To whom can we go?

Joshua 24.1-2a, 14-18 We will serve the Lord, for he is our God

Ephesians 6.10-20 Put on the whole armour of God

John 6.56-69 Who shall we go to? You are the Holy One of God

 

 

Simon Peter answered Jesus, ‘Lord, to whom can we go?’ (John 6.68)

 

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The last verses of this morning’s Gospel reading are poignant, and stinging:

 

When many of his disciples heard it, they said, ‘This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?’ But Jesus, being aware that his disciples were complaining about it, said to them, ‘Does this offend you? (John 6.60,61)

 

There are echoes here of the people of Israel in the Exodus from Egypt, murmuring and complaining to and about Moses, declaring that they preferred their life in captivity as slaves to the new freedom that God has delivered them into.

 

Despite God overcoming the Egyptians; despite being led by a pillar of cloud by day and pillar of fire by night; despite being led through the parted waters of the Red Sea to deliver them; despite God feeding them with manna from heaven, the daily bread they were given by the Lord who provides: still the Israelites grumbled.

 

Our first reading alluded to the fact that the Israelites had wandered away from the Lord their God. (Joshua 24.14-18)

 

You’ll recall that the Israelites constructed a golden calf, an idol of their own making, that was to be their object of worship, even as Moses was receiving the commandments from God on Mount Sinai.

 

‘Is that what you want?’ asks Joshua, ‘choose this day whom you will serve…as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD’. (Joshua 24.15)

 

There’s the crucial question, ‘is that what you want?’

 

Jesus knew that among his disciples - that wider band of those who have been following him - there were some who just did not believe:

 

Because of this many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him. So Jesus asked the twelve, ‘Do you also wish to go away?’ (John 6.66,67)

 

What does your heart say when Jesus asks, ‘Do you wish to go away?’

We are invited to respond to the same question, albeit for our times.

 

Peter says, on behalf of the Twelve, ‘Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.’ (John 6.68,69)

 

With Peter, believers see the vacuousness of any way, other than that of Jesus Christ.

 

Other ways, and their ideas - the so-called Zeitgeist - can seem very seductive: ‘influencers’, the powers that be, the rich and famous all are captivated by the ideas of the moment.

 

Is that what you want?

 

Passing idols, ideologies, fantasies, fears and fads: all can distract us from the living God.

 

The Christian life is not just about rejecting things - though it certainly includes that - it is about embracing Christ, about desiring to know Christ: as St Paul puts it, ‘that I may know Christ and the power of his resurrection…’ (Philippians 3.10).

 

Echoing confession of faith at Caesarea Philippi, ‘You are the Christ, the Son of the living God’ (Matthew 16.16) Peter says:

 

there’s nowhere else to go. But more than that, you, Jesus, have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.

 

This is the culmination of the teaching of John 6, that Jesus is the Bread of Life on whom we feed, and that this is so much more than just something we think, but something we embrace and receive through Christ’s presence in what we see as bread and wine, and what he teaches becomes his body and blood.

 

Peter’s declaration moves us from seeing belief simply as a mental act, to belief and faith as a whole-body experience.

 

The move of the eighteenth century was to say ‘I think, therefore I am’, in other words my mind is me.

 

If that is what moves us, then we too will reject Jesus’ teaching in John 6.

 

If Christ moves us, then we will know that we can feed on Christ; we can imbibe Christ; we come to know him at a cellular level.

 

We are not disembodied brains - thinking machines - after all, we love, we desire, we express ourselves in song, movement and gesture: there is so much more of us to feed!

 

Only to be fed with ideas and thoughts will not ultimately feed us. We will continue, as John 6 is telling us, to be hungry unless we feed on Christ.

 

And we need to keep on being fed, otherwise we fall away and find other ‘food’ that cannot satisfy but that can lead us away from the living God: that is why we receive the sacrament week by week, if not day by day.

 

John 6 invites us to encounter and know Christ on a level much deeper than our intellect, thoughts or even feelings, but to know him in such a way that knowledge is hardly the right word, rather it is a becoming knowledge, knowing by becoming as he is.

 

So Christ says:

 

Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. (John 6.56,57)

 

We abide in Christ and he abides in us when we eat his flesh and drink his blood.

 

This is a becoming, a mystical and contemplative way of knowing, so that our lives are shaped by the love, the truth, the hope, the life of God.

 

St Paul puts it like this in his letter to the Galatians,

 

It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God. (Galatians 2.20)

 

Today our journey through the sixth chapter of St John’s Gospel ends, but do return to it as you grow in knowledge and love of Jesus Christ, the Bread of Life, who invites us to become as he is, that we may come ‘to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that [we] may be filled with all the fullness of God’ (Ephesians 3.19)

 

Christ the feeder and the food

Proverbs 9.1-6 Wisdom builds her house and invites us all to eat her bread there.

