in vino veritas?

 

SERMON PREACHED AT ST PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN

AND ST PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

SUNDAY, AUGUST 18^th, 2024

 

John 6: 56-59

 

By way of background, one of the amusing things about this Year of Mark, as the lectionary compilers call it, is that we take a large chunk of time out of Mark and immerse ourselves in John’s account of the Jesus story. For that reason we have been for the last couple of weeks, and will be for another week yet, deeply immersed in the very challenging scenes and sayings of John Chapter 6.

In this chapter John has Jesus taking us into some very deep reflections on who he is and how we are supposed to respond to him when he is no longer visible to us – which of course he has not been for some two millennia.

With a whole lot of background about the Old Testament people of God, their recalcitrance and failure to live up to the demands of Torah, of Law, Jesus tells his listeners that he is Torah embodied for us – the language of bread and wine are rich with Hebrew understandings of how Torah and obedience to God are encountered and enacted. The knowledge of the Hebrew people would be such that they knew only too well that their ancestors, and if they were being honest they themselves, had not been terribly good at embodying the Torah, the Law, the demands of God.

It is almost, then, that God in Christ has another go. And at one level it’s okay to see it like that. That does not give us permission to have an anti-Jewish, much less anti-Semitic view of human history. By no means, as the apostle Paul often said. But we are encouraged to see our own ability to be not good enough or even wilfully stroppy in our own faith lives.

Having said all that, what is all this stuff about eating and drinking Jesus? I certainly don’t think it’s merely a reference to the meal that we will be symbolically engaging in in a few minutes at the communion table or altar. It is that but it is so much more.

Funnily enough it has been the muslin wearing mung bean munching crystal hugging hippies and new agers that have given me the best means by which to understand something of Jesus’ language. For if the symbols that he gives us of bread and wine are pregnant with, impregnated with the whole meaning of his life then we are using the language of “life force.” The Spirit as it were present in Jesus, who we call Holy Spirit, is transferred into our being by this simple act of ingesting.

But this is no waving of a magical wand. By reaching out my hands and receiving and consuming a tasteless wafer and a miniscule sip of wine I'm not engaging in some kind of magic that will transform me or my world. 

I am however engaging in an act of faith. Faith that this simple action that Jesus has given us is saturated, I say again, with the whole meaning of his life, death, resurrection, and that we, like the Hebrew people in the wilderness, are opening ourselves up to all of that. We are being, as both Paul and Jesus put it, grafted onto all that he was and is and will be. It is not magic, but a disciplined opening of ourselves again and again to the demands and the responsibilities of wearing Christ’s name, and the demands that he makes on our lives.

By eating and drinking, by consuming Jesus, we are in an immeasurably intimate relationship with him and all that he is. Early Christians were accused of cannibalism because of the strange language that Jesus uses. Sociologists of religion will tell us that ancient rites of cannibalism, such as those that I recently read about in Monty Soutar’s novel Kawai, was never about food, but always about ingesting the life force of a vanquished foe.

We are of course taught to believe that in the resurrection Jesus does not remain vanquished, nevertheless he has been there, and we ingest his suffering, his sorrow, and his irrepressible death-conquering essence.

Consume me, says Jesus. It is a simple enough act that we will undertake in a few minutes. But it is not magical. It is a commissioning over and over again to expose ourselves to embody all his compassion, all his devotion to the one he calls Father, the Creator of all that is seen and unseen; all his vulnerability, all his transformative energy as he addresses the injustices around him. All that and so much more in a simple act of reaching out and receiving him, or signs saturated by him.

In the end this is never an intellectual matter, and my words can just be bewildering. Bewildering because the matter of which we speak is beyond human understanding, first off. Bewildering, too, because the essence of this Jesus-teaching is that we are called to reach out in all our incomprehension and fallibility, in this most simple of ways, to accept all that God makes available to us week by week, again and again until we too become saturated with the radiant light and life of Christ.