Why is it that we have mass as our main act of worship every Sunday without fail, two opportunities to go to mass every Sunday, another two opportunities every Thursday and Friday, and communion from the reserved sacrament every Monday. Why do we do this?
[take answers]
Back writing somewhere between 80 and 110 AD, so way back in the early days of the church Bishop Ignatius of Antioch wrote:
Consider how contrary to the mind of God are the heretics in regard to the grace of God which has come to us. They have no regard for charity, none for the widow, the orphan, the oppressed, none for the man in prison, the hungry or the thirsty. They abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer, because they do not admit that the Eucharist is the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ, the flesh which suffered for our sins and which the Father, in His graciousness, raised from the dead."
[Ignatius "Letter to the Smyrnaeans", paragraph 6. circa 80-110 A.D.]
He’s writing about a strange group of heretics called the gnostics. Now you might why on earth the fact that these strange people didn’t like communion had anything to do with the fact that they weren’t very nice to the widows, the orphans, the oppressed, the people in prison, the hungry and the thirsty. what on earth has that got to do with drinking this very special bread and wine? ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING.
Today we are in the third of five weeks looking at the John Chapter 6 and the bread of life. Now if you go to school, and they make you look at the same subject for five weeks running, what does it mean?
[take answers]
Two weeks ago we had Tricia talk to us about the start of the story. We had Jesus take those five little barley loaves and those two fishes and feed a huge crowd.
Remember we were challenged about our attitudes - were we an Andrew or were we a Philip. Philip can only see problems “six months wages would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little”. Andrew sees possibilities “here’s a boy who has five barley loaves and two fishes” - it may be tiny but Andrew trusts Jesus do something with the tiny offering and Jesus does. We see the abundance of God’s generosity- so much bread that there is twelve HUGE baskets of scraps left over.
God is abundantly generous - that’s why for example when I do a baptism I use a lot of water. I won’t use too much with Grace because she is only little and I don’t want to scare her - but any of you who have seen me baptise a teenager or an adult - because we want to symbolise that God is not a God of small measures. God is the God of abundant generosity, not just feeding the crowd but twelve HUGE baskets of scraps left over.
when John and the over Gospel writers describe this miracle -there is a deliberate parallel with the mass, the eucharist. Jesus takes the bread, gives thanks and distributes it just as he does at the last supper.
Then last week we had Jill preach about verses 24-35 and talk about all those different sorts of bread - do you remember the different varieties?
[take answers]
Jill talked about essential bread is for life - and how Jesus is like that - how essential he is for our life. That’s what it means for him to be the Bread of life. Jill talked about the different ways we feed on him, including especially in the special bread and wine of the mass.
And so we get to today’s passage
[Monty python style voice] “Is not this not jesus the son of Joseph whose father and mother we know? How can he now say I have come down from heaven”
“no one can come to me unless drawn by the father who sent me, and I will raise him or her up on the last day”
It’s a bit like a Yo Yo isn’t it
Jesus comes down
Our bodies are taken up to heaven
“How can he now say I have come down from heaven”
“I will raise him or her up on the last day”
As Christians we believe in various figures taken up bodily into heaven - There’s Jesus of course at his ascension. In the Old Testament there is Elijah taken up to heaven in that chariot of fire. There’s Enoch. According to a widely held Jewish belief, referenced in several of the books that didn’t quite make the old testament, Moses too was taken up bodily into heaven. Then there is Mary Jesus’s mother. Alone among all the great new Testament figures there is no tomb where the early Christians gathered to remember her because as very early traditions attest … on her death bed she too was taken up bodily into heaven. That’s what St Joseph the Worker Northolt are celebrating at their special service they celebrate next week.
Jesus, Elijah, Enoch, Moses, Mary … taken up bodily into heaven - what is this all about?
“i will raise him up at the last day”
And has it got anything to do with Jesus “the bread that has come down from heaven so that one may eat of it and never die”
What it has got to do with is that God thinks bodies matter.
[poking my arm as I say it] Give your body a poke!
God thinks that matters!
