Texts: Proverbs 9:1-6; Ephesians 5:15-20; John 6:51-58
We are now on the fourth leg of our journey through chapter 6 of St John's Gospel, and we have covered a lot of ground. When we started out four weeks ago we did so with one of the best-known and best-loved miracles, the Feeding of the Five Thousand. That was a good, comfortable place to start. Even if we have a little 21st century voice whispering in the back of our minds, "you don't believe in miracles, do you?" we can still listen to the text and feel warm about it. It doesn't really challenge us.
On the same Sunday, we also had the story of Jesus walking across the lake to catch up with the disciples in their boat. Again, we may not be anxious to defend the veracity of the story with some of our secular-minded friends, but safe within our places of worship where most of us either believe the story or at least keep our disbelief to ourselves, the story is also rather nice in a safe sort of way. It doesn't challenge us. It doesn't suggest that as followers of Christ we ought to be able to walk across the waters as he did.
But from that feel-good start, things have begun to get more difficult as the journey through this chapter has continued. When Jesus got back to Capernaum and started teaching in the synagogue the mood started to change. You might remember that the crowd started off with the practical issue of how on earth Jesus had managed to get back across the lake without a boat. They were intrigued, bewildered, genuinely seeking an explanation of the mystery. What they got was a bit of a telling off from Jesus who questioned their motives for following him. They didn't really want to hear his teaching: what they wanted was for him to heal their sick and feed their hungry.
From there Jesus started talking to them about the bread of heaven, with its echoes of the miraculous feeding of the Israelites in the wilderness when manna came down from heaven. But his understanding of all that was very different from theirs. Moses did not feed them in the wilderness; the manna came down from heaven. And now, in the same way, he had come down from heaven as the new Bread of Heaven. Again, their initial response to this was one of bewilderment; what on earth is he talking about? He's a local, one of us: his parents live here in the town. How can he claim to have come down from heaven, and why does he call himself "bread"?
But far from trying to calm them down by explaining that he was talking figuratively Jesus ploughed on; and last week he really let the cat out of the bag with the saying that starts today's passage: I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world. We can surely understand the consternation that such a saying would have caused at that time.
So what was this all about? I said last week that there is clear evidence that the community of faith from which St John's Gospel emerged was split, with many members walking out; and we'll see part of that evidence next week. I also said that one of the major issues over which the split occurred was the claim that Jesus was divine. The many references to Jesus coming down from heaven or from the Father were code for that very claim; that in some way or other Jesus was God in human flesh, or God incarnate as we might put it today. Part of the problem there was caused by misunderstanding: many Jews thought the claim was that Jesus was "also God", in the sense that there were now two gods. That was the issue we explored last week.
This week we have the second issue, that of the Eucharist. There was a time when people tried to argue that this passage is not about the Eucharist, but thankfully that argument seems to have died a natural death. There are at least two principal reasons for arguing that it is about the Eucharist. First, as I said last week, St John does not include the institution of the Eucharist in his account of the Last Supper, as the other three gospels do. If today's passage is not about the Eucharist, then there is no mention of it in this gospel, which seems incredible. We know from St Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians that the practice was already formalised in the church in Corinth by 50AD; why would St John not know about it 40 years later?
The second reason is even more straightforward. If this passage is not about the Eucharist, what on earth is it about? In what other way are we to understand Jesus telling his followers to eat his flesh and drink his blood?
So it's about the Eucharist. That's the easy bit to say, but what this passage says about the Eucharist is very far from easy, and I always approach it with some trepidation because I have upset more people preaching on this passage than on any other I can think of. This is the problem. According to this passage, the Eucharist is essential to eternal life. Think about that for a moment; and think about its implications.
It would be easy for us, given the classic words of administration in our Eucharistic liturgies, to look upon the Eucharist purely in terms of remembrance, rather akin to laying a wreath at the War Memorial on Anzac Day, something we do simply to bring Jesus to mind. But that's not the teaching of the Church, and it's certainly not the teaching of St John. We believe that the act of receiving Communion is "efficacious", to use a technical word. Something happens to us in and through Communion, just as something happens to us in and through baptism. In baptism we receive the gift of the Holy Spirit; in the Eucharist we receive the gift of eternal life. That's what this passage this morning is saying.
Eternal life is that which survives death. If we do not have eternal life we perish, we do not survive death. That's what this gospel is talking about in the famous verse, 3:16: "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life." For some reason everybody loves that verse and never seems to be troubled by it. Nobody has ever said to me, "Does that mean that non-believers perish and do not have eternal life no matter how 'good' they are?" And yet, the answer is "yes", isn't it? The clear implication of the much-loved verse 3:16 is that only Christian believers have eternal life. But that doesn't seem to worry people, and I think the reason for that is that it seems to allow some wriggle room. It seems to allow us to say of our own loved ones, well, they are Christians in God's eyes because they are good people, even if they don't think of themselves as Christians. I have lost count of the number of times someone has told me that there is no doubt that X has gone to heaven because he/she was such a good person. That's not the teaching of Scripture, but it's what many Christians prefer to believe; and perhaps there is an element of vagueness in that verse that allows us to avoid taking it too seriously.
But now we come to this passage from St John and we find no such wriggle room. Here are verses 53 and 54: Jesus said to them, "I tell you the truth, 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." And there's the problem; that's why this passage has often got me into trouble. Because now we are dealing with observable facts: either somebody does receive Communion, or they do not. And if they do not, they do not have eternal life. On death, they perish.
That is not a palatable teaching today; and as we shall see next week it was no more acceptable in St John's community of faith. In the meantime we do well to ponder it and pray about it. If St John has got it right, there are people we need to warn in our closest circles.
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