Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne
Ephesians 4. 1-16; John 6. 24-35
“…they said to him, “What sign are you going to give us then, so that we may see it and believe you? What work are you performing?””
We all want the Church to be useful. And what’s wrong with that? We all want to be useful ourselves, don’t we? But in that, there are grave dangers. Some of them are flagged up in this morning’s Gospel reading.
By Cottonbro Studios, public domain, downloaded with thanks from Pexels.
In it, the crowd flocks to Jesus wanting signs and works. In John’s Gospel, it follows immediately after Jesus performs two spectacular miracles, feeding the Five Thousand and then walking on water. After the feeding of the five thousand, the crowd declares Him a prophet and tries to make Him king against His will—that was last Sunday’s Gospel.
The trouble with spectacular events, however, is that nothing is ever enough; the crowd always wants more. Just one hit of excitement and validation is rarely enough. We know that from the celebrity culture of our own times.
So it’s appropriate that this reading marks the start of a change in the relationship between Jesus and the crowds, one that defines the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel. I’m always careful about reading too much into ‘chapters’ in the Bible: they weren’t created until the 13th Century and although they’re useful for us in finding our way around a massive collection of writings, they don’t always reflect natural sections. But John 6 is a coherent sub-story in its own right, it’s a very long one, and a very significant one, which we hear over five successive Sundays.
After the crowd’s initial delight at two miraculous works, Jesus doesn’t follow up with more, but instead gives them a strange teaching that He Himself is bread from heaven, giving life to the world, greater than the manna with which Moses miraculously fed their ancestors fleeing persecution in Egypt. Here’s a point that’s easy to miss—Jesus is pointing out here that He is greater even than Moses. Moses gave the people food to satisfy their physical needs, but Jesus will feed them with eternal life. So also, while Moses gave the people the law, Jesus will give them something even greater than a set of rules that nobody can keep correctly all the time—forgiveness of their sins. Jesus represents a new set of promises God is making with the human race, promises that will be sealed, it will eventually be revealed, on the Cross.
Soon after, the crowd will turn on Jesus because He won’t give them miraculous bread on demand but teachings that are hard to swallow. The sixth chapter of John will end with even some of Jesus’ own disciples abandoning Him. If our faith in God depends on Him giving us what we want, when we want it – if it depends on God being “useful” – then it is a faith built on sand, and it will crumble as soon as it faces a real challenge.
As the old saying goes, God always answers your prayers. Sometimes the answer is ‘yes’, and sometimes the answer is ‘no’. Our lives don’t, to put it mildly, only consist of the good times. In the moments when I find it difficult to make the casefor a God who allows so much suffering in the world, I find my faith is always restoredbysomeone, often one of my parishioners, who is full of faith in the face of suffering. Following Jesus Christ is not always a comfortable experience—there were times in my own life when I prayed that God would take my faith away from me—but if God is who the Church claims He is, then His purposes and His methods must frequently be beyond human comprehension.
Certainly, God didn’t give us a simple explanation as to what He meant when He said, in the person of Jesus Christ, that He was bread. All these biblical descriptions work on multiple levels; they have literal, symbolic, and mystical meanings all at the same time. Jesus will go on to say in this same speech—“the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh”, an advance sign of the teaching that will define His followers forevermore, that when they break bread in His name, they will receive His body. This is the very moment at which the crowd starts to turn on Him for giving them cryptic teachings instead of flashy miracles; but this will come up in the Gospel readings for the next two Sundays, so I will say no more for now. Christians have always believed that in Holy Communion we truly receive the Body and Blood Christ. The exact manner in which we do so is a gift of God and only truly understood by God—how sad it is and what a terrible witness it is that this has so often become a source of dispute and division between Christians!
I think this would be less so if we understood that we are given Holy Communion by God not as a reward for good behaviour, but as medicine for the spiritually sick. I found a wonderful quote from a Swedish bishop this week, whom I suspect most of you haven’t heard of, named Bo Giertz. He wrote a famous Christian novel which was translated into English under the title ‘The Hammer of God’. But this quote comes from one of his pastoral letters to his flock in Gothenburg—“To go to the Lord’s Supper does not mean that a person makes a claim to be better than others, but that he confesses that he is a wretched sinner who would have Jesus as his saviour.”
This is where I come back to the point about the risk of defining the Church as “useful”. Of course we should want to do good to our neighbours. But we Christians are no better and no worse than anyone else; we just have the good fortune to have been called by Jesus Christ to follow Him as our Saviour. All sorts of people do good works. Most of our neighbours are somewhere on a spectrum between a vaguely Christian spirituality and outright atheism, and they’re mostly good and kind people. Some of the mosques that were attacked this week were heavily involved in things like foodbanks, usually in partnership with nearby churches. Christians have no monopoly on being useful, and Scripture never suggests we do.
Let me briefly turn to our epistle reading, from Ephesians, which is another one of St Paul’s reminders that each of us is called to serve the Church in our own unique way, with our own distinct gifts. Not everyone’s gift is to be useful. What “use” is the profoundly disabled child whose smile can light up the lives of their parents? The demented nursing home resident whose gracious recipient of care touches the staff deeply? None of us can be “useful” for all of our lives—we start out completely dependent on the care of others, and we often finish off like that too. There are times when Grace demands that we are the recipients of others’ good works as well as times when we are called to do good works. We know from the totalitarianisms of the last century that a society that only values people who are “useful” is entering a dangerous space where it might decide to get rid of the “useless” people.
That, to conclude, is the real danger of being too desperate for a Church that is “useful”. When we do so, we collude with a world that is too keen to dismiss some people, and some institutions, as useless. The irony is that once the Church became too consumed with being useful rather than teaching Truth, the churches began to empty. We offered people a useful Church when what they needed was a faithful Church. Be faithful first and we will find that God opens up the ways that He wants us to be useful—and might even call more people to worship with us.
Now glory and honour be to the Holy and Undivided Trinity, the Father who made us, the Son who redeemed us, the Spirit who sustains us, this day and forevermore. Amen.
Banner image—The Sea of Galilee near Magdala. © Gerry Lynch, 9 November 2024.