Ephesians 5.15-20 Be filled not with wine, but with the Spirit

John 6.51-58 My flesh is real food and my blood is real drink

 

 

 

‘Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them’. (John 6.56)

 

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A powerful medieval image for the Eucharist was known as the ‘pelican in her piety’.

 

It’s is the image of the mother pelican pecking her own breast, piercing it to feed her chicks with her blood.

 

Sadly, this is not actually something pelicans do – although there is an interesting reason why the misapprehension came about, that need not detain us now - but the image speaks of both the call to self-sacrifice by the Christian and of the self-offering of the Son of God realised in the Holy Eucharist.

 

We are to feed others, after the example of Christ, who feeds us with his own lifeblood.

 

That moves us to the sixth chapter of St John’s Gospel, which we have been exploring over the last few weeks.

 

It is a chapter of the Gospel that hinges on Christ feeding his people.

 

It begins with the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes as Christ feeds those who are becoming physically hungry; it continues, and goes deeper, with his teaching about the way in which he is not simply the feeder, but he is the food.

 

That’s what the pelican in her piety image points us to: feeder and food.

 

That Christ is both priest and victim, feeder and food, is a key to understanding John 6 and his teaching on The Bread of Life.

 

As priest he offers the sacrifice; as victim he is the sacrifice.

 

The sacrificial nature of the Eucharist is really important in sounding its depths.

 

The crowds ask, ‘How can this man give us his flesh to eat?’

 

Christ is the atoning sacrifice, as the First Letter of John tells us, he is the ‘propitiation for our sins’ (1 John 2.2; 4.10).

 

Only the One who is both fully human and fully divine can effect this.

 

Christ offers himself, sacrificially, for our sins, and for the sins of the world.

 

In Jewish sacrificial ritual, the lamb is the primary sacrificial creature; now Christ becomes ‘the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world’ (John 1.26).

 

It is as priest and victim, food and feeder that he can give us his flesh to eat.

 

But the crowd is not with him on this; and it is a hard saying for us today too.

 

What the crowd is really saying is that they want to understand the Bread of Life on their own terms, not on his.

 

As we reach adulthood we assume that the best way to handle ourselves in the world is on our own terms: let it be done to me according to my word, my preferences, my desires.

 

I am an island and dependent on no one.

 

From Adam and Eve onwards, this has been the conceit of humanity.

 

It’s there in childhood of course; we want to assert ourselves as toddlers, but in infancy we have a glimpse of utter dependence through how we take on food: it is the act of being fed, by self-giving, if not life draining, feeding.  

 

The mother feeds her child through her lifeblood in the womb and through the milk of her breasts: this is not simply the provision of food, as if from a food outlet; this is the deepest nurturing, self-giving human love we can experience.

 

The suckling child simply receives.

 

As adults the idea of someone feeding us is really difficult.

 

That’s for people we’d rather not think about most of the time: children, those with severe disability or the very aged.

 

These last few days I have come to appreciate the beauty and power of literally feeding someone.

 

Alice, my wife, broke both her wrists last Wednesday.

 

She physically cannot feed herself, and so I am doing it for her: it’s an insight into the marriage vow, ‘for better, for worse… in sickness and in health!’

 

What both Alice and I have reflected on is that to feed and receive without a sense of autonomy or independence is something we lose as adults, yet it is a Eucharistic posture.

 

In other words, in the Eucharist we have to set aside our sense of autonomy, that I am an island, and come to realise our dependence, first on Christ, and then our inter-dependence upon one another in the Body of Christ.

 

It is beautiful to feed; it is much harder to be fed.

 

But this is the way of wisdom in our first reading and the example of Christian living in our second reading.

 

Rather than begrudge how God nourishes us and feeds us or resent our dependence on him, the spiritually mature are joyful and have gratitude in their hearts.

 

So, in terms of being fed by Jesus Christ, the Bread of Life, we are not at a fast food outlet, satisfying and indulging our tastes and preferences.

 

We come, not as autonomous units, but brothers and sisters in Christ to be fed.

 

In this feeding we learn our dependence on the source of our life; Christ himself.

 

We glimpse this in the image and icon of the mother nursing her child; in the husband feeding his wife who cannot feed herself; in the priest, and those assisting, administering God’s holy gifts to God’s holy people.

 

In all this feeding and being fed, the food on which we feast is Christ himself: priest and victim, feeder and food.

