The Fifth Loaf: Meeting Jesus Christ in the Eucharist

 He set loaves of bread before them, they ate, and had some left, according to the word of the LORD.

2 Kings 4.44

 

+

 

In the gospel last week Jesus sighed with compassion and pity on the crowds who were like ‘sheep without a shepherd’. In other words, they were hungry for pastures that would nourish them and guidance that would lead them on the deepest level.

 

So what could he do for them?

 

Leaders are very good at the ‘bread and circuses’ approach to their people, throwing out cheap ruses that will that give fleeting satisfaction: crumbs that meet the basic need for a bite to eat and the circus for a bit of fun and entertainment.

 

The Roman Emperors knew all about that. And political leaders into our own day do it too. It’s about gaining short term approval, sedating the clamouring crowd.

 

But bread and circuses only deal with the surface.

 

The gospel today points us to the lasting nourishment, the deep feeding, fripperies stripped away so that we find we are given more than enough, there is more left over, more to come back to.

 

God preserve us, in the Church, from the bread and circus approach to faith which fobs people off with vacuous promises, glittering initiatives, passing fads married to the spirit of the age. The Gospel is inexhaustibly nourishing giving solid food not palliatives.

 

Jesus says, ‘I am the bread of Life’. He was born in a place, Bethlehem, that literally means the ‘House of Bread’; he was born in a manger, which is a feeding trough.

 

In today’s gospel the Bread of Life, feeds the teeming crowd with… the Bread of Life. That green field where the Five Thousand gathered is the pasture where the sheep are fed; this church is a House of Bread, a Bethlehem, where people are fed with the Bread of Life.

 

We are in the pasture here and now. Christ draws us in all our human frailty and bewilderment to give us more than the world can offer. The Church feeds on the Bread of Life and, indeed, notices the gifts that even the smallest, apparently most insignificant, people can bring. After all, it is a child who brings what is needful to the table, what seemed tiny and insignificant, which is abundantly transformed by Christ.

 

That’s why a healthy church never underestimates the ministry and potential of children in the flourishing of the gospel.

Let’s never stifle that instinctive faith and expectation from our children, or indeed from ourselves. And let’s nurture the faith of children in fresh ways and support parents and carers as they have the primary task of bringing their children up to the glory of God the Father.

 

Let’s rejoice when we hear the cry of a child, not say we’re distracted by them: they might have some loaves and fishes with them!

 

So not only are the crowds fed by Christ, but there is bread left over. That bread will keep them fed; it will feed others who are drawn to the banquet. As today’s psalm put it:

 

The eyes of all wait upon you, O Lord,

and you give them their food in due season.

You open wide your hand

and fill all things living with plenty. Psalm 145.16,17

 

The Feeding of the Five Thousand (which, incidentally, is portrayed in a fresco on the north side of our High Altar), the Last Supper, the breaking of bread on the road to Emmaus are Gospel sources for what we are doing now in the Eucharist.

 

Writing to the Church of Corinth St Paul says, ‘For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks over it, he broke it and said, ‘Do this in remembrance of me’. (1 Corinthians 11.23). It the self-same action of Christ. Taking bread. Giving thanks over it. Breaking it.

 

Christian disciples instinctively recognise that when bread is taken, thanks given over it and broken, then Jesus Christ is present.

 

The Eucharist is the distinctive, precious and central worship of the Church: the source and summit of the Christian life.

 

This is no circus; no fast food that fails to satisfy. This is deep, slow, lasting food that opens up the divine life of Christ so that we grow in holiness.

 

At the Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes in the Holy Land, at Tabgha, by the Sea of Galilee, where the miracle is said to have taken place, there is an ancient mosaic right in front of the altar of the ancient Byzantine church. The mosaic shows the two fishes, brought by the boy, and a basket of four loaves. Four? - you might ask – where’s the fifth?

 

Where’s that fifth loaf? Of course, it’s on the altar itself, and it is what we now eat.

 

‘He set the loaves of bread before them, they ate, and had some left, according to the word of the LORD.’

A sermon for the Presentation of Christ in the Temple

First preached as sermon at Croydon Minster on the feast of The Presentation of Christ in the Temple

+

A community - spanning the generations - with the eyes of all fixed upon Jesus Christ.

That is a pretty reasonable working definition of what a church is called to be: a community, those who break bread together - spanning the generations - with the eyes of all fixed upon Jesus Christ, God Incarnate.

It is something of the scene described in this morning’s gospel reading. A woman and a man - Anna and Simeon - both advanced in years; both expectant and full of hope praying in the Temple: a woman and man, Mary and Joseph, two young parents expectant and full of hope bringing their child to the Temple as required by the Law of Moses.

