ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET

TRINITY 9 2006

Fr Alan Moses
High Mass
All Saints, Margaret Street

Each year on the Feast of Corpus Christi, the Body of Christ, when we give thanks for the gift of the Holy Eucharist, we have a procession of the Blessed Sacrament which goes out onto Oxford Street and stops the Thursday night shopping traffic. Our procession is much photographed. We hand out leaflets to passers-by explaining who we are and what we are doing. Some of those who see the procession will know immediately what we are doing and what it means. Others will probably think of it only as some sort of religious spectacle: a parade, a bit like trooping the colour, another element in the kaleidoscope of multi-cultural, multi-faith London.

These varying levels of comprehension, understanding, are not that far removed from the situation Jesus faced as John shows him speaking about the sign of the Feeding of the 5000 in the synagogue at Capernaum. I wonder what the people who see us going by make of the quite extraordinary claim we make about the bread we carry and venerate and eat; the bread we call heavenly food, the bread of heaven. Will they be any more likely to understand and believe than the religious leaders who complain in this morning’s gospel?

All the Gospels witness to the fact that Jesus’ contemporaries were scandalized by the gap between the vast claims made by his words and deeds and the fact that he was just a working man from a village they knew. The “Jews” is John’s term for the religious leadership of Israel. Even since, theologians as well as ordinary people, have found this incongruity shocking. Theologians have even given it a name: “The Scandal of Particularity”.

• How can events in a particular place and time make a difference for all times and all places?
• How can someone whose origins are known say “I came down from heaven.”?
• How can someone whose name and address we know be God?

Everything depends on where we get out understanding of the word God. Do we take it from the general religious experience of the human race. Human languages all have an equivalent of the English word “God”. But information drawn from human religious experience, says John, will not lead us to the conclusion that Jesus is what these verses say he is.

The writer of the Gospel is not writing on the basis of general religious ideas or feelings. .
He begins somewhere else.
He is one of those whom the Father has drawn and given to Jesus and who has believed.
From this point of view he is bearing witness to what he has seen.
From this point of view the general religious experience of the world is not a safe place to start because it is sinful.
It was shown to be such in the condemnation and rejection of Jesus by its representatives.

From this point of view, we have to learn the meaning of the word “God” by “coming to Jesus” and learning from him of the one he calls “my Father”. From this point of view, a knowledge of God cannot be worked out from the religious experience of the human race. Knowledge of God could only come by the presence in flesh and blood, in the world of the ordinary human experience, of one who meets us in the concrete particularity of a man with a known name and address. “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know?”

If these two points of view are placed side-by-side and we ask “How do we choose between them?”, John’s answer is that we do not choose, we are chosen. “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.” There is no method of demonstration or persuasion or psychological manipulation by which this choice may be programmed. It is strictly a work of God, and the only demonstration will be “at the last day.” And when we hear that we might well feel like murmuring too. We do not like to think that our freedom of choice has been taken away. We rebel against it.

John does not mean that the Father is sparing in his action of drawing people to Jesus. As the prophet Isaiah said, he has promised that “all shall be taught by God” (Is. 54.13) This does not take away the responsibility that rests upon each to hear and learn from the Father.

But this hearing and learning does not mean that the believer, “sees the Father”. Only the Son can be said without reserve to see the Father. The direct immediate vision of the Father could only shatter the perception of sinful men and women. But because Jesus has come “in the likeness of sinful flesh” (Rom 8.3) it is possible for sinful men and women to believe and so to share in the life of God, the life which had come down from heaven and is present in Jesus.

When Jesus says that he is himself “the bread of life, this means not just that he lives but that he is the giver of life. So, while those who ate the manna in the wilderness had their hunger temporarily satisfied, but still died eventually, those who “eat” Jesus will not die because Jesus is the life-giving power of God “come down” into the life of the world.

And if we ask: “Who is the bread that has to be ‘eaten’?”, Jesus answers “My flesh”. He forces us by this crude and shocking word to look beyond the language of the Law, of teaching and instruction, and to ask, “What more is meant?” How does this “sign” point beyond itself to something greater, for that is what signs do in John’s Gospel.

As Christians we share every week in the reading and expounding of the scriptures, hearing and believing. But we are also accustomed to an action which goes beyond this, to the eating and drinking of bread and wine identified by the words of Jesus with “my flesh” and “my blood”.

The word ‘flesh’ emphasises in the sharpest possible way the materialism of Jesus’ words. In Greek there are two words for “body” and “flesh”. Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, has only one. If the words spoken at the Last Supper were in Aramaic, then - in contrast to the translation “body” used elsewhere in the New Testament - we have the deliberate use here, in John’s equivalent of the Last Supper, of the translation “flesh” which shifts what it means to receive Jesus as the bread of life away from a purely mental and spiritual hearing and believing, in the direction of physical chewing and swallowing.

We have already learned that “the bread” is Jesus. We now learn that the bread is his flesh and that it is given for the life of the world, - in order that the world may have life. This life-giving work is accomplished by the death of Jesus; only so he can give life. But this life is received only by “eating” this bread which is the flesh of Jesus. We have here John’s version of the words spoken at the Supper when Jesus gave the bread to the disciples and said, “Take and eat: this is my body (my flesh) given for you.” By eating this bread they become participants in his dying and so in his risen life. It is thus that Jesus “gives life to the world”.

Because we do this in faith Sunday by Sunday, even day by day, because we have been “taught by God”, because we have been brought to Jesus by the Father, our understanding of the sign is deeper than the incomprehension of the religious leaders. We experience the sacrament as the bread of life and the cup of salvation, by means of which we share in the body and blood of Christ, not in some static way which simply maintains us as we are. But in a dynamic way in which the life-giving presence of Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit continues his work of transforming us into the likeness of Christ, so that we can in the words of the Letter to the Ephesians be what would otherwise be impossible, “Imitators of God”, sharers of the divine life and work in the world, ourselves walking sacraments.

A Corpus Christi preacher here a few years ago recommended to us that we should see each celebration of the Eucharist, each Holy Communion, as a thanksgiving for the previous one and as a preparation for the next. We look back in thanksgiving to that communion in the life of God which we have already known and we look forward to the greater which is to come.

It is that looking forward to the next Eucharist and ultimately to the heavenly banquet that I want to finish with, that looking forward to the ever greater meaning of the sign which will not let us settle down with what we know but urges onward into the mystery of God and the divine life offered to us which is to transform the very fibre of our being, our flesh as well as our minds..