Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne, Christ Church, Worton, and Holy Cross, Seend
Ephesians 6.10-20; John 6.56-69
“…whoever eats me will live because of me”
Let’s imagine that one Sunday, after church, over coffee and cake, that I told you… to eat me. Would you think I’d gone a bit nuts? You probably wouldn’t be entirely sure what I was getting at, but let’s be honest, you wouldn’t think I meant something entirely wholesome if I, you know, told you to eat me.
What if I went on to tell you to drink my blood? Tell the truth, you wouldn’t just find that weird, but completely disgusting. You might even send an e-mail to the bishop’s office when you got home from church, asking him to have strong words with the clearly wayward Rector of the Wellsprings Benefice.
So, I have a fair bit of sympathy for the disciples when they start complaining to Jesus about the strange and difficult teaching He’s asking them to accept in today’s Gospel reading. I mean, ‘I am the living bread come down from heaven, and whoever eats me will live forever’—it’s really bizarre stuff isn’t it? We tend to accept the idea of eating Jesus’ flesh and drinking His blood because the Church has been teaching it for 2,000 years; and we’re all familiar with the idea from childhood; and we also acknowledge Jesus as the Son of God, so we’re prepared to accept things being said by Jesus that wouldn’t accept from anyone else. But don’t let that obscure how strange these ideas are.
St Peter Penitent (1639), by Guercino. Hangs in the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh.
And to the disciples in those early days, Jesus was just a teacher from Nazareth. A very clever teacher who seemed even to be able to perform miracles. But just a teacher. Once you heard Him asking you to drink His blood, you might even start wondering whether His power to work miracles came from God or from, you know, the other direction. It’s no wonder that a lot of His followers walked away from Him at this point.
Christianity is weird. It’s a profoundly strange faith. It isn’t about common sense—not the common sense of the 21st Century West, but also not the common sense of anyone at the time of Christ: not of pious Jews nor clever Greeks nor imperious Romans. At the heart of Christ’s teachings, are things that turn our conventional view of the world upside down. At its core of it is the concept that God gives us what we don’t deserve, because in fact we aren’t good enough to deserve anything; what God gives us, He gives us freely out of His love. And because we could never be good enough to pass any purity test, God closed the gap that humanity’s sin opened between us and Him Hithrough giving up Himself, in the person of Jesus Christ, on the Cross.
The temptation is to hide Jesus’ hard teachings because we think most people can see the sense of Christ’s moral teaching. Even if they find it impossible to believe in anything ‘supernatural’, we hope people will accept the stuff Jesus taught about being nice, and then they might become part of the Church because it’s full of nice people. Well, sometimes. And, hang on, Christians have no monopoly on being nice. Sikhs and Muslims and Jews and atheists do nice things all the time. Sure, Jesus told us to do good. But he taught lots of other, stranger, things, too. Not just the teaching about supernatural realities, but in His moral teachings too—“love your enemies” is strange, hard stuff. I wonder how many of us manage to live that out?
When we hide the hard stuff Jesus taught, we lose what makes it most valuable.
Flesh and blood. In our other reading this morning, St Paul reminds his readers that they are fighting not just flesh and blood enemies, but the cosmic powers of darkness and spiritual forces of evil.
The great conceit of our times is that there isn’t really any such thing as evil. There are just things that have gone wrong. If someone walks into a children’s dance class and stabs a bunch of little girls, or makes their money by swindling vulnerable elderly people out of their savings, we look for psychological explanations, or perhaps failures of public policy. Depending on our political view we’ll blame things like inadequate social services for people who had traumatised childhoods, or else bad parenting, or else prisons being too soft and getting rid of hanging.
But the idea that sometimes evil just happens, that sometimes people are seduced by evil because it seems fun and empowering and there may not be much that anyone can else can do about that… that leaves us very uncomfortable. Because we like the myth that we are in control of our lives, or at least that we should be.
Our civilization is built on a myth of control through knowledge and science, yet human beings are out of control. Wealthier than any civilisation in history, and probably wreaking serious damage on the planet’s capacity to support our lives to ensure our prosperity, we have solved innumerable scientific mysteries, spend countless fortunes on education, have access to almost all information ever generated by human beings at the touch of a button—but the world still remains a troubled place beset by poverty. Sometimes people still do terrible things for no obvious reason.
Of course evil acts do often have banal and mundane causes, and better public policy would stop many of them happening, but the existence of evil is a genuinely weird but very real thing.
When we hide the hard stuff in the Bible, we lose what makes it most valuable.
Now, what does Paul recommend to us to fight evil? In wonderful poetic language, Paul recommends truth – how powerful is that in our ‘post-truth era’ – and righteousness, and the Gospel of peace, and faith, and salvation, and the word of God. Many of these aren’t think we can put a financial value to or measure in metres or kilos. But they are things that we wouldn’t want to live without, they are things we can generate and encourage, but not things we can ever control.
And, going back to our Gospel reading, what about those who do stick with Jesus when others abandon Him? Foremost among them is St Peter.In all the Gospels Peter is the first to work out who Jesus truly is. But John’s Gospel is arranged in a very different way than in the other three Gospels, so the scene where Peter realises the truth is a different one. Jesus asks the apostles if they too will abandon Him, and Peter’s reply is one of his life’s great moments—“Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are eternal the Holy One of God.”
To whom can we go, ourselves? To politics? We’re losing faith in that. Scientific progress? We have unleashed enormously powerful forces through our increasing mastery of science and technology, but we fear these as much as we celebrate them. Our lives on this earth, as we all know, are short and much of what we attempt in our lives ends up in failure.
Yet, you and I have been called to something greater—to meet the Holy One of God in bread and wine this morning, and so to be fed by His flesh and blood. A hard teaching—few can accept it. But if, like Peter, you stick with Christ through the strange teachings, that is exactly how He will lead you to eternal life.
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 image: Photo by Mart Production, sourced form Pexels, and used under CC.0.
