“Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live for ever.”
This week, we hear again this passage from John Ch 6 that we heard last week. Last week, these words were the concluding words of our reading, this week, these are the opening words and then we get to the end of the Chapter. This isn’t, as you may have noticed, a happy ending. The words Jesus speaks are crude and difficult to hear, the crowd is shocked, a lot of disciples turn away. Peter remains and yet, it seems, almost halfheartedly: he does not like what Jesus says either but he and the eleven have nowhere else to go, and among the eleven, Judas is “a devil” who is going to betray Jesus by handing him over – which is, of course, an even worse thing to do than to just turn away – v70-71, that we’re missing in the lectionary, perhaps because they’re too dark.
This dark tone may be surprising since we have noticed in these past weeks that the feeding of the 5000 is this great miracle that is told in all four Gospels, and maybe one of the most famous miracles Jesus ever did. It should have made for a lot of Jesus’s popularity. Yet we noticed also that the way John tells us the story is different from the other evangelists. John adds this long section after the miracle where Jesus explains the spiritual dimension of the miracle, and we realize that people aren’t on board with this. They come for the physical bread, the good benefits they can obtain from Jesus, but they are not ready to accept who Jesus really is. To say the truth, they are disappointed. Jesus does not want to be their king after all, he is not really going to change life as they know it, although he very well could if only he would. Jesus is asking people for a spiritual transformation. He asks them to work for the bread that does not perish and to do the work God requires: to believe in the one God sent.
Now I said that we were going to talk about the Eucharist in this sermon series, and we could wonder how this relates at all to the Eucharist. Well, if you remember from last Sunday, we talked about Jesus’s presence in the Eucharist. We said than, less important than the rite itself, or the way we perform the rite, we come to the Eucharist to receive the presence of Jesus. The thing is, there is the flip side of the coin, and to me this is what this Gospel leads us to think about. To celebrate the Eucharist, we have to be present too. What is the sacrament worth if Jesus is willing to give himself, but we are unable to show up for him?
We noticed last week that there is much more to be present than sharing the same space. Being present is intentional. We have the means to connect with people on the other side of the world. We may not be present physically in the same room, yet our love or affection is still the same and still as valuable when we meet on line. The thing is: the opposite is possible too. We may very well be in the same room, and yet lack this deep connection. I don’t know about you but often when I read the Gospels, I think how lucky were all these people to be able to meet Jesus “in person”, things should have been so much easier for them! And yet we see that it wasn’t. In this Chapter of John, the crowd and the disciples have just received the bread from Jesus himself (and not from some random minister!) and yet they fail, they fail as much as we do, to understand Jesus, to receive Jesus, to follow Jesus – to be in communion with Jesus – and they also fail to be in communion with one another: They stick together because they have no better option and Judas is going to betray not only Jesus but all of them as a group.
And so indeed those words are hard to hear: We can celebrate the Eucharist, we can be right there in this spot with Jesus, and yet fail to be in communion with God and with one another. I told you last week that the Eucharist isn’t magic, so I guess this is where we are: Contrarily to what we might think, it is not enough to have God’s presence if we are not able to bring to God our own presence, which is just not our physical bodies. We can share the same room, meal or bed with the one we love, if we are not there with them with our hearts and minds, then the rest does not matter. There will be no communion.
So after we have talked about how Jesus was present for us in communion, it could be a good idea for us this week to be thinking about the way we want to be present to Jesus in communion.
– The first thing we have to do to be present is to bring our intention, our desire of being present. This is at least what our liturgy invites us to do when we say the Collect for Purity at the beginning of our service: “Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and to you no secrets are hid: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you and worthily magnify your holy name, through Christ our Lord”.
We start our celebration of the Eucharist by telling God our desire to be with God and how worthy God is to be worshiped (Gloria and Collect of the Day). We acknowledge the things that are on our minds and keep us away from God to recenter on our intention of being here. In the same way that it is sometimes hard to be with our family because there is so much going on at work, or sometimes it is so hard to work because there is so much going on with our family, we have to refocus to be truly present.
– Then to be present, we have to listen, to be attentive and open enough to be curious about the ones we are with – open to what they have to tell us. And that’s the second way we have to be present in the Eucharist too: listening to get to know God better and to hear what God has to say to us as a church but also as individuals. This is why we listen to the Scriptures (four readings!) – the word of God spoken to us in Ancient times – and the sermon – which ideally would explain how these ancient words are relevant for us today.
– Finally, and this is the last part of our worship before we celebrate the Eucharist, to be fully present we have to be repentant. Aware of our limitations we pray for what we need and we also pray for the forgiveness of our sins. It is not about condemning ourselves, but presence, “real presence”, requires self awareness, we’re called to be authentic, not “holding back” – present with our true selves, not the selves we wish we had. This was probably the stumbling block for most people at Jesus’s times – and it is probably the same for us today. People weren’t willing to continue to follow Jesus because they hoped Jesus would fulfill their own agendas, instead of being able to follow Jesus and serve him. In the same way, we often come to God desiring to receive, to be filled, but we are not that willing to change, to be transformed and to receive “Eternal life” – which is not only everlasting life but this very life that comes from God. Godly life, holy life.
In John’s, Jesus presents himself as the Sacrament, his flesh and his blood are the presence of God. There is very possibly this idea in John that, as we drink the wine and share the bread, we are also called to be the Sacrament. To embody Christ for one another in our church, family and in our own communities, each one of us and as a church. We use to think that we come to church to receive communion, but maybe it would be more accurate to say that we come to church to be in communion, with God and with one another. This is what we manifest when we celebrate the Eucharist, as we do so, we become Jesus’s flesh and blood, we become the Sacrament.
Now concretely: How is it that we can be in communion? This is the theme that we are going to study in our next Sermon Series, leaving “mystical John” for the very “down to earth James”. During five weeks starting next week, we will be reading from the Letter of James and James shows us how being Christian is all about the way we treat each other, all about learning how to live with one another – and not just worship. Worship is the manifestation of a communion that takes place in the hearts.