Anna and Simeon are in the Temple, the place of encounter with God, looking for the coming Lord.

They could have said, as the psalm puts it, ‘we wait for thy loving-kindness, O Lord: in the midst of thy Temple’ (Psalm 48.8).

In the arms of his Mother, Jesus Christ is brought into their midst: the Hope of the Nations, the Light to Enlighten All People, God’s Own Salvation.

The words of the prophet Malachi are fulfilled for Anna and Simeon, ‘the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple’ (Malachi 3.1).

So we have the elders, Anna and Simeon, and the young parents, Mary, Jesus’ mother and Joseph, her husband and Jesus’ guardian.

This is the image from the icon of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple that you have on the prayer cards distributed this morning.

From left to right:

Joseph stands holding the two young pigeons for the sacrificial offering in the Temple and gazing over at Jesus.

Next to him is Anna, pointing at Mary, whose role was always to be the Mother of God, in Greek Theotokos, also translated, Godbearer. And Anna looks at Mary’s Son and holds in her hand an unfurled scroll with words of prophecy and expectation about Christ.

Then there is Mary herself, who has handed over her child - from the vestibule to the sanctuary - and like Anna, she has a gesture of pointing towards Jesus.

Then the heart of the icon: all eyes are directed at Jesus, who gives the appearance of tugging Simeon’s beard (just like when I have baptised babies and had my nose pinched, lapel microphone torn off and eye poked: yes, all that has happened).

And Simeon bears in his hands his Saviour and ours. It is almost as if he is receiving Holy Communion, and indeed he is, and look at the warmth of his loving gaze, and the reverence of his receiving of Jesus.

This is an inter-generational scene if ever there was one. The church is one of the few places that young and old come together, not graded by precedence but on an equal footing, because we are all here as children of the Most High, children of God.

Receiving Jesus is at the heart of Candlemas and the Christian life. And it has a practical outworking that we’ve been pondering in this church over since the Feast of the Epiphany.

How we receive children in church is a measure of our delight, valuing and welcome of the youngest into our midst, even if they figuratively pinch our noses, poke our eyes, or, more likely, bellow and wail.

Modern re-working of the traditional icon
of the Presentation, seen in a church in Ghent

Last Sunday leaders and helpers from our groups for children and young people at this church met to consider how best our children and young people might be served here, and how they remind us all of the call to be welcoming and hospitable to everyone.

That is what our Candlemas prayer card is for, that we might pray for the whole church family so that we may all, young and old, grow in wisdom.

So Candlemas tells us to welcome the young, appreciate those nurturing the young, and also value the precious wisdom that can come with years.

On one level that just gives us a sociological insight into the church; that is, if we fail to see that what is being presented in Christ is the mystery of his incarnation and the fullness of the Gospel. That’s what Simeon and Anna, Mary and Joseph see in the Temple when Christ is presented there.

The presentation of Christ in the Temple moves us on from any sociological observations and takes us deep into the realities of life and mortality, love and loss, hopes and pain.

Avoidance of the cost and pain of life and Christian discipleship does no one, least of all our children, any favours. The gospel is cheapened when we airbrush out the radicalism of its power, and try and blunt its dramatic message and full implications. That would be to proclaim Easter with the Cross. It’s what the twentieth century German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer calls ‘cheap grace’:

Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession... Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate. (Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship)

Grace is free, but should never be cheapened; that’s Bonhoeffer’s point. Cheap grace does not equip us to handle the predicament of being human, loving and losing, cherishing and weeping:

Anna knows God’s free gift of grace, having lived a life in loneliness as a widow for many years, worshipping and fasting, yet until this moment never having her hopes truly fulfilled. 

Simeon, a righteous man, knows God’s liberating grace as he sees his mortality in a new and liberating way: he can now die, knowing he has seen the Lord’s Messiah.

Mary learns of the costly grace that will come with the redeeming death of her son on the cross, as a sword pierces her own soul.

This is profoundly realistic about life. Christians do not live in cocoons. If we walk the way of the cross we can’t.

That is what the Candlemas Procession tells us: knowing Christ as Emmanuel, God with us, through his incarnation - and bearing candles signifying that light - we turn – young and old - from the Crib to the Cross, from the birth to the death of Jesus. Mortality is never far from our doors. Yet marked with the sign of the cross, recipients of the blood of Christ, our hope is well placed in the Light to enlighten the nations, Jesus Christ, our hope and our salvation.

Simeon glimpsed this truth and will have recognised its coming in every fibre of his being, for, as he knew from the psalms:

‘… this God is our God for ever and ever: he shall be our guide unto death’ (Psalm 48.13)