Sunday 25th August 2024
Joshua 24: 1-2a, 14-18
Psalm 34: 15-end
John 6: 56-699 May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O LORD, my Rock and my Redeemer. I’d like you to begin today by trying to remember the very best meal you’ve ever had. I think of a Pizza express in Sutton a few years ago , enjoying a pizza with my two brothers just months before my youngest brother died of cancer . It was the last time we’d ever just be the three of us together. The pizzas were forgettable, but the meal was wonderful. Those meals we think of as special, like that pizza in Sutton, the best I’ve ever had, are rarely just about the food or the wine, they’re always about the people, the laughter, the love and the companionship. And in today’s Gospel Jesus invites us to understand that there is a connection between the things we value most about being alive, things we celebrate when we eat and drink together, like friendship, love, community, and the way they embody the mystery that is God present in the everyday, the mystery which I think Jesus maybe speaking of when he refers to himself as the bread of life. Today’s Gospel invites us to reflect on what Jesus means when he describes himself as ‘ the bread that came down from heaven’ , and to wonder at His promise that whoever eats this bread ‘will live for ever’.
The Bible, from start to finish, puts God right at the centre of all that we enjoy about eating and drinking together. From Eve eating the apple in the garden of Eden, through Old Testament figures like Abraham and Sarah, who in providing food and drink for strangers found themselves entertaining angels unawares, to the miraculous ways in which the God of the New Testament becomes tangible and present in the feeding of the five thousand, the turning of water into wine, the mysteries of the last Supper- all of these stories have at their core a sense that eating, and drinking, and everyday staples that nourish and keep us alive such as water, fish, bread and wine, are central to how we can live every day in the presence and the mystery of God. Life and living are at the heart of today’s gospel; but Jesus makes a distinction between food we eat just to keep ourselves alive and the spiritual food, the bread of life, which God offers us in every moment and which, if we accept, has the potential to transform us for ever. When Jesus talks about living, and living and life are mentioned eight times today, he means living with an intense awareness of God as present in us and around us, shaping our actions, our thoughts, and our interactions with others in ways which enable Him to be experienced in and by everyone we meet. This, I think, is what Jesus means when He talks of ‘the spirit that gives life.’ The New Testament is full of examples of the spirit giving life, and often that life giving spirit finds its expression through eating and drinking.
Think about Cleopas and his fellow disciple who meet Jesus the day after the crucifixion on the road to Emmaus, but only recognise him when, Luke tells us, ‘He took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them.’ Or later in John, when Jesus appears to the disciples after the crucifixion by the lakeside and John tells us that that it was only when Jesus told them to ‘come and have breakfast’ that ‘they knew it was the lord’. The Bible is full of instances of people whose lives are blessed when they offer food and drink to friends, and to strangers. By giving of themselves they bring life to others. As Jesus tells us in Matthew, when we nourish and help others we share in the life of the spirit, the life that He promises for those who live with others needs in mind,
‘For I was hungry, and you gave Me something to eat, I was thirsty, and you gave Me something to drink, I was a stranger, and you took Me in’
Jesus makes it clear to His disciples, and us, that today’s Gospel isn’t just about eating and drinking. Eating and drinking meet our physical needs, but this is living in its most basic sense. Jesus wants us to realise how our lives can be transformed forever through being in full communion with him and God His Father. And today we can experience that communion for ourselves, by hearing the gospel and then later to taste the bread of life for ourselves, as we take communion and share the bread and wine of the eucharist.
Here, in John’s Gospel, Jesus makes the ultimate connection between what we eat, who we are and how we can live every day filled with God’s presence and love.
‘Whoever eats me will live because of me.’ Is there any other line as extraordinary as this in the whole of the Bible? Jesus is offering us the most intimate relationship not just with him but simultaneously with God his Father. The act of eating suggests how we can become one with Jesus and God simultaneously; just as the bread and wine of communion dissolve on our tongues and become absorbed by our bodies so Jesus is inviting us and all who hear him to absorb and to be changed forever by God’s transforming love. There is an extraordinary intimacy about this idea – the thought that God can be as close to us as the bread we eat and the wine we drink- No wonder the Disciples, always ready to voice for us our own puzzlement at Jesus’s difficult teachings, say ‘this teaching is difficult, who can accept it?’ Although Jesus speaks with intense certainty, we can see plenty of human vulnerability here; John tells us that many of Jesus’s followers reject Him at this point, and Jesus Himself accepts that not everyone believes what he says. We might find ourselves amongst those doubters, but I think John wants us to share Peter’s confidence that, as he tells Jesus ‘You have the words of eternal life’.
Later at the last Supper Jesus will act out the breaking of his body in the breaking of bread, and in that upper room perhaps it will be easier for the disciples to understand what Jesus means by ‘the bread of life’, because there they can see and eat the bread and smell and taste the wine with Jesus inviting them to experience His love through what he’s about to say and do, just as we can reflect more on the bread of life when we take communion later.
But here they just have Jesus, describing himself as ‘the bread that came down from heaven’ and asking them, and us, to understand that for first time in history God is present before us in human form and present in every aspect of everything that gives us life. And as we hear today’s Gospel and take communion we too can reflect on what it means for us to taste the bread of life for ourselves.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
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