Sermon: The Twelfth Sunday after Trinity

Preacher:

Date:

Sunday 26th August 2012

Service:

Eucharist

Readings:

John 6.56-69

Taste, and see that the Lord is good
(Psalm 34)

Mealtimes at my grandparents’ house brings back warm memories for me (they were always more peaceful than at home!) and I recall one of the quirks of my late grandfather who always insisted that we should chew our food well. Not just bite and swallow, but chew a certain number of times before swallowing. I texted my sisters this week to ask if they remember how many times he said we should chew something before swallowing: one sister said 10 times, the other 25 times, and just to complete the inflation on that, I was sure he had said 70 times. Perhaps that was just my precocious piety: how many times should I chew my food, as many as 7 times..?!

Chewing is something that cows do particularly well; or, rather, ruminating. The cow with its famously multiple stomachs eats the grass, chews it, swallows it and then regurgitates it to chew all over again: chewing the cud. In this way, rumination, the cow extracts every last bit of goodness from the grass, and in breaking the grass down makes it more digestible: we don’t physically ruminate, but it is like the cooking of the inedible raw potato that enables us to eat something nourishing; roast, mashed or sautéed. This is concept used in the practice of Lectio Divina the process of reading scripture in a meditative, reflective way, extracting the most from it.

Lectio Divina, literally ‘holy reading’ has four stages: lectio, the first reading; ruminatio, the rumination of it; contemplatio, the contemplation of it and oratio, the praying with it.

Over the last four Sundays our gospel readings have encouraged us to chew, and to chew both metaphorically and literally. We have been chewing over the sixth chapter of St John’s gospel - an extended reflection on Jesus the Bread of Life, who feeds his people with his own life - pondering it and trying to extract its meaning. And literally we chew the bread of the Eucharist, which Jesus declares to be his own flesh. This image of eating, chewing, the flesh of Jesus is shocking and for some repugnant.

An interesting journey happens in that sixth chapter of John: we move from the touching sharing of the thoughtful boy who offers his loaves and fishes, to the miraculous multiplication of those loaves and fishes, to the declaration by Jesus that he is the Bread sent from heaven and as that bread is eaten, so we eat his flesh. As Jesus leads his hearers, his own followers, further he subverts the meaning of the Manna in the wilderness and says he is the authentic bread from heaven.

But as he speaks the eager listening of his audience is gradually turned into furious questioning, an allusion perhaps of the murmuring of Israel against Moses on its way to the Promised Land.

Finally even many of his disciples find it hard to take, and Jesus asks them if this offends them (John 6:61): they have chewed this one over – they are back in the Synagogue now, no longer outside - and now it sticks in their throat as a scandal, a stumbling block, indigestible and unpalatable.

According to the text, what is unpalatable for these disciples is not the fleshy, carnal imagery, but the unity of Jesus and the Father (v 62): the Word became flesh; it is the scandal of God coming in the flesh, the Incarnation. But John toys with the word ‘flesh’. He uses it to describe the human condition locked in a narrow, restricted understanding of God; while ‘spirit’ is that life that believes in Jesus as revealing the Father, and the Father as the one who sent Jesus into the world (vv 63-65): that is what makes those disciples choke and stumble.

‘Taste and see that the Lord is good’ says the psalm (Psalm 34).  Peter and the other eleven stay, having tasted and seen that Jesus has words of eternal life: that is, they have overcome the scandal, at least to some extent: ‘we have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God’ (v 69). Somewhat darkly Jesus says that one of them will remain locked in that scandal, gagging on Jesus’ unity with the Father, and that one is referred to as a diabolos who will betray him (v 70). The word diabolos here is quite specifically not used to indicate a metaphysical entity, but a human person locked in scandal, and as Jesus says elsewhere, ‘Blessed is the one who is not scandalised by me’ (Matthew 11.6).

‘Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.’ We have responded this morning to the leading of the Holy Spirit, calling us to the Lord who gives us life, to receive him: and as the prologue to St John’s gospel puts it, ‘To all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who born not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God’ (John 1.12, 13).

Receiving Jesus is a scandal to the world; it exposes human fears and fantasies, and bewilders people, as it makes possible that we are made in the image of God as his children. In the Children’s Chapel of the Cathedral is a sculpture of an African woman bearing a child on her back; she may be Mary with Jesus, and I guess she is in that chapel because of being a mother with a child. More pertinent though she is using a pestle and mortar and grinding flour: this is a Eucharistic image, a transformative image. Just as the grain must die to bring forth the ear of corn, so the harvested corn will be ground down to make flour - husks and chaff removed - to make the bread.

The miracle of John 6, of the Last Supper, of all those meals and banquets at which Jesus was host and guest, of the whole Gospel, is re-presented and embodied now in our presence and spills out of this place. The Bread of Life, Jesus, is broken and distributed today. And, as that bread is distributed to give life, so we ourselves, the Body of Christ, are made ready to be distributed to bring life, his life, to the world. ‘Lord, to whom can go?’ Peter asks. The answer is that we can only go to Christ, and we go out into his world, not as ravenous, condemning beasts, but we go to encounter him and make him known in those we find unpalatable, those broken, empty and angry and point to him as the way to union with God, the Bread of Life. May we and they be blessed in that endeavour. Amen.