Sermon: 12th Sunday after Pentecost
15 August 2021 –
Archdeacon Mark Long
Ephesians 5:15-20,
Psalm 111, and John 6:51-58; NRSV
We continue today with our journey through the theologically rich sixth chapter of St John’s Gospel. Verse 51 is the bridge from last week’s Scripture passage to today’s:
“I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”[1]
In my sermon last week to the Parish of St Saviour in Claremont I commented in relation to this verse that, “We need to hear in these words of Jesus that you and I are the Body of Christ; you and I are given for the life of the world.”[2] Stephen similarly commented in his sermon here at St Andrew’s that, “… as we ingest the Truth from God and allow God’s Spirit to really fill us – we too can be food for others. God has chosen to work through the Church and that means you and [me] – we can feed and nourish people through our presence and guidance and teaching; through our healing words, our compassion and generosity of spirit.”[3]
As the ‘Body of Christ’ we are Jesus’ flesh, God’s hands and feet in the world. As we are reminded in the first letter to the Corinthians this phrase is both a Eucharistic one, “The bread which we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ?”[4] which speaks to our unity as we share together in the Eucharistic meal; it is also a definitive one as the Apostle Paul reminds us, “… you are the Body of Christ and individually members of it.”[5] One of the reasons, if not the reason, that we spend so much time journeying with this particular chapter in John’s Gospel is that this sign that John offers us is key to who we are as God’s people, and core to what we are called to be. We are invited to see Jesus for who and what he is, the source of all being. As the bread of life, broken and shared in and through us, Jesus not only satisfies but also sustains, and does so primarily by inviting us into direct relationship with God, whom we call Source of all Being. And the call on each one of us as people of faith is to offer the same gift to the world in which we live, knowing and trusting that through the constant presence of the Spirit of God our own brokenness is never an obstacle, but rather an opportunity for life to be shared over and over, again and again.
If you’re finding this hard to get your mind around, take comfort from the fact that both last week and this week in John’s narrative the people around Jesus struggled, too. Remember that he was not speaking to strangers but to a community amongst whom he had grown up: they knew his parents and they recognised him. It’s generally true that as Anglicans many of us have grown up with Jesus being part of the fabric of our lives in some form or another, at times a distant relative that we visit on special occasions, at other times a good friend with whom we are in regular contact, at another time a counsellor in moments of hardship and difficulty, and often the one around whom our lives may revolve constantly. As we explore this chapter of John we are asked to see Jesus afresh, to have our perspective of God’s role in our lives shifted, and to explore a changed narrative for how we see ourselves. This is discomforting, and we join those around Jesus in their responses: “We know him, how can he now say …?”; “How can he ask us to …?”
No matter our discomfort, reality has shifted because God has acted, and we’re invited to see different kinds of truth about Jesus,[6] about what God is up to, about what we are called to. It is also an invitation not just to be onlookers, but to abide: “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.”[7] ‘To abide’ has a number of different meanings, but it is used here actively: it is to belong, it is to live with, it is to embrace, and it is to persist in doing so.
While much of this chapter in John’s Gospel has been metaphorical, in today’s portion we are presented with some Eucharistic realism, and asked to grapple with the concept of Jesus as the Bread of Life as we would with real food. The Greek verb used by Jesus here suggests a noisy eating that involves gnawing, nibbling, chewing; more like a dog with a bone than a cultured sit-down meal.[8] A little different from allowing a wafer to melt genteelly on our tongues at the altar rail, and more reminiscent of the chewing of baked bread I see going on in Gallery View[9] as we share in the Eucharist from our homes; and at the feeding of the five thousand it was after all barley bread and dried fish, neither of which would have been easy eating. As we grapple with the truths about Jesus presented to us here it does require more of us than we may be wanting to give. We are being asked to engage with our faith on a very deep level, to dig down, and not to be satisfied with easy and superficial answers. We are being asked to join the dots between what we believe, what we know, and what we experience, and to activate the link between all of this and how we act in the world.
We are challenged today to accept that God has acted through the real life of Jesus, and that God continues to act in and through the reality of our lives. Eternal life in John’s Gospel is not some vague after-death experience; it is rather real life in the present moment, in the here and now, lived in and through the real presence of God’s Spirit among us, engaging us in the world as agents of hope, healing, and wholeness.
I close with a prayer by Irish Theologian and Poet, Pádraig Ó Tuama:
Let us pray,
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