Christ the Food of Man

“The Jews therefore strove among themselves, saying: How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” — JOHN vi. 52.

ANY one who suddenly came upon a group of eagerly disputing men and overheard this question, unconnected, by itself, would see at once that he needed something more before he could understand it, that it must have a history; and if it interested him at all he would inquire how such a strange question came to be asked. The answer would be this: Yesterday, on the other side of the Sea of Tiberias, Jesus of Nazareth worked a miracle, and fed a crowd of five thousand men with five loaves of bread and two little fishes. During the night He crossed the lake. In the morning the people found that He was gone, and they took boats and followed Him. When He saw them, He told them that He was afraid they had come after Him not for His own sake, not because they loved or honored Him, but because they wanted another miracle and more bread. Then He goes on to tell them that the food they really need is food for the soul, not for the body. Then He offers them Himself as their Savior, their Master, their nourishment, their strength. And finally, led on into the strong figure by the first event which started his discourse, the flocking of the people after food, He makes this singular and impressive announcement: “I am the living bread that came down from heaven; if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever; and the bread which I shall give is My flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.” Then came the question, tossed back and forth among the debating Jews, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”

From this simple sketch we can see that the discourse which the question interrupted was one of the most profoundly spiritual and solemn. The nurture of the soul of man by the communicated life of God, that is what Christ is talking of. Earth and man seem to lie open in their need, with all their ordinary concealments stripped away; heaven and God are open in their readiness to supply. All reserve is broken and the power of life, the manifested mercy of God, is offering itself to the want of man. In the very midst of this sacred offer comes in this question which at first only chills us and casts us back: “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” We have been so carried on by the speaker’s spirit that we have been ready to accept anything. The special form in which He clothed His offer has not staggered us. We have not stopped to analyze it, hardly to notice it. But here are some cooler or more captious Jews; nay, perhaps some Jews who, being more anxiously in earnest, do criticise and weigh every word in which the offer comes, and to them this form seems so strange as to be unintelligible, and so we begin to hear the murmur drifting round, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”

What was the spirit of the question? I have just suggested that there are different spirits in which it might be asked. There are two ways in which you may assent to any statement that you hear. You may not care much about it, and merely say “Yes” to it be cause it does not interest you enough to make you criticise it at all. Or, on the other hand, you may go down to the very bottom of it and believe it true with all your heart. And so there are two ways of questioning a statement, the superficial and the profound, the flippant and the earnest way. One man asks questions because he wants to prove the announcement false. Another man asks because he longs to see it prove itself true. There is the arrogant and wanton objector; and there is the eager questioner who so dearly loves the vision which the words he has just heard have raised be fore his mind that he hardly dares to ask about it lest he should lose it, but yet who must ask because it is too dear to be left in doubt. Both of these must have been present in the crowd which heard the words of Christ. Hence came the strife. One man said “I believe it,” and you saw as he spoke that he had thought deeply and been deeply touched and really did understand and believe. Another said “Yes, I believe it,” and you saw that he was a merely thoughtless partisan admirer of Christ, not having reached any true comprehension of his Master and not knowing what he was talking about. Another said “How can it be? “and his” How can it be? “evidently meant” It shall not be if I can help it.” Another said “How can it be? “and you saw his face all wistful as he spoke, as if he said” It sounds like what I want. 0, if I could only see just what He means and get hold of the truth and strength which I am sure there is in what He says! It eludes me, but

I am sure that it is there. How can it be?” These were all present in the crowd.

Now let us leave the company which was assembled on the shore of Gennesaret and come down to our own time and place. Still men are striving among them selves with the old question. Still the earnest believer, the flippant partisan, the captious objector, and the wistful inquirer, are busy with these words of Christ. These words have kept their hold upon the world. Now, just as then, they are not words to be ignored. Men will ask what they mean. Men are asking one another; nay, souls are divided within themselves and do not know how to think in seeking the answer to that old question, “How can this man give us His flesh to eat?”

