14th Sunday after Pentecost – Ted Hackett
John 6:51-58
It’s nice to be back up here …
As many of you know I have been pretty much out of circulation for a few months…
As we age we become like old cars…
The parts wear out…
Some they can replace…
Some they can fix for a while…
And some just…
have to give out!
I won’t waste your time with details…
Corner me privately if you want and I’ll bore you with my ailments
But to the matter at hand…
the Gospel readings…
The last two Sundays…and today…Our Gospel readings are from the 6th chapter of John…
They are really quite mystifying if you read them closely…
Now that’s partly because these readings, are from three different sources…
John had at least three different traditions to deal with…
All of them dealing with the Eucharist…
Three different Churches…
Probably all in the region of Ephesus in what is now Turkey…
There were probably several Christian communities around Ephesus…it was a pretty big city…
And each may have had slightly different traditions by the year 95 when this Gospel was written…
John wrote this Gospel in part to unite these communities…to keep them from arguing…
So when you read John’s Gospel…
It often seems disjointed and perhaps even self-contradictory, because it is put together with pieces from each tradition…
Now in today’s readings…it is clear that John is trying to clarify something about what each of these Churches do every Sunday….the Holy Eucharist…but about which they have disagreements..
Disagreements about just what the Eucharist is and how the Eucharist brings Jesus…
The real Jesus…
Brings Jesus to us!
And how does John believe this happens?
Remember…John is trying to justify several traditions…….
For instance, last week’s Gospel has Jesus saying: “I am the bread of life. Who ever comes to me will never be hungry and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”
It’s very easy to read this metaphorically.
It’s very easy to think that Jesus is just saying that hunger and thirst are metaphors for spiritual things…
Even so, the Pharisees in the audience are offended.
They know Jesus is the son of Mary and Joseph and as far as they are concerned he did not come down from heaven!
This is typical of John’s Gospel…
Jesus says something profound and his listeners…take him to be speaking literally and just don’t get it!
And what Jesus says two weeks ago sounds like a metaphor.
But… a bit later on in the same Chapter 6… the Gospel from last week, we find something quite different…
Jesus’ words are far less rhetorical.
Listen again…
Jesus says:
“I am the living bread that came down from Heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh” … “Very truly I tell you unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood you have no life in you! Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them. … Whoever eats me will live because of me.
Now…that is pretty graphic stuff!
And it sounds very much like primitive, barbarian ideas…
The sort of things cannibals believe…
Eat the body of a dead man and magically gain his power…
It’s no wonder the Pharisees did not “get it”…“How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”
A very reasonable question!
As a matter of fact…it is precisely one of things the Church has been arguing about for about 2,000 years. ….
“How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”
We don’t have time to explore the ins and outs of this question of how this could happen….
Just believe me, that for 2,000 years…
Christians have argued with each other…
Have excommunicated each other…
Have executed each other…
Have even fought wars over this question…
Theologians have yelled at each other…
Have written volumes trying to reconcile the issue of Christ’s Presence in the Eucharist with logic…or Science…or for that matter…
Common Sense!….
Thomas Aquinas gave us an elegant, learned theory…which is almost always misunderstood…
Goes by the name “Transubstantiation”…
But it has a fatal flaw…
If anyone wants to talk about that…again…corner me and we’ll talk about substance and accidents.
The great Reformer…father of most Protestant thinking about the Eucharist, Ulrich Zwingli…
Said it was a matter of what you believed…
If you believed Christ was present that was as good as his really being there…
Martin Luther insisted that Jesus wasn’t lying when He said: “This is my body…” and we just have to take it on faith…
And Anglicanism…that is our tradition…
Has said: “We strongly profess all theories….but the important thing is to do it….”….and then grow into understanding.
To celebrate it and to be open to what God would have us believe…
And that is pretty much what we do…..
And that is worth exploring…..
Let’s look at a sort of “case history”…
Let’s say a young woman “falls in love”
Or we could say she is infatuated…
Her perception of him is dazzling!
But….she doesn’t know him very well.
Courtship…to use an old-fashioned word…
Is a process of really knowing a person better And she does find out things about him…
Some she is not fond of…..
He is always late…stuff like that…
But basically…she likes what she discovers…
And infatuation…almost without her noticing …
Deepens…
and turns to love.
Of course…this is ideal…Happily ever after…
But life is life…
And after a while…she finds things are not always peaches and cream…
It isn’t that he is abusive or unfaithful
But….he doesn’t always anticipate her needs…and fulfill them. He forgets their anniversary!
Sometimes he is distracted…
and doesn’t attend to her.
Sometimes…
When she wants something…
He says: “No,
We can’t afford it!”
It doesn’t seem like a perfect relationship anymore.
She begins to have fantasies of finding someone else who could fulfill all her wishes…
But then…One day when she is feeling pretty down…
She starts to cry…
And she realizes that he is there…beside her…
And the whole time she has been feeling lonely…
He has been right there…
She just wasn’t open to knowing it…
Maybe she was too self-occupied…
Maybe she was still in the fantasy-land of first love….quite adolescent!
But now…somehow…in her need…
He is there…
And she knows…
He loves her.
And that is how it is for many people I have known…..
For many it is the story of coming to know Our Lord is there for us …
Especially in the holy Eucharist…
First… when we go to Communion it seems like a really nice piece of Symbolism…
We may find it comforting…even a bit fascinating….but not life-changing.
But then…if we keep on…maybe…
Maybe things deepen…and we begin to…somehow…know…that he is really, somehow…in that bread and wine….
It can be a strange feeling…
A little scary…
But amazing.
But it doesn’t last…
It can be fleeting…
It cannot be summoned at will…
It can seem like it was an illusion…
But then…maybe in a time of fear or sadness…we find out that our sense of Jesus’ presence in the Eucharist is real…
He is with us…
He is with us…even when we don’t know it…
When we don’t feel it.
And he is with us…
In the Eucharist
It’s O.K. if all this doesn’t happen to you…
God doesn’t judge you for it…you are no less a Christian…
This sort of thing is, after all, a gift from God…
We have to cooperate….but it is a gift.
But it is worth waiting for…
And like any coming of Jesus,
Without seeming to change anything… It changes everything.