One of life’s greatest pleasures is to share a meal with loved ones and friends, isn’t it?
It is for me, and it
is for you too I’m sure – good food, good drink and good company. And it must
have been so for Jesus as well, since so often in the Gospels we find Jesus
sharing meals with others. He shared meals not just with his disciples and
friends, but also with tax collectors and sinners, and with Pharisees and
scribes – with all kinds of people.
When Jesus himself
broke bread as the host at a meal, he had a special way of doing so – first he
took the food, then he gave thanks or blessed it, and finally he broke it and
shared it out. It was so distinctive that only when the disciples on the road
to Emmaus saw it did they recognise Jesus, after his death and resurrection.
Today’s reading from John’s Gospel (John 6:35, 41-51) comes just after Jesus
shares a meal with others on a grand scale – the feeding of the 5000 – a truly gigantic
outdoor picnic. There too in his special way, he took, blessed and shared the
five barley loaves and two fish to feed the crowd.
We can recognise this
same sequence of actions – taking, blessing and sharing - in the Last Supper as
recorded by Matthew, Mark and Luke. And that of course is the model for the
Eucharist which we with all other Christians continue to celebrate in his memory.
The Last Supper can be seen as an acted parable – and so, I think, can all the
other meals Jesus shared in his Eucharistic way of taking, blessing and
sharing.
But what does the
acted parable of Eucharist mean? In today’s reading John opens out for us the
spiritual significance of Eucharist for Jesus himself, in Jesus’s own words.
The last verse sums up what Jesus meant:
‘I am
the living bread that came down from heaven. 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.’
Today I want to share
with you what these words say to me.
First, what does Jesus mean when he says, ‘I am the living bread that came down from
heaven’?
Jesus says ‘I am’ many things on different
occasions, among them ‘I am the good
shepherd’, ‘I am the door’, ‘I am the way’, and ‘I am the true vine’. He is of course talking in metaphors, about
his relationship with those he is talking to, but also his relationship with
God, who he calls his loving Father.
Jesus has just been
responding to hecklers in the crowd who want him to display earthly power, as they
believe Moses did by sending bread from heaven – manna - to feed the people in
the wilderness. So naturally the metaphor Jesus uses on this occasion is about
bread.
As Jesus tells the
hecklers, it is God, not Moses, who sent the manna, just as it is God who sends the food we
all need to nourish our bodies. But Jesus wants his listeners to look beyond
the physical to the spiritual. God also provides what we need to nourish our
spirits – by analogy with the bread which feeds our bodies, this too is bread
from heaven.
And Jesus knows that
his loving-father God is calling him, by his every action and his every word,
to offer this spiritual nourishment to all people. So he describes himself as
the living bread which comes down from heaven.
The hecklers in the
crowd know quite well who Jesus is - the son of Joseph the carpenter from
nearby Nazareth. They choose not to understand his metaphor – and they ridicule
the idea that Jesus came down from heaven.
Second, what does Jesus mean when he says, ‘Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever’?
I suppose people since
the dawn of humanity have dreaded death and had fantasies of living for ever.
But we all know, as Jesus did, that our physical bodies are doomed to die and to
decay.
Yet for Jesus this is
not what truly matters. What does matter is our relationship with God. It is
those who believe that God enfolds and protects them like a loving father that
are released from dread of their own mortality. So he says, ‘Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has
eternal life’. Eternal life is surely another metaphor for a
loving relationship with God.
And more than that,
Jesus knows his own importance. Working in and through him, God reveals his own
nature as loving Father to those who listen. Those who feed on Jesus’s words
and actions, as on bread from heaven, have eternal life.
‘This is eternal
life’, says Jesus, in John’s Gospel after the Last Supper, ‘that
they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.’
Third, what does Jesus mean when he says, ‘The bread that I will give for the life of the
world is my flesh’?
Jesus equates bread
from heaven with his own body, his own very flesh. He does so again at the Last
Supper, when he says ‘Take,
eat, this is my body which is given for you’, words we still hear every time the priest consecrates
the Eucharistic bread.
What a shocking thing
to say, with that suggestion of cannibalism! It certainly upset the hecklers in
the crowd. And it upset many of Jesus’s disciples too, who, we are told, ‘turned
back and no longer went about with him’.
And it still causes
problems for some of Jesus’s disciples today. On the one hand we have those who
accept the medieval doctrine of transubstantiation, whereby in some miraculous
way the essence of the Eucharistic bread is actually transformed into the
essence of Jesus’s flesh. On the other, we have those who are disturbed, put
off, by the idea that the Eucharist involves eating human flesh.
I think that some
people interpret these words of Jesus too literally, as the hecklers in the
crowd did. For here surely Jesus is extending the metaphor of bread from
heaven, and to understand it we need to look behind the literal words. Christians
have wrestled to understand Jesus’s metaphor of his flesh as bread. They have
come up with many different ideas – and perhaps this is part of the strength of
the metaphor, that it can be understood in so many ways.
For myself, I suspect
the point is simply this - that Jesus is expressing in the strongest, most shocking way the
depth of his commitment to God’s saving work for us. He is ready to give up his
life, his human existence, his very flesh, for our salvation. That is precisely what he did for us on the
cross.
These words of Jesus are difficult, and you’ve
sat patiently through my reflections on them
But why don’t you take
a little time to ponder Jesus’s words for yourself? They may speak to you in
quite a different way to how they speak to me. And that is alright. Metaphors
often bear many different meanings at the same time. God will surely grant you
the ones that are right for you.
Listen again to what Jesus says:
‘I am the living bread that came down from heaven.
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.’
Let me finish in prayer with a Collect of the
Word
Gracious Father,
your blessed Son
came down from heaven
to be the true
bread that gives life to the world.
Grant that Christ,
the Bread of Life,
may live in us and
we in him,
who lives and
reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and forever.
Amen
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