 

The mystery and wonder of this sacred meal is that our feeder and our food is Christ who promises that ‘[his] flesh is real food and [his] blood is real drink’ and that this nourishes body and soul, putting us in right relationship with him, our Lord and God.

 

‘Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them’ says the Lord.

'I am the living bread that came down from heaven' - John 6 continued

1 Kings 19.4-8

Ephesians 4.25-5.2

John 6.35, 41-51

 

Jesus said: ‘I am the living bread that came down from heaven.

Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever;

and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.’ (John 6.50, 51)

 

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Today we continue our journey through the sixth chapter of St John’s Gospel, the chapter that focuses on Jesus’ teaching on the Eucharist: in which he declares, ‘I am the bread of life’.

 

By way of recap, Jesus has fed the crowds, numbering a good five thousand plus, by his miraculous multiplication of the loaves and fishes brought by a young boy.

 

He then fled to the town of Capernaum, where the crowds followed him, and he is now in the synagogue teaching them about what the multiplication of the loaves and the fishes actually signifies and means.

 

It is teaching that undergirds the celebration of the Eucharist.

 

It’s when we come to learn that the meal that is at the heart of the Eucharist is a sacred meal, a participation in the body and blood of Christ, a foretaste of the banquet of heaven.

 

The sixth chapter of John is utterly decisive about who we believe Jesus to be and what he does.

 

This teaching elevates the Eucharist beyond a simple fellowship meal of like-minded believers, beyond a miracle of feeding lots of people, to being a sacred act that is the source of our deepest communion with the Lord, and the summit, the very peak, of that communion.

 

Of course, Jesus’ hearers could not, would not, accept this teaching. When they hear him teach that he ‘is the bread that is come down from heaven’ (John 6.41b) they dismiss it as delusional human generated teaching, ‘come off it’ they say, ‘we know this bloke and his parents, he can’t be God, or God’s son’ (John 6.42)

 

But Jesus doubles down, answering them:

 

Do not complain among yourselves. No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me; and I will raise that person up on the last day. It is written in the prophets, “And they shall all be taught by God.” Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. (John 6.43-45)

 

This is divine teaching from which we have the Eucharist, instituted by Christ himself: it is not manufactured, not the invention of pious minds and certainly not made up by the Church sometime after the event.

 

The breaking of bread as a divine act is at the heart of Christian life and practice from the beginning: the Acts of the Apostles describes how the believers met to share the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to break bread and pray (Acts 2.42); and St Paul describes what has been handed onto him, what is already in existence, and describes the Last Supper as what Christians enact when they meet (1 Corinthians 11.23-25) and concludes saying, ‘for as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes. (1 Corinthians 11.26)

 

And as the Eucharist is not simply a meal, Jesus is not simply an inspired guru, not a wonder worker, not a community organiser or social justice warrior: the witness of the Bible is that Jesus is Son of God the Father,

 

This is why this man, Jesus of Nazareth, is Saviour, the one who died for us and our salvation, and for whom the martyrs have given their lives in witness to his saving power.

 

This is so fundamentally important to the Christian faith, and revealed in the Eucharist: Jesus Christ fully divine and fully human.

 

If he is one or the other it’s no use and we should pack up now and go and do something else altogether.

 

If Jesus is only divine, then he doesn’t touch us; if he is only human, he can’t save us.

 

Jesus Christ both touches our lives and saves our souls.

 

This is where we come to seek the life of God; this is where we come to receive the life of God.

 

And bread is the token of this.

 

Mind you, it is not simply a symbol, if by that we mean that it is not the true life and presence of God we receive, as if it were simply a metaphor.

 

Someone once said to the American writer Flannery O’Connor that he thought the Eucharist is ‘a pretty good symbol’ to which she replied, ‘if it’s just a symbol to hell with it’.

 

A symbol does not save us; actual bread does not save us: a person does, the one described as the Bread of Life, Jesus Christ.

 

We pray ‘give us this day our daily bread’.

 

And, as scripture says, something Jesus quotes in the face of Satan himself, ‘Man does not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God’ (Matthew 4.4, quoting Deuteronomy 8.3).

 

Even physical bread, integral to eating together, does not keep us alive for ever. The people of Israel, fed by manna in the wilderness, are no more; the prophet Elijah, miraculously fed by angelic food was hungry again, the Five Thousand fed with loaves and fishes have long since died.

 

Jesus tells us that the bread that he gives, ‘is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die’ (John 6.50).

 

This bread of the Eucharist is not ‘a pretty good symbol’ but the way in which we feed on the one who says:

 

I am the living bread that came down from heaven.

 

That is why he says

 

Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.’ (John 6.51)

 

Let us then come to be fed by the Bread of Life, that we may know the Father and be his life to the world.