• I Kings 2:10-12,3:3-14

The nine Sundays in which we have followed David’s life and reign as King conclude.  Now the story of the reign of the son David had with Bathsheba, Solomon, commences.  David now “sleeps with the ancestors.”  Although he is now King, Solomon continues to worship in the “high places,” which were considered rival places for sacrifice to Jerusalem.  On this occasion in Gibeon, the Lord appears to him in a dream and initiates a conversation by asking Solomon what does he want as he begins his reign.  Solomon begins his response with an idealized memory of his father’s “faithfulness, righteousness and upright heart.”  He also recalls the Lord’s abiding love for his father, including the fact that it is David’s son who is  following in succession.  Solomon asks for “an understanding mind to govern Your people, able to discern between good and evil….”  The Lord is so pleased with Solomon’s request for wisdom rather than wealth or a long life or the defeat of his enemies that the Lord grants him wisdom as well as  all the things he did not request.

• Psalm 111

The psalmist articulates the Lord’s “deeds”– bounty, grace, mercy, sustenance, the promised land, truth, justice, precepts that endure for all time, redemption.  Given this astonishing list, the beginning of wisdom, the psalmist insists, is “fear” [an appropriate, respectful and affectionate awe] of the Lord and comprehensive knowledge and implementation of the Lord’s ways.

OR

• Proverbs 9:1-16

“Wisdom” is portrayed as a gracious hostess of a large, imposing home who has the means to put on a lavish meal paired with superb wines.  She sends her servants into the streets to invite any and all– the “simple” and those “without sense,” “come, eat of my bread and drink of my wine I have mixed.”  The invitation also includes an admonition:  “Lay aside immaturity, and live and walk in the way of insight.”

• Psalm 34:9-14

The psalmist provides a compilation of conventional admonitions, but then uses a captivating metaphor:  fear the Lord and do not speak evil or deceitfully of others.  If one follows this counsel, he or she will produce a sweet taste and the sated feeling that comes with a full stomach.  Otherwise, one’s needs are like a raging and ravenous lion.

• Ephesians 5:15-20

The writer to the Ephesians calls for God’s people to be “wise.”  Do not find your natural need for release and the fun of getting drunk to take precedence over “singing and making melody to God the Father at all times and fore everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

• John 6:51-55

John’s long discourse by Jesus, which follows the miraculous feeding of more than 5,000 men, women and children, continues and becomes more specific and more intense.  Jesus has just declared that the “bread” he gives is his “flesh.”  John’s  usual protagonists against Jesus, “the Jews,” are shocked at such a claim.  But the discourse insistently pursues this image of eating flesh and drinking blood.  “The flesh and blood” here is, of course, Jesus’ voluntary torture and execution as the dazzling display of God’s love!  Anyone who ‘ingests’ this act of love “will live forever.”

Religion that is still infatuated with Modernity is uncomfortable or just flat out ignores biblical sensuality.  Yet, biblical narratives and poetry engage all the human senses vividly and frequently.  The reading from Proverbs evokes the quest for God’s ways by engaging sight, smell and taste as the reader is invited to an extravagant feast paired with the best wines.  The writer to the Ephesians suggests that the ‘high’ of getting drunk be replaced with another mind/mood altering activity– singing together God’s praises.  But most dramatically, John’s narrative evokes taste.

We know the expression– “I want something so bad I can taste it.”  So we are already familiar with the experience John is referencing: that ecstatic moment when something or someone we long for becomes so intense it becomes palpable.  (And, since Proust, we know the reverse as well; when a taste, for example, remembered from childhood sets off powerful memories and emotions.)

In the final pages of The Call and the Response, Jean-Louis Chretien describes the power of one sense– touch, when longing or memory or anticipation is so intense that physical and transcendent touch reinforce each other.  Here he writes specifically about Christian experience:

“Only the thought of love, however, gives the flesh it’s full bearing of intellect and leads touch to its highest possibility.  Quite obviously, when passing from the finite to the infinite, all continuity explodes.  Discontinuity increases exponentially, and any initial similarity blossoms into an ever-more intensely luminous dissemblance.  Contact with the infinite must necessarily involve a whole other order beyond contact with the finite.  Yet touch, in its finitude and based on it, is already open precisely to a presence without image or representation, to an intimate proximity that never turns into possession, to a naked exposure to the ungraspable,  The excess over me of what I touch and of what touches me is endlessly attested in the caress.”

Then exhibiting an affinity with pre-Enlightenment spiritual and theological writers that many postmodern writers share, Chretien cites St. John of the Cross, the Sixteenth century Spanish mystic and poet:

“The greatest mystic of the touch is the mystic of the Dark Night John of the Cross.  He speaks indeed of ‘God’s touch’ (toque de Dios), foretaste of eternal life since it is the highest encounter with God”  “The merciful hand of the Father, with which he touches us is the Son.  It is therefore the ‘Word who is the touch that touches the soul’ (el toque qua toca al alma).  To be touched in one’s very substance by the Word, beyond all image, is properly speaking, to listen with one’s whole being, body and soul… thanks by this very touch.  Nor does the ear alone listen; the eye also listens and responds.  The possibility of their listening, however, ultimately takes root in the totality of the flesh.  The flesh listens.  And the fact that it listens is what makes it respond.” (pp129-130)

John’s evangel is that the love of God is now “in the flesh.”  And it is so vivid, so unforgettable;  its memory, its image so powerful it “touches” our flesh and we “respond.”  In and through Jesus, the Christ, we have gotten a “taste” of God’s love for us.  It is so strong we can virtually taste it on our lips as we “ingest” the “body and blood”  and we “swallow” the Word.  We know it is real when it heals leftover hurt and pain we thought would never go away; when hungers we never thought could be filled are met and exceeded.  And once we have developed a “taste” for it, we cannot get enough: This is my body/this is my blood/ eat, drink and live forever!  Excess, extravagance beyond ‘belief’ is the point of the feeding of so many thousands from so little.  This event provides the ‘proof’ beyond argument or reason of God’s initiative to meet and exceed our deepest longings and passions.  The first offering from God was “wisdom” in all her beguiling and gracious “hospitality;” the second is the Christ, God in the “flesh” that feeds and nurtures, satisfying our basic needs so completely we can “taste” it.