In our Gospel reading - Jesus’s hearers are shocked at that the thought that Jesus could have come down from heaven, because they knew his sisters and his brother. How could God get that close to their lives? How can someone be God when you have seen the way their brothers and sisters argue with each other? Can God live in the house next door to someone whose marriage is failing? What is God doing sharing a toilet with an old lady who is incontinent? “Is not this not jesus the son of Joseph whose father and mother we know? How can he now say I have come down from heaven”
“I am the living bread that has come down from heaven” - as Father Herbert McCabe Op puts it “The story of Jesus is … the projection of the Trinitarian life of God onto the rubbish dump we have made of the world”.
A lot of people like the idea of a nice distant God who stays up there in his clean and tidy heaven issuing us a few commands (that when we keep we can feel good about ourselves) but otherwise keeping out of our lives.
So for example - the Daily Mail at the moment are very angry that next Sunday Songs of Praise are filming from the Ethopian church in the migrant camp in Calais. They don’t like the idea of God being with the poor and the vulnerable immigrants in that refugee camp in Calais.
Well - the Daily Mail may be shocked to hear it, but the god the Daily Mail believes in is the god of Islam and Plato not Christianity. The god who sits on his throne in heaven distant from us, not getting involved in our mess.
But the scandal of christianity is that God get’s involved in our mess.
“i will raise him up on the last day” - the life to come is not going to be about some sort of “beam me up scotty” escape from our bodies, but about our bodies being made new. Indeed Paul describes the life to come as “not being unclothed but being further clothed so that what is mortal might be swallowed up into life” (2 Cor 5:4)
That’s why God gives us miracles like the Ascension of Jesus, and the taking up into heaven of Elijah and Enoch and Mary - those miracles are pointers by God to show that heaven is not some sort of floaty cloudy experience where we have no bodies, but rather in the life to come, our bodies shall be made new.
Because {give yourself a poke} God likes bodies.
God made them and God likes them. Your body isn’t separate from you: it is part of you. And when God sees people suffering not just in mind and spirit but in body … it hurts him. That’s why when Jesus sees that the 5000 people are hungry does he say “their bodily hunger doesn’t matter, what matters is that they are spiritually fed” Does he say that?
No! He looks with compassion on them and he feeds them.
and then he talks about
“whoever eats this bread will live forever. and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh”
and he goes on to use a verb means not just eating his flesh, but chewing, gnawing, munching on his flesh
Because the way we are going to recieve his body and his blood isn’t going to be something up here [point to brain] but something physical that we chew on, that we munch on.
Jesus knows we are physical beings - which is why he gives us physical ways to feel, to touch his presence, physical ways to gnaw on him and satisfy our stomachs with the bread of life.
So back to where I began, with that quote from Bishop Ignatius of Antioch writing somewhere between 80 and 110 AD, way way back in the early days of the church:
Consider how contrary to the mind of God are the heretics in regard to the grace of God which has come to us. They have no regard for charity, none for the widow, the orphan, the oppressed, none for the man in prison, the hungry or the thirsty. They abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer, because they do not admit that the Eucharist is the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ, the flesh which suffered for our sins and which the Father, in His graciousness, raised from the dead."
ignatius "Letter to the Smyrnaeans", paragraph 6. circa 80-110 A.D.
That strange group of heretics, the Gnostics - couldn’t believe that God would get involved in our messy world. They couldn’t believe God would come down and become human being because that felt too messy and as they would put it “unspiritual”. They couldn’t believe jesus would become present in physical bread and wine, because God didn’t need physical props like bread. That was too messy and as they would put it “unspiritual” They couldn’t believe God healed people and they couldn’t believe in the point of helping people who were hungry or thirsty or poor - because all these were merely physical needs but what was really important was what they would call “spiritual” needs. Much like the Daily Mail really.
But Jesus believes physical needs are spiritual needs.
That’s why [get Yo-Yo out] he comes down from heaven to live bodily among us.
That’s why he will raise us up bodily at the last day just as he went bodily into heaven, and he took Elijah and Enoch and Mary before him.
That’s why when he wants to welcome Grace into his family, he uses physical water to wash her into new life
That’s why when we worship he meets us physically in bread and wine
and that’s why Christians don’t just get involved in telling people about Jesus, but in helping with foodbanks, working in jobs like nurses and doctors, giving money to development charities Christian Aid and Tear Fund, worshipping with asylum seekers in a church in a migrant camp in calais and generally recognising that our God is the bread of life who came down from heaven to get involved in our mess.
