Sermon: The Bread of Life

Preacher:

Nicholas Thistlethwaite

Date:

Sunday 19th August 2012

Service:

Eucharist

Readings:

John 6: 54-5

Guildford Cathedral possesses a small but interesting collection of twentieth-century church plate.  Most of the pieces were commissioned in the years leading up to the Cathedral’s consecration in 1961, and inevitably reflect the taste of the period.  Among the finest of the communion vessels is a tall gilt chalice made by Leslie Durban in 1937.  Durban was an extremely distinguished craftsman.  His chalice is beautifully proportioned, and I always enjoy using it, because it handles so well and allows the communicant to drink easily.

           The foot is engraved with a picture of the crucifixion; Jesus with outstretched arms on the cross; Mary and John ‘the beloved disciple’ placed to either side.  Historically, the iconography used on chalices and the accompanying patens varied.  Grapes and wheat are common for obvious reasons: they remind us of wine and bread.  Sometimes, you find angels (an allusion to bread of heaven), cherubim (representing the heavenly host) or Jesus, the Lamb of God.  The crucifixion is perhaps more surprising.  The connection between the Last Supper, the eucharist, and the shocking events on Calvary is not so immediately obvious.

           Or is it?

           In today’s Gospel, Jesus has this to say to the Jewish religious leaders who are picking over his words critically:

‘Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.  Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink.’  (John 6: 54-5)

This is part of John’s extended treatment of Jesus, the bread of life.  It is introduced with the story of the feeding of the five thousand, and then turns into a long discourse in which Jesus (or perhaps John) draws parallels with the Old Testament story of the manna given by God to the hungry Israelites in the wilderness.

           Interestingly, some scholars think that this passage is a fragment of a liturgical exposition of the eucharist: an explanation that would have been added after the priest had recited the words of institution (‘This is my body, which is given for you’; ‘This is my blood of the covenant’) to remind the congregation of the true significance of the bread and wine.  This is particularly interesting because John gives us no account of the Last Supper, and yet his Gospel – and this section especially – is full of allusions to it and the eucharist.  It is as though he was writing for a community that was so saturated by the story, and so familiar with the practice of the eucharist, that he had no need to repeat the narrative.

           ‘Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.’  Although the setting (according to John) is the synagogue at Capernaum, those are words that Jesus might have used in the upper room on the night of his betrayal.  Unlike the Israelites in the wilderness, who ate flaky, bread-like manna, the disciples are being prepared for a very different form of   nourishment.  Jesus, too, will give them bread from heaven, but that bread (miraculously) will be his own flesh.  Yet this gift cannot be realised until Jesus is ‘glorified’ – which for John means the crucifixion.  In other words, Jesus’ death (paradoxically) is the only way to release this bread of life for the new Israel.

           So we begin to weave a connection between the crucifixion (glorification) of Jesus and the release of this new ‘bread of heaven’.  It’s reiterated in the Eucharist when the priest invites the congregation to communion, saying

Draw near with faith.

Receive the body of our Lord Jesus Christ

which he gave for you,

and his blood which he shed for you.

Eat and drink

in remembrance that he died for you,

and feed on him in your hearts

by faith with thanksgiving.

As the priest says those words (‘in remembrance that he died for you’), we recall the crucifixion, and are reminded that it was the death experienced by Jesus on the cross that released the grace of the sacrament to nourish our needy souls.

           In John’s use of the phrase ‘bread of heaven’ or ‘bread of life’ we hear an echo of the story of the manna.  But there is another echo from the Old Testament that we need to hear.

           John’s use of the word ‘flesh’ is very striking.  It differs from the other three Gospels in which the word ‘body’ is used instead.  (‘This is my body.’)  ‘Flesh’ resonates with John’s assertion in the Prologue to his Gospel that ‘the Word became flesh and lived among us’ (1:14), helping the believer to forge an imaginative connection between the doctrine of the Incarnation, expressed so powerfully there, and the doctrine of the eucharist, in which eating the flesh of the Son of man and drinking his blood is the means of partaking of the new bread of heaven.  But there is another connection to be made; the phrase, ‘flesh and blood’, also communicates echoes of the Old Testament cult and the practice of sacrifice.

           Parts of the New Testament (the Epistle to the Hebrews, for example) draw heavily on the imagery of sacrifice.  Jesus’ death on the cross is presented as a sacrifice offered to the Father for the sins of the world; it is a leading idea in most versions of the doctrine of the atonement: those attempts to explain theologically what ‘happened’ on the cross.  It’s not without its problems.  It is all too easy to paint a picture of a vengeful, angry God whose wrath at human iniquity had to be propitiated with a bloody sacrifice.  That deeply unattractive and unchristian image is still being pedalled by deeply unattractive and unchristian forms of religion today.

           But there is no getting away from the fact that the New Testament writers to a man (we must assume) believed Jesus’ death was in some sense a sacrifice, nor that the Church from the earliest days believed that the eucharist was itself a representation or recalling of Jesus’ self-offering.  It was not that the priest at the altar was repeating Christ’s sacrifice – Anglicanism has always been clear that the death of the cross was a ‘perfect sacrifice made once for the sins of the whole world’ (Prayer B) – rather, the cross was an historical event, yet one which in its cosmic and saving dimensions stands outside time and space.  It is that eternal dimension which is made real to us when we gather round the altar, take bread and wine, hear the narrative of the Last Supper, and then distribute the body and blood (the flesh and the blood) of the Lord.

           In baptism, the Christian is united with Jesus in his self-offering on the cross; we go down into the waters of baptism, sharing in his death so that we may also share his risen life.  The eucharist (the other great sacrament) is a continuum with this.  Through the bread and wine, we enter again into Christ’s self-offering, and receive its benefits by God’s grace.

Ultimately, of course, the excited chatter of theologians falls silent in the face of a mystery which is always going to be beyond our reach.  Time, then, to turn to poetry.  Josiah Conder’s hymn expounds with remarkable economy what I have been trying to say:

Bread of heaven, on thee we feed,

for thy flesh is meat indeed;

ever may our souls be fed

with this true and living bread;

day by day with strength supplied

through the life of him who died.

Vine of heaven, thy blood supplies

this blest cup of sacrifice;

Lord, thy wounds our healing give,

to thy cross we look and live:

Jesus, may we ever be

grafted, rooted, built in thee.   (CP 284)