The Limits of Good Works: Sermon Preached on 11th August 2024 (Eleventh Sunday After Trinity)

Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and Christ Church, Bulkington

Ephesians 4. 25-5.2; John 6. 35, 41-51

“Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

Do you find some of the teachings of Christianity a little hard to swallow? That eternal life is a reality? That Jesus Christ actually rose from the dead? That Christ is actually present today whenever Christians break bread and share wine in His name? All this stuff is quite challenging to the common viewpoint of our times that only material things that really matter and that the main goal of the Church is to change the world.

These days, we tend to put the difficulties that many people have with these mystical beliefs – difficulties, indeed, that some of us here probably have with these beliefs – down to living in an era of science and reason. When people find the more mysterious teachings of the Faith hard to accept, it is tempting to reduce Christianity to the Cult of Militant Niceness, where the Church is all about its good works, and we don’t talk too loudly about the weirder stuff Jesus Christ taught.

But none of this is new. The section of John’s Gospel from which this morning’s reading comes from is all about that. People got into little boats and sailed across the Sea of Galilee to keep up with Jesus, because they wanted to see Him feed them and heal them—but instead He gave them a cryptic message that the He was bread come down from heaven, that whoever ate this bread would live forever, and that the bread He would give for the life of the world was His flesh. No wonder they started muttering. Soon after today’s Gospel reading, the complaints got so bad that even some of Jesus’ closest followers abandoned Him. The things that Christ taught about His own nature, about death and eternal life, have always been hard for people to believe.

If we say the Church is all about its good works – which is what most people who aren’t particularly committed Christians want to hear – then we are making the same mistake as the crowds who muttered when Jesus didn’t give them the good works they wanted. Here’s one problem with a Gospel of good works—I hope none of us thinks that we are better people than others because we are Christians. That’s not what Christ taught at all. We all know atheists, and Jews, and Muslims whose basic goodness puts us to shame; we all know that being a Christian hardly makes us perfect.

That isn’t anything new either. Look at what St Paul had to write to the Christians in Ephesus – warning them against bitterness and anger and squabbling. Of course, they were called to live better lives than that, but they clearly often failed, otherwise he wouldn’t have had to write.

St Paul adjoins his readers, “let all of us speak truth to our neighbours”. A powerful truth in our culture and time is that for all our learning, and for all our technology, and for all our material power, human nature has not changed at all. Modern Westerners have a terrible conceit that we are somehow both wiser and more caring than our ancestors, when a brief read of a newspaper would quickly confirm that our society is a basket case!

And if we in our turn offer people the hope that everything would be perfect if only everybody was a Christian then we are offering them a false hope. The related offer that everything would be perfect if only people of all faiths and none would put aside their differences and work together to be kind is also a false hope.

I don’t know if the name of Professor John Gray means anything to any of you? You may occasionally hear his dulcet Tyneside tones on Radio 4 as you’re getting ready to come to Church, because he often appears in the Sunday morning ten-to-nine essay slot. Gray is, to my mind, the most interesting popular philosopher in Britain today, with a capacity to make complex arguments understandable to an interested non-specialist.

Gray is a stone-cold atheist but, in response to humanist claims that God should be dispensed with because enlightened reason would ensure people lived in better ways famously quipped that, “the idea that Jesus returned from the dead is not as contrary to reason as the notion that human beings will in future be different from how they have always been.”

This is the paradox of our human nature. As the secular world might put it, human beings are made of star-stuff but somehow seem to spend a lot of their lives rolling around in the mud. Our as the Christian Faith has always put it, people are made in the image and likeness of God, yet havebecome alienated from our true nature as a result of The Fall.

Human nature won’t change. That’s why Jesus came—not to perform good works, but to cross the gap between God and humanity that had been opened up by our nature at The Fall. If that seems fanciful to today’s people, that is perhaps because they haven’t caught up withwhat science has been unveiling in this century.

For a time, science taught us that we were nothing special—that we human beings were just another animal species, living on a rock orbiting an ordinary star in a mundane part of the universe. The fact that we existed at all, as an intelligent form of life living on a planet that could sustain life, meant that among the trillions of stars of the universe, that life must be abundant, and intelligent life quite common. Why should there be anything special about us?

But since the turn of this century, we have been able to peer into the universe in ever greater detail. Planets like ours, with surface temperatures where liquid water can exist, seem to be quite rare. And if there is other life with advanced technology out there, we can see no signs of it despite actively looking for it for more than sixty years with increasingly powerful radio-telescopes. What the science of the 21^st Century is tentatively starting to tell us is that we human beings seem to be an example of something vanishingly rare. Perhaps, we might argue as Christians, even something made in the image and likeness of God.

At the same time, you can hardly switch on the news without being reminded of how fragile the natural systems that sustain human life are – fragile most of all to the actions of we human beings ourselves, perhaps the cardinal example of the fallenness of our nature.

For a time, we were in danger of losing touch with the sheer mystery of our existence just as we overestimated our capacity to build heaven on Earth. Instead we’re learning that conscious intelligent life may rarely emerge, and the greatest threat to our existence is our own dark side, a dark side that our learning and technology seems to be amplifying rather than taming.

That is why I counsel you against a Gospel of good works. Of course, we should seek to do good for its own sake. But be under no illusions that Christians hold any monopoly on the good, or that we are not subject to the normal run of human failings.

What is actually special about Christians is the gift of Truth that Christ gave us—that He was indeed God made human, truly died and rose from the dead, and in doing so opened the way to eternal life. It is that that makes the Church worthwhile. And all the other good things that we do through the Church – care for the vulnerable, creating beauty, good fellowship – are a foreshadowing of the life that awaits us in heaven, when we become the people we were truly made to be; when the seed that God sowed in our human bodies bursts forth in the glory of our eternal spiritual bodies.

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.

Top banner image—the Sea of Galilee near Magdala. © Gerry Lynch, 9 November 2024.