What answer can we give? To the captious objector, in this as in every other question concerning Christ there is no answer really to be given. If a man wishes to find the religion of Christ untrue and asks you questions about it with the distinct desire of convicting your Master of folly or of fraud, then there is simply nothing for you to do but to turn off from him and go your way; not angrily, not with any idea of punishing him for his obstinacy by shutting him out of the truth. You have nothing to do with that. If such a terrible penalty as that can be inflicted, God must inflict it, and not you. You must get the truth in to any most closed soul where it is possible to send it; but if a man is wilfully obstinate and determined to find fault, you have to turn away simply because it is impossible by the very nature of the things to make him see and believe. For what ever the announcement of Christ may mean, it means something whose understanding must be experimental certainly; it declares something which the heart must feel before the mind can comprehend it. It is a law of spiritual action and so appeals to the spiritual function for its recognition. If that spiritual function is closed and bolted against its access by the heavy will there is no hope that it can enter in another way. If you hold a rose up before a man and he shuts his eyes tight and just holds out his hands and says “Here, I am ready to be persuaded; convince me by touch that your rose is red;” then you are helpless. If you hold a spiritual power up to the conscience and the heart, and the conscience and the heart are shut tight, refusing to obey and love, then you are hopeless even if the intellect does cry “Convince me.” Christ in every claim is spiritual demand as well as mental conviction, and so the willing heart must go with the open mind. Nothing is harder or more painful than to try to tell a man who is simply interested in Christianity as a curious problem, what Christ is to you as Savior and Master and Friend; and to see not merely that he utterly fails to understand you but that he thinks all such accounts of your own experience and such appeal for a new spiritual sense in him to be thoroughly unreal, irrational, and absurd.

We must speak then mainly to others; to those who do not want to disbelieve, those who are willing to believe. Some of them do believe already. Having long made Christ a spiritual study, kept their lives close to His for years, He has borne witness of Himself to them and they have drawn much up from Him. He has fed them richly; but still, when the full words are put before them, about “eating his flesh,” it seems as if there were still something a great deal deeper than they have known yet, and they begin to ask with vivid anticipation of some new experience of the Savior, made delightful by all their recollection of the old, “How can He give me His flesh? I would know all if there is more to know, now that I have known so much and found it so full of joy and strength.”

And then there are others who do not believe but who want to; who cannot claim any personal experience of Christ but who long for it; who hear others telling what He has done for them and who wish that they might know something of all this; who hear His own account of what He can do, outgoing any story that any ripest saint has to tell of what He has done; those, in one word, who want a Savior and feel that this must be their Savior though they cannot see just how His work is to be done. These are the people that I want to speak to especially to-day, for there are no people in the world in whom Christ must feel so deep and tender an interest, none of whom we are so sure that He would say as He said of the scribe in the Gospel, “Thou art not far from the kingdom of God.”

And the very first thing that one wants to say always to such people is this; that although they cannot get the assurance which they need out of the reported ex perience of other people, yet the experience of others may give them an assurance of the possibility of gaining what they want and so may help them very much. It does not make you warm, perhaps it makes you feel all the colder, to see other men walking off there in the full sunlight; but it may let you know that your case is not hopeless, that if you sit and wait a little longer the light that is shining on them may move on until it reaches you; or, what is better still, that if you will you may get up and go into the sunlight which will then warm you as much as them. Either way the sight of their comfort gives you hope and courage, which is what you need. So it is in religious things. A verse of Scripture may be all dark to you, but you know that multitudes have found in it the revelation of light and life. You cannot possibly take their comfort in it for your own. All spiritual culture is a great deal too individual for that. But you can believe that there is comfort in it and search after it more hopefully because they found it there. It must signify something to you that, though it seems so unintelligible to you, there have been hundreds of thoughtful men and women whose soul’s life has run deep and strong as a river, who have looked for truth with eyes quickened by much knowledge of life and human need, who, if you had asked them for the secret of human existence, would have done nothing, but turn and lay their hand upon this chapter and say: “Except I eat His flesh and drink His blood I have no life. That is my only life. I feed on Him.” You may say it proves nothing and explains nothing. It makes us believe at least in the possibility of proof and explanation.

