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.
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