stories, I suspect from the peace and joy I see in so many of our members, that such moments may be in your histories as well.
The Gospel of John does not tell of a last supper or a moment when Jesus instituted his supper, but it does have chapter 6, often quoted by all kinds of theologians to support their various ideas about what’s going on in holy communion.
Jesus’ words are disturbing, summoning images of cannibalism. As with Nicodemus, who was confounded by Jesus’ insistence that the only way to know God was by being born from above, so this synagogue in Capernaum is confounded by his insistence that his flesh is true food and his blood true drink. Nicodemus and the Judeans in the Capernaum synagogue are trapped in their mental and emotional ruts, because they have failed to take God’s Spirit into their bodies.
To say we eat of Jesus’ Spirit when we partake of the Lord’s Supper is true. But it is also true that Jesus is risen and is alive right now. We are not merely remembering a dead prophet. A living human being is both spirit and flesh, and so if we eat his Spirit we are also eating his flesh.
Troubling and maybe even nauseating to those who cannot accept God’s revelation in Jesus, eating his flesh and drinking his blood is a poetic description of implanting God’s free Spirit into our sinful flesh. There is no life in spirit alone and there is no life in flesh alone; there is life in Spirit and flesh.
Our world today desperately needs wisdom, the freedom and the willingness to respond to reality truthfully and completely. To accept what is true even if it isn’t the truth we ordered, to eat, as it were, what is on our plates, and to eat it with thanksgiving.
Those who eat his flesh and drink his blood abide in him and he in them. Just as the living Father sent him and he lives because of the Father, so whoever eats he will live because of him.
Amen.
Sermon for the 13th Sunday after Pentecost Year B
John 6:51-58