And one thing more. Notice how Christ receives this doubting question: “How can this man give us His flesh to eat?” “Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, ye have no life in you.” That is His answer. It reminds us of another scene. In the third chapter of St. John, Jesus says to Nicodemus, “Except a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom of God;” and Mcodemus answers, “How can a man be born when he is old?” and Jesus answers him, “Except a man be born again he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.” You see the similarity of the two cases. In each of them Christ says “It must be;” and in both cases the answer comes, “How can it be?” and in both again the answer is, “It must be;” nothing more. What does it mean but this, that you cannot know how it is done except by doing it? You ask me “How?” The answer is, “I cannot tell you. Go and do it and you shall learn.” It may seem strange, but it is no new law. It is a law which runs through all life in application to the highest things. I cannot tell you how to meet sorrow. Go and meet it and you shall learn the sweet lesson out of the bitter education. I cannot tell you how to meet joy so that the head shall jiot be turned. It is when the head is tempted to be giddy that it learns soberness in prosperity. I cannot tell you how to meet death. Who ever did tell his brother? Nay, can even God tell us so that we can know before hand what we shall say to the king of terrors when at last he stalks across our path? But, going straight up to him, what beautiful sights have we not seen of old men greet ing him as their friend, and strong young men letting him take their burden off of their yet unbent backs, and little children laying their hands trustingly in his to go down the dark way which he knows, which leads into the Father’s light. Of all these highest trials there can be no previous experiment to see how it is done. You must do it. So only can you learn how to do it. “How can I?” cries the poor bereaved heart sitting in the darkened room alone; “How can I live my dreary life alone?” “Go on and live it” is the answer. And as he goes it is not dreary and he can live it bravely in Christ’s strength. So it is with being a Christian. Be one; so only can you know how. “How can I eat His flesh?” “Except you do you have no life.” It seems hard and unreasonable, this inexorable demand for the unintelligible and impossible; but it is only the principle of all experimental truth; that in no other way than by experience can it be learned. It seems to involve a contradiction but yet it is the method of much of the very best progress which we make, and we all act on it constantly.

“You must love Him, ere to you
He shall seem worthy of your love.”

But now after all these preliminary words, let us go on and see if we can understand the question and at all see its answer. “How can this man give us His flesh to eat?” The whole expression which called out the question is a figure. It is figurative through and through. Even the most literal Eomanist who applies it all to the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper and treats that sacrament in the most material way still must own something of a figure in it. The bread even though turned into the sacred flesh is still eaten by the bodily mouth for spirit ual purposes, and it seems impossible to bridge over the gap in the idea between the physical and spiritual nourishment without some intrusion of analogy or figure. The figure is very vivid and graphic, so clear and sharp that it sometimes seems as if there were no figure there, as if it were the statement of the baldest material fact, but it is figurative nevertheless.

And the general spirit of the figure is clear; it means support or strength. That is the idea of food. Only food means a certain kind of strength. It is strength in a man, not strength without a man. It is strength incorporated and not strength applied. You see the difference. If a wall is tottering upon the street the men come with their timbers and wedge them in and brace the bulging building back and hold it up. If a man is weak so that his legs tremble under him, you give him food, and the strength of the food enters into him and becomes his strength, and he stands firm. There is the strength of a buttress which sustains a tower, or a rock in which a tower is set. That is outward strength. There is the strength of food which supports the man by be coming the man. Evidently that is something different. That is inward strength. And this last is the sort of strength which Christ promises in the gift of Himself. Thus much is clear in the word “eat.”

We easily distinguish everywhere between the two sorts of strength, and the last is more valuable in so far as it is more intimate and personal. The outer strength is the strength of the prop and the buttress; the inner strength is the strength of the life-blood in the veins. You have a hard duty to do to-morrow morning, something which you thoroughly hate to do. Your reluctance makes you weak. But you must do it because it is God’s will and so your duty. You do not expect or try to escape, but you cry out to God to strengthen you, and He has two ways of answering your prayer, one better than the other, which He uses according as He finds yon open and fit for the lesser or the larger mercy. He may bring all His commandments and penalties and lay ,16 them up like buttresses against the weak wall of youi resolution and crowd you into duty by the pressure of compulsion and of fear. Or He may fill you so with Himself, make you love Him so that you shall, as the Collect beautifully prays, “love the thing that He commands,” and so grow into duty by the inspiration of His character, His standards, His life, become yours by love. Or again, you are too weak for your sorrow. What does He do to give you strength? He may perhaps take the sorrow off; or He may give you something to beguile it, something that makes you proud to suffer, or some strong friendship that is brought out by your suffering and almost makes you forget your agony. Those are external strengths. Those are buttresses against the walls. He may do something better. He may give you that unutterable certainty of His sympathy which does not abolish pain but transforms and transfigures it, so that you would not let the suffering go if with it you must lose this precious nearness of God. He may make suffering, by some such exquisite mixture, the source of rich delight and holy deeds, so that the suffering itself becomes the central pillar of the life, and does not have to be held up, but holds. That is the inner strength. That is the strength of food.

