The Twelth Sunday after Trinity
Sermon
18 August 2024
The Reverend Caroline Brownlie
John 6:51 - 58
Perhaps you heard recently, the BBC Sports Editor, Dan Rowan saying in answer to a question the day after the end of the Olympics, we need time to reflect, a key phrase in relation to our Gospel . In 2007, when I was just retired and luxuriously church-shopping, I walked into St. Benet’s and saw our very rare if not unique central window: was there ever a pull, a message for someone just retired? It had not been my experience that I belonged in the Church as Christ’s (now) human body; much more to do with my personal and family history and chaplaincy ministry, than that since ordination the last 30 years has been mainly being ‘out front’! When the writer of John wrote ‘the Word became flesh’ in Greek, it meant ‘became Real’; I have gradually learned to value here the careful balance between hearing the Word in the Gospel and then receiving the bread and wine together, the Word literally becoming real as I/we hold out our hands. For me particularly, learning to experience ‘I am not alone, but really, (even verily) with others’ was the crux of the matter; our reasons will be various, depending on our history, temperament, Christian journey with different needs and priorities’; what is real and common is that we all hear the Word, say the Creed and receive the bread and wine if we wish to, together. Including the children.
So, we are all doing in our own unique way, what Jesus bids us through John, in this section of Chapter 6; ‘unless you eat, unless you drink you will not have life within you. The living Father sent me, I live because of the Father, and you live because of me - ‘. John’s conviction of these intangible truths about Jesus are partly reflections on the meaning of Jesus Actual feeding of 5000 placed earlier in the Gospel; so he can be relied on when we now hear these words about Jesus giving himself in the bread and wine we receive later - we are in time as the feeding of the 5000 and the Last Supper were, but this morning is an eternal moment too, as we individually hear these words and as a family are fed with the Real Bread …. for bodies and souls.
We hear these ‘mind-blowing’ truths about God providing all we need, as from the mouth of Jesus because that is how ‘John’ was convinced to write. The lovely Scottish theologian of the people, William Barclay puts it much better than I can: ‘It may well be that we remember that here John is doing what he so often does. He is not giving, or trying to give, the actual words of Jesus. He has been thinking for decades Who Jesus was, what He said and did; and now led by Jesus’ Spirit he is giving the inner significance of his words and works. It would have been merely a feat of memory to repeat the words; ‘here is their essential meaning for us guided by the Spirit.’ (Remember this is post-Resurrection, when he and his companions in the early church were ‘seeing’ and believing that when they saw Jesus they had seen God).
Isn’t it a common if not universal, experience that it is the spirit of a loved one, the essential person, which is left in our hearts long after we have forgotten their doings and their words and how glad we are to speak about them when we trust friends to listen. We are used sadly these days with Twitter and instant interviewing to an expectation of instant feedback on a person’s (or group’s) experience people are followed with a microphone after an event, not something we humanly are designed to do. Remember Dan Rowan! John is at the other end of the spectrum having waited and absorbed the truth of who Jesus was (remember his oft repeated statement in different people’s mouths, Who is This?) and then been able to speak and write. ‘That which we saw and heard and touched with our hands, we now proclaim to you, a very long time afterwards. How many of us have had the experience (usually of relationship) where the significance, the value, the richness of this dawns on us as the years roll on.
So (as ‘they’ say these days), I’d like to ask a rhetorical question (very happy to hear the answer later!) We hear John’s words this morning as from Jesus’ mouth; how often, or do we at all, mentally demand they be literally true? We can be immeasurably enriched in our perspective on and our relationship with Jesus now, knowing how these truths were literally conveyed to us. God’s In-Spiration was literally breathed into this human being which is why I think we hear his words as Truly from God; isn’t this perhaps another miracle of God communicating His deepest truths through a human being completely open to his past experience of human truth in the life of Jesus.
(Many Christians worry if they question this expression of truth; witness the still continuing US Creation/Evolution debates, even when we know so much more now (because God is continually In-spiring creative people in different fields; we all experience different levels of fact, imagination, or inspiration as conveying something we believe in, so another question; does what we have heard, hear this morning, will hear in the weeks to come, as from Jesus, ring true to us in the depths of our hearts?)
In this reading John includes the line ‘The Jews disputed among themselves, ‘how can this man give us his flesh to eat?’ a rational question given their belief that nothing containing blood could be taken by mouth as the ultimate Jewish desecration and blasphemy. Doesn’t this illustrate just how ‘beyond and outside cultural, national and religious limits’ John considered Jesus to be; and he was looking from beyond the Cross when his body and blood were ultimately and supremely in evidence. John was also used to talking to Greek pagan believers, whose dramatic rituals (contemporary Passion plays as we would recognise them) involving a dying and rising God whose followers were unified with him through their liturgical communion together. So his use of the word Real shows its accuracy – he was saying to them: ‘This is the Real Thing, listen to Him …. my flesh is true bread, my blood is true drink’
Sometimes we use as an argument against someone’s views, “well it’s just John again banging on”?... but 000’s of years ago, as we heard the words of Proverbs telling us, there was prophetic coherence with what we’ve heard this morning; ‘simple people and those without sense are invited by Wisdom to turn aside and eat bread and drink of the wine she has mixed; to live and walk in the way of insight.’ Wisdom being the Old Testament personalising of the Spirit of God, who is also prophetically? Female in Hebrew thought.
Going back to my early experience of St.Bene’t’s it was a sense of Reality about the faith here, intangible as it is, people searching for and a faith in, the person of Jesus, through the worship here; and sadly, but in a real way, through Anna’s death growing in a greater appreciation of one another and our belonging together.
God didn’t bypass humanity in the writing of John or the other Gospels, far from it; truthfully helping us come to the Jesus John writes of, in his eternal and human dimensions; God entrusted himself to be communicated through a rag tag mixture of people among Jesus followers, and as John later conveys to us, yes us, ‘blessed are those who have not seen but believe.’ Lets give John the last word! ‘He who saw this has testified so that you also may believe. His testimony is true and he knows that he speaks the truth.’ Amen.
