The Task of the Church

At the tail end of Jesus' Bread of Life Discourse in the Gospel of John, Jesus tells his Jewish listeners that if they are to follow him, they must symbolically eat his flesh and drink his blood.  The word that Jesus uses to describe "eating" is the Greek trogein, which is rarely used in the New Testament.  This was a word that is the rough equivalent of "gnawing."  Instead, the New Testament more commonly uses the more polite word phagein, which was the general word used to describe polite and socially appropriate dining.

Jesus was clearly throwing down the gauntlet, figuratively speaking, with his listeners.  Notice that at the conclusion of his discourse, many of his listeners stopped following Jesus.  What offended them was his reference to eating flesh and ingesting blood.  Even when used as a symbol, this was a notion that would have been shocking and offensive to his Jewish listeners--in Jewish culture, ingesting flesh and drinking blood is an anathema.  By using blunt, even extreme terminology, Jesus made it clear to the crowds that in order to be his followers, they had to be willing to abandon their own cherished cultural practices when those practices conflicted with being a follower of Jesus.


As Christianity spread into the Roman Empire, Gentile Christians had to make the same choice.  Paul and Christian leaders in later generations made it clear that the Church stood separate and apart from culture--when following Jesus conflicted with Roman culture, the Church had to follow Jesus.  Sometimes Roman practices were consistent with following Jesus; sometimes they were not.  The Church was willing to face persecution and even death when necessary.

This is the task of the Church.  Its complicated.  Its somewhere between the extreme of being the mirror and the voice of culture, and setting itself against culture.  Its learning to be, in New Testament terms, in the world but not of it.  Too often the Church today tries to appease the casual disciples who follow Jesus into the desert to get bread and to be entertained.  Jesus was willing to let these casual disciples go in order to get down to the real business of the Church--forming a community that would follow in the way of Christ without compromise or limitation.