Pentecost 13 Year B
Sermon Preached by Reverend Michael Hillier on Sunday, 18 August 2024.
John 6.51-58
In recent weeks, we have been exploring the miracle of the Feeding of the 5000 and the events that followed it. We’ve seen how this miracle, coupled with Jesus’ declaration that He is the Bread of Life, underscores the vital role this plays in our spiritual nourishment. Our focus has been on John’s Gospel, with occasional insights from the other gospels.
So we come to today’s gospel reading, in which Jesus again emphasises that we are to eat His body and drink His blood. The verse following our reading tells us that Jesus was back in the village of Capernaum beside the Sea of Galilee, and this teaching took place in the synagogue. Capernaum was also where He made His base after being forced out of Nazareth.
Clearly, Jesus, in John’s Gospel, wants us to take seriously the truth that He is the bread of life and that we are to feed on Him. We are told this three times (v.35, 48, 51). It is as if Jesus and John are saying to us, ‘Pay attention to this!’
In verse 35, we are told that He is the bread of life, and if we come to Him, we will never be hungry, and if we believe in Him, we will never be thirsty. Then, in verse 48, we are told again that Jesus is the bread of life.
In verse 51, which begins our gospel reading for today, Jesus tells us that He is the living bread and has come from heaven, and this bread is His flesh.
The listening Jews scoff, with Jesus responding by pushing the argument deeper, saying that His flesh is proper food and His blood is true drink. If we do this, He tells us, He abides in us, and we are in Him (v.53, 56).
The Jews were deeply uncomfortable with this, but most certainly, when you read
anthropology, there are tribal groups who believe that in eating their enemies, they are in some ways empowered by their enemy’s spirit. Not that Jesus sees it this way, nor does He want us to, but He does want to see us empowered by His spirit through eating His flesh and drinking His blood.
There is no getting around that John chapter 6, which we have been exploring for some weeks, has consistently been seen by the Church and its scholars as pointing to the Eucharist. In eating the bread and drinking the wine, we absorb Jesus, taking Him to ourselves.
Jesus intends us to be nourished in our spiritual lives by His Body and Blood. As we eat food to sustain us physically, so we take Jesus as bread and wine into ourselves to nourish us spiritually.
So, we must approach our Eucharistic worship with great reverence. The Orthodox Church speaks of how we are consuming God, and they are spot on. Thus, it is reverence, reverence, and then again, reverence. If there is no reverence, something is badly amiss, for in this Service, we are meeting God.
This is called the Real Presence: Jesus is present in His sacrament. To say that He is not present in His sacrament would be to say He is absent, and no Christian believes that. How He is present is a matter for debate, and Anglicans tend to be agnostic on this, leaving the matter as just: He is present in His sacrament.
There is something else that we need to notice. Ronald Rolheiser reminds us that the Greek word used here for body is sarx rather than the more neutral word soma. He says that sarx refers to the human body negatively with all its bodily smells, sin, sickness and death.
The Body of Christ can have three meanings: Jesus’ physical body, the Eucharistic elements, and the Community of the Faithful, which is us, the people.
Rolheiser says that Jesus is saying, ‘You cannot be in relation with God if you are not in a relationship with this deeply flawed community, the Church.’
Verse 66 will tell us that many stopped following Jesus because they found this teaching too challenging to cope with. As we all know, the Church is a far from perfect society. It is deeply flawed. But you and I follow Jesus and remain faithful to Him despite all.
So, where do we go from here?
I said before Jesus said three times that He was the bread of life and that we are to feed on Him. And I said that Jesus and John were speaking to us saying, ‘Pay attention to this!’
But it is hard to pay attention, particularly in our day and age when we are constantly
bombarded with images and words through television, radio, and social media. We can feel overwhelmed, resulting in psychic numbness so things do not register how they should. We can be like tourists passing through life, with things only just registering because we are already moving on to the next new thing to see and do.
But you and I, having responded to God’s invitation, need to approach life differently. We belong to a minority group in our society, and we have taken the time to come and worship God and be loved by Him.
That’s risky, for it means we will be changed in the process. Relationships and being in love constantly change us, and this involves risk-taking. God wants to change us and wants us to be co-creators with Him in transforming our world. And that, by definition, must mean we will be transformed. And that’s risky for us, as we don’t know where this will lead.
But we start with paying attention. It is like looking at a great painting. We can quickly and casually glance at that painting, not noticing much before we move on to the next. Or we can take the time to stand and look at it in detail, trying to work out what the artist was saying and notice what we missed at first glance. This painting also interrogates us as we interrogate the painting. This is what great art does. And our faith is no different.
We might have originally become Christians for community or cultural reasons or because we think it’s a good cause. But as we begin to take Christianity seriously, we start to change and notice depths that we did not at first notice. Then, to our horror, we find God interrogating us. And can we bear God’s gaze? Do we find ourselves turning away or drawing back? Taking Christianity seriously takes courage, which will come from the Holy Spirit. We cannot do this alone.
As we celebrate this Eucharist this morning and come to receive His Body and Blood, I urge you, as Jesus and our evangelist John do: Pay attention! Something extraordinary is happening: We are consuming God. His grace is being poured into your life and mine. For us, it should be a moment of awe and wonder.
Let me finish with words from a hymn in the Liturgy of Saint James dating to the fourth or fifth century. We know these words and sometimes sing them, and they precisely state it: ‘Let all mortal flesh keep silence/and with fear and trembling stand;/ponder nothing earthy-minded,/for with blessing in his hand/Christ our God to earth descendeth,/ our full homage to demand.’ They are words that should touch us deeply.