Bread for the world (3)
What is the Kingdom of Heaven like? The Kingdom of Heaven is like eating pink fondue in a tent. I was spending Easter at the Taize Community in central France, and one evening, slightly disorientated after singing Latin chants for several hours, I stumbled into the wrong tent by mistake. The tent was full of Swiss people eating cheese fondue, which happened to be pink as red wine was the only wine they had to hand. They were a group of friends from a church in Gruyere and soon after I went to visit them in Switzerland.
For my fondue-eating friends the life of faith was one of celebration and sharing. One of the friends had a house in the countryside and everyone of the group had a key to it. They used to meet up there after an walk for huge shared meals, which they always all ate out of one enormous dish, a habit they’d taken from the single fondue pot, which was their symbol of their shared life in Christ. I lost touch with them years ago but for me this chance encounter was a glimpse of the Kingdom.
Then again, maybe the Kingdom of Heaven is like sitting in a park in Sheffield on a summer evening, with, hundreds of other people. It was a special picnic, organised by the Make Poverty History Campaign, and timed to coincide with the banquet held for the G8 summit leaders nearby in the city. While the world leaders enjoyed their gourmet meal we had a simple meal of rice; standard fare for poor of the developing world. Inderjit Bhogal, the former president of the Methodist conference addressed the crowd. He said: I’m here as Methodist minister, and I’m here as a follower of Jesus, and the genius of Jesus Christ was that he put food at the centre of the life of his community. And here we are this evening sharing our food, there’s rice to spare, and everyone has enough.” It was a eucharistic moment on Devonshire Green, a moment of grace. It was another glimpse of the Kingdom.
The genius of Jesus Christ was that he put food at the centre of the life of his community. The first three gospels – Matthew, Mark and Luke – are full of stories of Jesus sharing meals with low-lifers and social misfits. And when Jesus reveals to his friends the full significance of his imminent death, he chooses to do so in the context of a meal. He takes the bread and breaks it up into pieces, so that everyone can have some. And then he says, this bread is my body, given for you. I’m going to give myself for you, by dying on a Roman cross. And then he takes the wine, and blesses it and says, drink this, because this is my life blood, which I’m pouring out for you, for everyone, for the forgiveness of sins. Oh, and one more thing. What I’m doing; you do. Do it to remember me. And of course we do, week by week and that’s what Holy Communion is all about.
Our communion with our God is our communion with one another. The way we celebrate Holy Communion doesn’t help us recognise this really. This is not a private matter between me and my God. It is the giving of a place at table where there is an open invitation, and many others draw up their seats next to ours.
This is the third of our series of sermons in which we’re exploring John chapter 6, and what it means for us to know Jesus as the living bread. And this week the plot thickens. “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life.” “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.” For orthodox Jews these words would inspire revulsion. Of course cannibalism is taboo in every culture, but for Jews the idea of drinking blood is particularly unacceptable. Kosher butchery is based on the premise that blood is drained from an animal before it cooking, so that there is no possibility of consuming it. If we read on in the passage we find that many people can’t cope with what Jesus is saying, and fall away from following him. And taken out of context, these words do sound very shocking.
So what is the context? Well, surely we need to understand these words in the context of the church’s practice of breaking bread and sharing wine to remember Jesus. By the time John’s Gospel was written, in the first couple of decades of the second century, it seems probable that the early Christian Community that John was writing his gospel for was pretty well-established in its rhythms of worship. The first readers – or rather hearers – of the gospel would pick up the reference to something they already knew from their worship, just like we do. Though oddly, John doesn’t include in his Gospel the story of the Last Supper. Perhaps his community already knew it so well, he didn’t feel he needed to include it. John’s Gospel was addressed originally to his own community, but beyond that to people of every age and time: these are words for us, for now.
Words of Jesus: “The bread that I give for the life of the world is my own flesh.” This takes us to the heart of faith, to the heart of worship. It’s about a God who gives. God gives of himself by creating the world. God gives of himself by becoming human in the person of Jesus. This same Jesus gives of himself even to the point of dying for us. God gives of himself by pouring out his Spirit. That’s what we mean by grace: God’s ceaseless giving to us of God’s very self. Grace is what God is and does. All that’s left for us to do is to hold out our hands and be thankful.
Later in the service I’m going to invited you to receive the bread that is the life-giving body of Jesus for us, the tokens of Jesus’ sacrificial love for us and for the world. But of course, it’s not really me who’s inviting you to share in Holy Communion. I might have the privilege of saying the words, but the invitation is from God. The promise is from God: that whoever eats this bread will share in the eternal life, the resurrection life of Jesus. And it doesn’t matter how mixed-up or insignificant we feel: the offer still stands. The invitation still stands, it’s God’s great free gift for us all. Let yourself be fed. Let yourself be loved. Let yourself be forgiven. Open your hands and receive God’s grace.
Steve and I have a friend Jim who used to celebrate Holy Communion in the chapel in the attic at the top of his house. When we received Communion Jim used to say to us, “The body of Christ” as he gave us the bread, and then, instead of “Amen”, he used to encourage us to say, “I am”. “The body of Christ” ....”I am”. I am, and more importantly, we are. As we take Christ’s body into our body, we become part of him and he becomes part of us. We are the body of Christ for the world. You, and me, and Inderjit Bhogal, and the fondue-eaters from Taize, and friends of Jesus in every place. Through God’s grace, we become the bread for the healing, the transforming of our hungry world.
The eucharist isn’t just a religious practice we do in church. It is the pattern for our living as Christians, an invitation to a life of openness in community.
Saint Augustine: You are to be taken, blessed broken and shared, that the work of the incarnation may go forward.”
Frances Eccleston July 2021