ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET

The Ninth Sunday of Trinity, 9th August 2009
Sermon preached by Fr. Gerald Beauchamp at the Parish Mass

Readings: 1 Kings 19. 4 -8; Ephesians 4. 25 - 5.2; John 6. 35, 41-51

If we turn on the News we tend to hear things like this:

Washington has decided to increase the numbers of its troops in Afghanistan. The White House has said that it will do whatever it takes to prevent further insurgency. London, however, feels reluctant to commit more troops on the ground and Paris and Berlin are sceptical that the additional soldiers will be enough.

I don't want to get into the rights and wrongs of international foreign policy but I'd like us to think about the way in which we use language. 'Washington', 'White House', 'London', 'Paris' and 'Berlin' are being used in a certain way.

When we speak we can be literal. We give straightforward information. 'The congregation is seated in the church' is a factual statement that we can make this morning. I could say at the moment that 'The congregation is seated in church like statues.' You're all sitting very still. I've now moved away from pure fact and been a bit poetic. I've used a simile: the congregation is seated 'like statues.' I've made an imaginative comparison. It's not factually true, of course. You aren't statues. You're people. You'll prove that in a moment when you stand up for the Creed and kneel down for the prayers.

I could go a step further and say: 'The congregation is seated in church and is all ears.' I've moved now beyond simile into metaphor. Again it's far from the literal truth. You aren't 'all ears' you've got mouths and noses, too but you know what I mean. To create a metaphor you take one aspect of what you're talking about (in this case people and the fact that people have ears) and home in on it up like a cartoonist who exaggerates a feature of someone's appearance.

Now the reporter who talks about 'Washington' and 'London' isn't speaking literally. Cities don't 'speak'. The reporter hasn't used a simile because he hasn't likened one thing to something else. And he isn't speaking metaphorically because metaphors rely on something that's already part of what's spoken about.

I can talk about the congregation being 'all ears' because people have ears but cities cannot talk, think or feel. Washington cannot 'decide'. London cannot be 'reluctant' and Paris and Berlin cannot be 'sceptical'. And yet we understand what the reporter is saying. And the reason that we understand it is because we recognise that there is a level beyond the literal, the simile and the metaphor. This level is known as 'metonymy'.

Metonymy' comes from the Greek: 'meta' meaning 'beyond' and 'onoma' meaning 'a name'. Metonymy takes us beyond something we can 'name' (such as government decisions and their pronouncement) and describe it with another 'name' (such as that of a capital city). Metaphors work because they are based on similarity. If you are 'all ears' then we see the logical step from the ear to the idea of hearing but metonymy is based not on similarity but on association ('contiguity'). Washington, London, Paris and Berlin are cities where governments and administrations are based and so we make the leap and get the point when we're told that 'Washington has decided.'

I realise that you probably didn't come here for a lecture on language theory this morning but I want to use the notion of metonymy to explore the discourse that we have just heard from John's Gospel. Jesus talks about himself as 'the bread'. I am the bread of life, he says. That Jesus isn't speaking literally is a cause of consternation for the Jews:

The Jews then murmured at him, because he said, "I am the bread which came down from heaven." They said, "Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How does he now say, `I have come down from heaven'?" (6. 41-42)

Jesus goes on to talk about the experience of the Exodus and the way in which God fed the people with manna in the wilderness. And what were the Israelites forever doing in the wilderness? They murmured just like the Jews murmured about Jesus.

Being fed in the wilderness was a theme that would crop up again in Jewish history as this morning's first lesson records. The prophet Elijah was fed in the wilderness from where he would go on to Mt Horeb taking forty days and forty nights. 'Wilderness', 'forty days and forty nights': sound familiar? Forty days and forty nights was the time spent by Jesus in the wilderness at the beginning of his ministry: and what happened at the end of that period? He was tempted, tempted by the Devil. And what did the Devil tempt him to do? Turn stones into bread. And that's exactly what Jesus didn't do. Jesus was about the bread of life not about the bread of death. I am, says Jesus the bread of life. What John is doing is to string together a series of associations that had profound meaning for the Christian community for which he was writing. He was using metonymy. The writing was being done not in the detached cool air of a philosophical school but the white heat of an emerging church persecuted from various sides and attempting to deal with its own internal divisions. Metonymy is a key device in rhetoric and John's is a highly rhetorical gospel. He's not like Aristotle in his Lyceum carefully weighing the evidence for this and that and trying to come to a conclusion. As John says at the end of his gospel:

Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name. (20. 30-31)

And belief is urgent. It's urgent because people are dying. People are in the wilderness - the wilderness of fear, the wilderness of knowing that life is short. Some are believing. Some are murmuring.

It's often noted that when you compare John's Gospel with Matthew, Mark and Luke there are some striking dissimilarities. Let's note three. At the beginnings of Matthew, Mark and Luke, as soon as Jesus is baptized, Jesus goes to be tempted in the wilderness. John makes no mention of the temptations. Instead, in John Jesus is baptized and the next day begins to gather disciples (1. 35).

Then there's the Last Supper. Matthew, Mark and Luke record the Words of Institution: On the same night that he was betrayed he took bread ... In John? Silence: nothing but the sound of water in a basin and the washing of feet. Yet, John's Gospel has this lengthy discourse about bread that we have been hearing in church these past three weeks.

And John isn't just missing some things that are in Matthew, Mark and Luke. He also has things that they don't mention especially resurrection appearances. On the lakeshore Jesus cooks breakfast and he gives the disciples bread (21. 12).

So what's going on? What's going on is that John is rhetorically unpacking the symbol that Jesus had made his own in his ministry and was now passing on as the time got short. Jesus gave his disciples bread at the Last Supper because he had to sum up his ministry in a way that was accessible and portable. John is written, as it were from the other side of the earthly ministry of Jesus. He's writing for a persecuted church that is basking in the resurrection yet baking in the oven of martyrdom: cross and coliseum cast a constant shadow over its life.

Yet what they experienced was a forging of their life with the life and the death and the resurrection of the Lord. As John's community took bread, gave thanks, broke and shared it they recognised Christ's presence and his truth. As they faced death they held on to life. Their flesh and his flesh were fused. They were a community with a future, a people of hope, the body of Christ.

Thinking about the sacrament in this way can cut through the sterile debates about the Real Presence. It takes seriously the person of Christ, the power of the sacrament and the lived experience of the church through two thousand years. Life always has something of the character of the wilderness about it and the life of the church reflects that. So we can either spend our time murmuring or we can live our lives in hope nourished now as then by bread. His bread. Him.