Eleventh Sunday after Trinity – morning
Sunday 12th August 2018
Proper 14 – 11th Sunday after Trinity – morning
Ephesians 4.25 – 5.2
John 6.35,41-51
Revd Preb Maureen Hobbs
“I am the bread of life!”
I shouldn’t think you could have a more potent symbol… I don’t think there is a Christian culture on earth that doesn’t have some form of bread as a staple food? Maybe some of the Inuit – it must be hard to cultivate or find a grain bearing plant in the ice and snow? But with that exclusion, most of the rest of humanity has some form of bread in its diet.
Bread making is also sort of magical. You take a whole variety of dry ingredients – add some yeast in some form and a bit of moisture, mix it up and leave it alone a few hours and something amazing happens. It grows! Maybe even doubles in size.
Then when you bake it in an oven, you have something that smells wonderful, tastes good and fills you up. Amazing!
And the smell of baking bread is something that most human beings respond to automatically – that is why some supermarkets pipe it into their stores, even when there is no baking actually happening! It puts people in a better mood and they are more likely to linger and buy more! There is a kind of mystery about it – much as there is about God and our faith in him.
Our Gospel reading today follows on directly from the passage we had last week. The context, to remind you, is that Jesus has fed the 5000 miraculously: he then tried to find some peace and quiet from the crowd, but they followed him clamouring for more bread, saying to him, “Sir, give us this bread always!”
But when Jesus begins to try and teach them, explaining that true sustenance comes only from God and is to be found in his own person – as a being sent directly from God for their benefit, they begin to mutter and chunter and complain.
They don’t think much of his advice to come to him and believe in him. That is not the sort of response; not the sort of proof they are seeking.
Someone remembers that this is a local lad from a family well known to them; how dare he give himself airs and graces! How dare he claim heavenly descent! There is more than an echo of the hostile reception he received in his home synagogue that Mark details in his Gospel. But these people have just come from a demonstration of his extraordinary powers. You would think they might have a bit more trust – a bit more faith.
With patience that survives the hurtfulness of rejection and lack of belief, Jesus again explains that he is not claiming the status of the Father, but offering God’s people, them and us, the way to God, and the gift of life.
This is a much better gift than their ancestors received through the prayers of Moses in the wilderness. But it will take much more of Jesus’s patience – even unto the cross and death itself – before they realize that the gift of this living bread to the world demands his own life.
And are we really any better? Do we recognize the true value of the bread we are offered as a free gift from God? Perhaps we like to think we do as we approach his table week by week, day by day, – and the real wonder is that God is always willing to receive us; always willing to forgive us; always hoping that we will respond with the sort of love and kindness that Paul writes to the Ephesians to commend.
Always hoping that we might be stirred into being imitators of God as we see him in Jesus Christ, so that we too might be a fragrant offering and sacrifice. If we were, then surely more people would be drawn towards the ‘fragrance’ and beauty of our lives…? That is quite a challenge for each and every one of us, this week and always. There is a kind of mystery about that too – but one that is well worth grappling with.
Amen.