And notice how this last alone is vital. It alone makes life. It lives. The buttress keeps the dead wall standing, but the sap makes the live tree still more alive with growth. So compulsion and fear keep us true to duty, but love makes us larger and fit for greater duty every day. Every vital strength must be the strength which incorporates itself with the very being of the thing that it supports. Except we eat we can have no life in us.

Now we must remember that the great trouble of life with which religion has to do, the only weakness that really can give a man the most deep and poignant sor row, must be moral trouble, must be sin. There alone can self-reproach come in; and if a man has nothing to reproach himself with he can bear anything. But when we are speaking of the weakness of sin then it is evident that the only strength that can be sufficient for it must be the strength that enters into and becomes part of and changes the sinful nature. You have done wrong, you are wrong, and in your wickedness you are weak as the wicked always are. You are tottering and trembling under the fear of punishment, under the sense of broken harmony with God, but most of all under the consciousness of a corrupted and perverted nature in yourself. What does Christ do for you? First, He declares forgiveness. That takes aWay the fear of punishment. He calls on you to believe that you are pardoned. He asks of you that faith which, laying hold of His great love, shall see the penalty of broken law broken itself and trodden under foot by triumphant grace. He reveals God’s love to you. He shows you a Deity not angry but infinitely pitiful. Against the wall tottering with a sense of divine displeasure He builds the strong buttress of an assured love of the Father you have sinned against, and so keeps you from falling. These are external strength. If they stood by themselves they would be only external. The soul, sure that the past is forgiven, feeling above it the pitying presence of a grieved but loving God, has every outward strength for holiness that it could ask. But what then? If still the sinful nature stays within, if the whole loved and forgiven man is still full of the old bad impulse, what is there still but weakness? Some new strength must come, and it must be inward and not outward. It must enter in and change the nature. It must mingle itself with the soul itself and make that holy which was unholy, set that right which was wrong. It must be a new birth of goodness in the man as well as a new world of mercy about the man. It must be not only buttress to sustain but food to change; not only a Christ to stand outside and support with the strong hands of His forgiveness, but a Christ to come in and strengthen by the power of His incorporated life.

The two indeed are not so separate as we seem thus to describe them. They must come together. The outer and the inner, forgiveness and regeneration, are inseparable halves of one single mercy, given not separately but by one single act of pitying love. They can not come separately. God does not forgive a soul and leave it still hopeless in its unchanged native sinfulness; nor does God change a soul and leave its new life crushed under the burden of its old unforgiven sin. He does both, or He tries to do both, for every soul. But in our thinking about the great mercy there appear these two aspects of it, and we think of them separately. Christ is the Staff we lean on, the Bock we stand on, the Light that leads us, the Master on whose breast we lie; but He is also the Bread of Life. He is many things outside of us, — Wisdom, Bighteousness, Bedemption. He is also something inside of us, Sanctification. He says “Lean on Me, stand on Me, take hold of Me and walk.” But when He takes up His deepest word it is this, — “Feed on Me; unless you feed on Me you have no life in you.” He says “Look and see how good God is; touch Me and feel God’s mercy; hear Me and I will tell you how He loves you.” But at the last this comes as the commandment of the deepest faith, the promise of the highest mercy, — “0 taste and see that the Lord is gracious.”

