ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET

TRINITY 10, 2006

Fr Alan Moses

HIGH MASS
ALL SAINTS, MARGARET STREET
Proper 15, Year B

“I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever.”

If you were here last Sunday, you will recall that I spoke about our Corpus Christi procession on Oxford Street. We have set of photographs from a couple of years ago taken by Jim Rosenthal who is the Communications Officer of the Anglican Communion, and one of the Friends of All Saints. One of them shows the monstrance with the consecrated host just as we passed MacDonalds: Junk Food or the Bread of Heaven.

In the Orthodox Liturgy, before the proclamation of the Gospel, the deacon says “Wisdom, Let us attend”.

The divine Wisdom, issues an invitation:

“You that are simple, turn in here!”
To those without sense she says,
“Come eat of my bread
and drink the wine I have mixed.
Lay aside immaturity, and live,
and walk in the way of insight.”

Wisdom invites us not to fast food, eaten in haste and as soon forgotten, but to a banquet in Word and Sacrament: a rich meal that demands of us the time which we would give to a special meal.

The text draws us into Jesus’ own offering of the banquet of his own body and blood, bread and wine for all people, including “the simple and those with no sense”; a category in which we might well feel we belong when we encounter the depths of John’s Gospel.

“Be careful then how you live, not as unwise people but as wise, making the most of the time.” Eph. 5.15
Wisdom for the Jews was not simply a matter of human cleverness, of intellectual sophistication. It was about establishing the right relationship with God and with our fellow human beings. It was about conduct as well as intellect; action as well as thought.

The Jewish Wisdom tradition, of which the Book of Proverbs is part, identified the manna, the bread from heaven, on which the people of Israel were fed in the wilderness, with the Law, the instruction given to them by God through Moses at Mount Sinai. This was the revelation of God’s will for them. They must feed on it.

The Gospel of John takes this much further. The revelation of God’s being and nature and will, is to be found now not in a written code but in the flesh and blood, the life and death, of Jesus: the Word made flesh.
This shocks the religious leaders of Israel. “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” It has disturbed people ever since. John’s Gospel is at once both the most like the Wisdom literature, the most intellectual if you like, the Gospel of the Word, the Logos, the reason, the Wisdom which underlies the universe, and at the same time the most materialistic - the gospel of the Word made flesh and blood, of eating that flesh and blood.
The shock is compounded by the realistic language Jesus uses about eating his flesh and blood, chewing on his flesh. drinking his blood, which sounds like cannibalism. Flesh and blood emphasise that it is the incarnate life and very real death of the Son that are life-giving food. Only the physical body of a human being can produce flesh and blood.

Unless, Jesus says, you are willing to accept this new reality of the divine life joined with yours, “you have no life in you.” It is by relationship to the life and death of Jesus that people “have eternal life and I will raise them up on the last day.” .

Because we are Christians who celebrate the Eucharist Sunday by Sunday, perhaps this language no longer shocks us in the way it did them or does people who hear it afresh. That is good if it means we have grasped something of the its truth. It is not if it means that we have domesticated that truth; fitted it into our way of thinking.

Unable to go beyond the physical, the religious leaders , misunderstand Jesus’ promise. To say that Jesus is the life-giving bread is more than saying that to hear and believe his teaching is to have life. It is to say that Jesus in his concrete humanity - flesh and blood – is the actual presence of the life of God in the midst of human history.

That life is not present in some detached, self-sufficient, external. unmoved form, to be admired perhaps from afar, but in unlimited self-surrender. It is made available to the world by being given away - flesh and blood of this man given up to death.
So, there can be no abiding, no participation in the life of God, except by an equally concrete factual participation in the self-surrender of Jesus - in his body broken and blood shed. The hearing and believing in the words of Jesus lead to an act of communion, of eating and drinking in accordance with his own words which make this sign an effective means of participation in his death and his risen life.

In this way we live because of Jesus who himself lives because of the Father. The Resurrection is our pledge that this living through dying will be consummated in and by a victorious life from the dead. This is the real meaning if the text “He gave them bread from heaven to eat”. The giver is the Father, the bread is Jesus. It is eaten by actual participation in his own total self-giving which is the manifestation of God in the life of the world. The end is resurrection of the dead to new and eternal life.

This mutual indwelling flows from union between the Father and the Son ; “Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of men.” Jesus has authority to pass on life to those who accept the revelation of the Father in the Son. Here, as throughout the Gospel, unconditional commitment of the revelation of God in and through Jesus leads to life, here and hereafter. The one who eats the flesh of Jesus will live because of him.

John’s readers and Christian ever since, ask:
“Where do we find the revelation of God in the flesh and blood of the Son of Man?”

The use of the language of the Eucharist: “bread”, “food”, “flesh”, “blood”, “to eat”, “to drink”, “the bread that I will give for your sakes” points to the answer: we encounter the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ in the celebration of the Eucharist.

The Eucharist renders concrete what John has spelled out through the commentary. The Eucharist is the place where we come to eternal life; encountering the broken flesh and spilled blood of Jesus “lifted up” on the cross.

In the original miracle which sparks the discourse, Jesus commands disciples to have the people recline as if for a meal. He feeds a huge crowd in a way that prefigures the Eucharist. He takes the loaves and give thanks and distributes to the people - just as the priest who presides at the Eucharist does. ..

This feeding takes place at Passover which recalls the gift of manna. Jesus commands his disciples “gather up the fragments” that nothing be lost.. The word John uses for “gather” is the same one used in early Christian documents for the assembly of the faithful for the Eucharist.. The word for “fragments” is the one used of the broken bread of the Eucharist. .

The Israelites gathered manna each day, eating till they had the fill.
But the manna was not to be stored overnight and if it was it went bad. .
Jesus’ gift to people who come to him in search for bread must not be lost, disciples are to see to its preservation. An abundance of fragments still available. The Eucharist is to be celebrated so that the people might share in the life of Christ.

The Church’s understanding of this passage leads to its continuing feeding at the table of the Word, but now it sees the revelation of God’s will and being in Jesus, not simply as a teacher but in the life, death and resurrection, the flesh and blood. If the Church, if Christians are to be truly wise, they must be united with that life and death, share in it, abide in it, dwell in it.

Our Corpus Christi procession led us not just past MacDonalds but groups of people standing outside pubs enjoying a sociable drink or supper after work on a summer evening. But that is only part of the story: a convivial drink becomes a binge-drinking session in which people set out to get drunk; perhaps to cope with life’s demands and pressures by blotting them out in an alcohol-induced haze.



The truly wise life which God wills for us is no grim and sullen
business. Not is it a flight from the unpleasant realities of life. It is life in which we are on the alert, “making the most of the time”, in the language of the market place which Paul uses, seizing the opportunities it provides to serve God. It is a life, says Ephesians, in which, “filled with the Spirit” we “sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.. giving thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.” The wise life is a Eucharistic one in which the whole of life is drawn into the life of God. It is a life constantly formed and informed by Word and Sacrament. A Eucharistic life works to transform all that we are and do, the bread and wine of our work and play, joys and sorrows, into the life of Christ as they are placed on the altar and received back from God as the bread of eternal life.