A sermon preached at St. Mary’s by David Barton on 25th August 2024

John 6:56-69

We’ve had John chapter 6 for the past four weeks, and the parish’s finest preachers have preached their best on it!  And now here I am with another – but don’t worry.  This is “John chapter 6.  The final instalment!”  Next week we’re back to Mark again!

And arguably, this chapter in John is a very significant one.  John doesn’t write about the last supper in his Gospel.   Everything he wants to say about that is here, in chapter 6.  He gives us a clue to that at the start of the chapter, when he says that all this happens near the Jewish feast of Passover.  And this is a very carefully worked chapter.  You don’t have to be a scholar to notice that. Understand this chapter…. and you go a long way to understanding just what this writer is trying to convey throughout the whole of his Gospel.

So today, after last week’s long discourse on the bread of life theme, Jesus gets back to the central thrust: don’t look for more loaves and fishes:  I make the difference: whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life.

And that, as Alice pointed out last week, does indeed sound pretty macabre.  But John is using an OT image. In the OT if your enemies defeated you, that how it was described.   Eating up my people as if they would eat bread, the Psalmist says.  And Jesus enemies will do just that to him when they put him on the cross.    As will we when we walk away from him and deny him.  We all have a hand in the kinds of circumstances that lead to the cross.  And that’s one level of meaning John wants us to see. 

But John always works in layers of meaning, one on top of the other. So there is another.

As was pointed out last week, we all live by consuming other forms of life.  That is true of the meat we eat, and the vegetables too.  They were once alive with their own life. 

So to remember the night before Jesus died, and to recall his identification of his coming death the next day, with the breaking of the bread, and the pouring of the wine; and then, together to share that bread and wine, is to walk into that sentence of our Gospel.  Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I in them.  Receiving communion with him we are given the love and forgiveness and life that flow from, the cross.  Abundantly.  Baskets of it are left over,

And John wants us to be clear exactly what this means. A little later on Jesus says:  The Spirit gives life, the flesh is useless.  We need to get that right.  Its true that this flesh can easily tempt us into too much food, too much wine, too much indulgence.  And the Spirit is what matters. 

But that does not mean that “Spirit” is the opposite of “matter”, of “flesh”.  Its not. The two go together.  They are one thing, not to be separated.  Look at Jesus, and in him we see the whole Spirit of God incarnate; flesh and blood, our flesh and blood, filled with the life of God.  When Jesus heals he uses these hands, this voice.  And if we want to see the reality of God’s love for each of us, then look at that torn human body dying in pain on the cross.  The spiritual and the material in the Christian faith go profoundly together and they are not separate. 

And that brings us to something absolutely central and distinctive about this gospel.   I deliberately chose that wonderful Wesley hymn “Christ whose Glory Fills the Skies” for the start of the service, because it always seems to me to be a headline for this Gospel.   This gospel is written with a profound understanding that the world is shot through with the Glory of a deeply loving God.  And the agent of that Glory for John is Christ.  And for John – despite everything his community has suffered and still does – the glory of God in the face of Christ Jesus shines out continually, the material world as much as the spiritual. 

Remember, at the start of the Gospel John says that Jesus is the one through whom all things came to be.  Without him nothing was made.  Not even the darkness extinguishes his Light. And that is the world John writes about.  Jesus’ presence changes everything at the wedding in Cana. And as this Gospel goes on he is the water we drink, the bread we eat, the light, the door, the shepherd: I am, I am I am he says.  And in another variant on the same theme in this chapter, he is the one who comes to the frightened disciples on the lake and calms their fears and brings them home: it is I, he says. So Christ is the one who comes to us in our lowest moments, he is the path we walk, the truth we search for, the nourishment we take, and he fills our life with his life. 

And we don’t have to be the writer of the fourth Gospel to know that.  “Heaven is our goal,” George Herbert once said, “and all the way to heaven is heaven.”

Abhishiktananda, that remarkable French priest who, as a Christian, followed the life of a sanyasi in India, once asked a friend of mine – in genuine perplexity: Murray, is there anywhere where God is not?  And the answer the writer of this Gospel would give is: nowhere. God in Christ is everywhere, and is always ready to fill us with his grace

And I think John writes, knowing that it is hard for us to see this, and yet we should live with that expectation.  We are to live as if we know Christ is here, but perhaps we have just missed seeing him, or glimpsed him out of the corner of our eye.  Remember the empty tomb at Easter in this Gospel.  John tells us about it in great detail so that we understand the wonder of it:  the sense of the risen presence. Jesus has only just left:  We just missed him.  And Mary in the garden…. Is it him? Is it a gardener?

Was it a vision?
Or did we see that day the unseeable
One glory of the everlasting world
Perpetually at work, though never seen
Since Eden locked the gate that’s everywhere
And nowhere? *I think such moments belong to all of us.  Christ burst open the locked gate.  We need to live open to the possibilities of wonder.. The unseeable one glory of the everlasting world

And there is one last implication of this Chapter and this Gospel:

If Spirit and matter, spirit and flesh are one, then you and I are alive with the spirit of Christ.  That is the way God looks at us.  As those who are his daughters and sons.  On the back of the service booklet for Bridget’s funeral there was a short poem by a Persian poet – a poem we might all take to heart:

I wish I could show you,

When you are lonely or in darkness,

The astonishing light

Of your own being.**

• Edwin Muir. Transfiguration
• *Hafez