My dear friends, how noble and how beautiful it is. Great is the work that Christ does for us. Greater, deeper still, because without it all the other would be purposeless and useless, is the work that Christ does in us. How wonderful it is. The world glows with the assurance of redemption. Heaven opens, and there the saints and elders are prostrate before the throne. The whole spiritual universe trembles with the new spiritual life which has come to it out of the marvellous death. In the midst of it all lies one soul, dead and incapable of action, though intensely alive with desire for a share in all this glorious vitality. It knows that all this is for it, and yet it cannot rise up and lay hold of it. The world about it is strong with the promise and temptation of holy things. The soul itself is weak with its own unholiness. Then comes the better, per feet, completing promise of a change of soul. The Christ who has done all this offers to do one thing more, to make the dead soul alive and able to enjoy and use it all. He will come into us, not merely stand without us. He will come in and be Himself the power which lays hold of His own invitations. We may feed on Him. Nay, let us take His own strong word and say, “He that eateth Me, the same shall live by Me.” That is the inner life, Christ in the soul rising up and laying hold of the infinite possibilities which redemption has prepared. Forgiveness is not too great a boon, earth is not too sacred or solemn, heaven is not too glorious, for the soul which, alive with Christ, claims all the spiritual life that Christ has created for its own.

To feed on Christ, then, is to get His strength into us to be our strength. You feed on the cornfield and the strength of the cornfield comes into you and is your strength. You feed on the cornfield and then go and build your house, and it is the cornfield in your strong arm that builds the house, that cuts down the trees and piles the stone and lifts the roof into its place. You feed on Christ and then go and live your life, and it is Christ in you that lives your life, that helps the poor, that tells the truth, that fights the battle, and that wins the crown.

But what is this strength of Christ that comes to us? There can be only one answer. It is His character. There is no strength that is communicable except in character. It is the moral qualities of His nature that are to enter into us and be ours because we are His. This is His strength, His purity, His truth, His mercifulness, — in one word, His holiness, the perfectness of His moral life. It is not that He made the heavens; it is not that He is the Lord and King of hosts of angels, cherubim and seraphim, who do His will and fly on errands of helpfulness to laboring souls all through the world at His command. Those are the external strength which Christ supplies. In unknown, countless ways He furnishes it. Even the powers of nature He can mould to most obedient servantship to His disciple’s needs. He helps us as the divine can help the human, by supplies of power coming from without and laying themselves against the tottering life. But this is not the strength which enters in and, by a beautiful incorporation with the disciple’s weakness, becomes his strength. That must be a strength of which the human disciple too is capable, as well as the divine Master. It must be that holiness which was in Jesus of Nazareth and which we, because we are of the same humanity that He wore, are capable of possessing and developing. This is the strength of which we eat, and which like true food enters into us and becomes truly ours while it is still His.

And this brings us to the understanding of that word “flesh.” We are to eat His flesh. Now the flesh was the expression of the human life of Jesus. It was in His incarnation that He became capable of uttering those qualities in which man might be like Him, which men might receive from Him and take into themselves. Think of it. God had stood before men from the first, and they had looked with awe and adoration upon Him throned far above them. They had worshipped Him, they had feared Him, they had loved Him. Now and then some ardent and ambitious spirit soaring to the highest dream of the soul, or some patient and humble nature purified to deeper insight by its humility, had conceived that man ought not only to worship and fear and love God, but to be like God, to reflect in his own obedient nature the perfectness that he .adored. But how? What was it that he should reflect? What was there in the Deity that could repeat itself in man? Not His majesty, not omnipotence and not omniscience, surely.

Men were bewildered; and either vague and impious attempts to match the inimitable glories that belong only to divinity, like Eden or Babel; or else reckless discouragement and brutal despair, as if nothing that was in God could be restored in man, as in the countless Sodoms and Gomorrahs of the ancient world, — these were the terrible results of the blind craving. Then came the incarnation. Here was God in the flesh. Solemnly, that of the divine which was capable of being wrapped in and of living through the human, was brought close within that wondrous human life lived in a human body. There was the God we were to imitate, to grow like to, to take into ourselves until He filled us with Himself. It was the incarnate God; it was the God in the flesh that was to enter into man. This was the flesh we were to eat and by which we were to live.

