“Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them”(Jo. 6:56).
Where do you feel at home? I remember my grandparents’ house in Jacksonville, Florida, when I was a small boy: a place with a rabbit warren of huge azalea bushes out back; possessed of a deep and shaded screened porch to catch the breeze off the St. John’s River; and permeated with the smell of the river itself, funky and alluvial, the whiff of creation itself. We must have spent many weekends there toward the end of my grandparents’ life, and that early time is etched in my memory.
In some ways that place defines for me what “home” is, an archetype of sorts that made a deeper impression on me than any of my boyhood homes. Later, when Caroline and I lived in Louisiana, I used to step outside and breathe in the air with the same swampy smell, and through the power that resides in the olfactory sense, I was transported back to those earlier days. It was a pleasant form of time travel, if you will. How about that: amazing.
When Jesus talks about abiding in our Gospel today, he’s talking about permanence and connection, being at home and being at peace. I think that abiding in the Gospel sense must be something like the feeling invoked in me by that memory of a place so identified in my mind with family, three generations deep. Abiding is linked to identity and relationship: the sort of identity we don’t make up for ourselves but is bestowed by others, and the sort of relationships we depend on for our lives.
In the Gospel of John, Jesus talks about abiding in a number of places, and not only here in the sixth chapter. Sometimes the same Greek root is translated by the word “abide” or “remain”: for instance in the fifteenth chapter where Jesus says to the disciples, “Abide in me as I abide in you” (Jo. 15:4). But other occurrences are typically rendered differently.
For instance, at the very beginning of the Gospel, when Jesus encounters two of John the Baptist’s disciples they ask him, “Rabbi… where are you staying?” (Jo. 1:29), and he invites them to come and see, to be with him where he is. It’s the same root word: “Rabbi, where are you abiding?”; that is, where is your place? Again, in the fourteenth chapter, Jesus tells St. Jude, “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them” (Jo. 14:23). That’s right: “our home.” It’s the same root word as “abide.” Where is your place? Where do you live? Where do you belong?
Of course, Jesus is not just talking about the place we think we belong, but about the place of genuine abiding, of true permanence and peace. That place is where he is. That is our true homeland. The connection that roots us is our relationship with him. As he says in the fifteenth chapter, we did not choose him but he chose us (Jo. 15:16). As Jesus prays a little bit later, “Father, I desire that those also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory, which you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world” (Jo. 17:24).
Jesus talks about this abiding as a kind of interpenetration or indwelling, the virtual occupation of the same space, where we are “in” him and he is “in” us, just as he is in the Father and the Father is in him. “I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one” (Jo. 17:23) as he says in that same prayer in the seventeenth chapter. Space and time almost collapse here as we abide in him and he in us. The Apostle Paul also talks about being “in Christ” (2 Cor. 5:17). Abiding in Christ is not just the memory of what was or the imagination of what might be, but being where Jesus is, right now.
“Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them” (Jo. 6:56). This brings us back to our Gospel reading, and to the Eucharist we celebrate this morning. Our abiding in Christ, the reality of permanence and peace, connection and relation, is focused for us in the sacrament of the altar. Holy Communion creates its own kind of abiding, where the bread and wine of the Eucharist become Christ’s body and blood, a shorthand symbol of his life offered for us. We eat and drink, and his life becomes not only the source of our life but a part of our own life itself.
In this Eucharist, we occupy the same space; we become, as say in the old prayer “very members incorporate in the mystical body” of Jesus himself. Now it is Christ who lives in us, as St. Paul says in Galatians (Gal. 2:20). Here, this morning, at St. James’ Church, is the place of abiding, where Christ dwells with us, and we dwell in him.