Do you not see this? God in the heavens, the eternal unseen God, is true. His truth is the pillar of the universe. But can man win that truth? It is too vast, too mighty, too bound up with omniscience. But be hold here! Here in the flesh is truth as perfect, as divine, yet truly human. Listen to the truth as it is shown to Pharisee and publican, to His disciples and His judges, to the young man who wanted to be His follower, and to Judas Iscariot who was to betray Him. That is the truth, that truth incarnate, the divine truth in the flesh, that we are to take and eat and make it truth in us. So of purity. It was awful as it flashed in solemn indignant judgments from the clouded skies. It was gentle, gracious, and human, though none the less divine, as it defied and cowed the devil in the temptation in the desert. So of pity, even. It awes us and consoles us when it comes to us out of the unseen heart of God by the revelations of nature or our own experience. But it enters into us and makes us pitiful when it falls upon us in the soft tear-drops of the pitying Savior at the tomb of Lazarus. These are the acts that Jesus did. Take the yet more wonderful being lying behind them all which Jesus was, and see how that, in its perfect consecration, in its consecrated perfectness, became clear and imitable to men; how men began to believe that they might be that divine thing too when they saw it in the incarnate God, in Christ; and then, I think, you can understand something of how only in the flesh could God thus present Himself for the most intimate entrance into man; so can know something of what Jesus meant when He bade the hungry human soul eat of His flesh.

How high that hunger and its satisfaction is. You long for God to come and be within you, to rule you, to fill you; nay, in the words that sound so mystical but are so real to multitudes who seek in vain for other words to tell the strange experience, for God to be you and to live your life. That is a vast desire. How every other wish grows insignificant beside it. Do you know anything of it? I trust you do. You look on high and God is too mighty. You look close by your side and Jesus Christ, the God incarnate, has the very words you need: “He that eateth My flesh and drinketh My blood dwelleth in Me and I in him.” “This is the bread that came down from heaven.” “He that eateth of this bread shall live forever.” Then there is nothing left but to cry, “Come, come, Lord Jesus.”

But there is one thing more that I must say. This giving of His own flesh for our food is always spoken of in connection with the great sacrifice of the flesh in which He gave it for us. There is always this association between the reception of the strength of the incarnate Christ, and His crucifixion in which He willingly gave Himself up that He might furnish that strength to His people forever. The great Christian sacrament, which embodies this idea of which we have been treating, the idea of the feeding of the soul upon the flesh of Christ, is all filled full of memories of the agony in which the flesh was offered. What does this mean? Does it not mean this, — that however man longs for his God; however man sees that in the incarnate Christ there is the God he needs and whom his nature was made to receive; it is only when man sees that Divine Being suffering for him, only when he stands by the cross and beholds the love in the agony, that his hungry nature is able to take the food it needs, that is so freely offered? The flesh must be broken before we can take it. This is what Christ says, and the history of thousands of souls have borne their witness to it, that it is the suffering Savior, the Savior in His suffering, that saves the soul. Eager and earnest men may have gone beyond what is written, beyond what is pos sible for us to know, in their attempts to analyze that suffering and in telling just how it works most wonder ful effects. I believe they have. But do not let that make you lose sight of what the Bible tells you, that it is the death of Christ that saves the world; nor of what your own heart must tell you if you let it speak, that it is only when you see this Savior whom you honor, whom you love and try to serve, dying to show a love for you which nothing short of death could utter; only then that the soul opens wide enough with gratitude to take Him in completely to be its life and its salvation.

The suffering Savior inly known, and through His wounds letting out His life into the starved lives of those who hold Him fast, that is the Gospel. It is not what church you belong to or what work you do, but what you know of, how deeply you are fed by Him — the suffering Savior. That is the question for the soul.

Before His cross the lesson must be learned. Stand there until you are grateful through and through for such a love so marvellously shown. Let gratitude open your life to receive His Spirit; let it make you long and try to be like Him; let love bring Him into you so that you shall do His will because you have His heart. That entrance of His life into you shall give you strength and nourishment you never knew before. Then you shall know in growing, dependent, delighted strength, more and more every day, the answer to the old ever new question, “How can this man give us His flesh to eat?”

How can He? Certainly He can if you will go to Him and pray to Him and love Him and obey Him and receive Him. And what a strength comes of that holy feeding! Where is the task that terrifies the man who lives by Christ? Where is the discouragement over which he will not walk to go to the right which he must reach? You may starve him but he has this inner food. You may darken his life but he has this inner light. You may make war about him but he has this peace within. You may turn the world into a hell but he carries his inner heaven safely through its fiercest fires. He is like Christ himself. He has meat to eat that we know not of, and in the strength of it he overcomes at last and is conqueror through his Lord. It is possible, and may God make it real for all of us.