More than bread Pt 3 – Feed on him in your hearts
Readings: John 6. 51-59
I wonder what your first thought was as I read todays Gospel. Did your mind wander to what we’re doing a little later in this service, connect flesh and blood with bread and wine. It’s not a difficult link to make is it. But if we make that leap too hastily we do so at our peril. To connect too quickly and too closely this part of John 6 with the Eucharist will ignore what we’ve been looking at before, and will lead to us putting the cart before the horse. So let’s tread carefully.
We’re continuing through John 6 and Jesus’ words ‘I am the bread of life’. So we’re still in the context of the conversation following the feeding of the 5000 and Jesus’ words about him being what truly satisfies, he being to our souls what bread is to our bodies. He and he alone being both the foundation of our spiritual lives and a universal need, all need him from palaces to slums. He hasn’t moved on from that context here, he’s continuing to build and expand upon it.
So his language here of eating and drinking is in some ways metaphorical. We talk don’t we about devouring books, about fire consuming things. We use the language of eating a lot in our metaphors. So too here when Jesus is speaking about eating and drinking he’s using metaphor, he’s speaking about our faith, our faith in him. To consume him, to eat his flesh and drink his blood is to place our faith in him. Ground our whole lives in him. But not just in him but on what he has done.
As I said we’re still in the context of the conversation after the feeding of the 5000, and what does John tell us immediately before the feeding of the 5000, that it’s almost Passover. And at that first Passover and at every one since a lamb was slain, one for each household. And at the first this lamb’s blood was spread on the doorposts of the house. And then the flesh of that lamb was eaten, consumed by those gathered in the house. Jesus is referencing this as he talks about eating his flesh. He’s talking about the cross, about the truer and greater Passover which is soon to happen upon mount Calvary, where the Lamb of God, Jesus himself, will die, his flesh torn apart his blood poured out. When he takes upon himself all our sin and shame so that the punishment that we deserve passes over us, and goes to him instead.
To eat his flesh and drink his blood is to place our faith in his death for our sins on the cross. As we heard last week to take advantage of his death, to benefit from it and to place our hope in his resurrection. And it’s also to become one with him. To eat his flesh and to drink his blood is to become one with him; you are what you eat. As he says here ‘Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them’. Or more literally abides in me. Dwells in me. You are what you eat.
That first Passover the people of God were freed from their slavery in Egypt, led out into the promised land. And yet they still died. Jesus as he leads us from slavery to sin promises that as we eat and drink from him, eat and drink him, we will live forever, through faith in him we shall have everlasting life. Life without end.
But if we think about faith in Jesus just making life better we’ve missed the point. I said a fortnight ago, Jesus doesn’t just make life better he makes it worth living. But Jesus pushes us further in his language here, to a place which is perhaps uncomfortable. ‘Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you’. What Jesus us saying here isn’t that he makes life better, he’s saying that without him we’re dead. And not dead in the sense that we’re heading for death, as though we’re already dying. No, dead. Without Jesus we’re dead. Spiritually, legally, we’re dead, there are no life signs. Not a pip from the monitor.
We’re dead, dead in the water. And once you realise that it becomes obvious that we can’t earn our salvation, we cannot save ourselves any more than a corpse can run a marathon. We need saving. Jesus coming to die on the cross isn’t just to clear the debt of our sin, it’s to rescue us from death, to breath life into us afresh.
As we come to faith the Spirit is poured out upon us to bring us life, to enliven our dead spirits. And as we believe we are fed with Jesus, fed with his sacrifice, fed with his life. And this language of eating and drinking is key because it points us to two realities about faith; it’s personal and it’s continual.
It’s personal because no-one can eat or drink for you. If I eat for Katy it won’t do her much good, I’ll be more full, she’ll still be hungry. In the same way we can’t live off the faith of our parents or our grandparents or our friends. It must be ours, we may have come to believe through them at a very young age, but it needs to be our faith, owned by us. It has to be personal.
And it’s continual. We need to keep eating or we die. No good feasting today and then hoping that’ll last us the rest of our lives. Because it will, but it won’t be a long life. We need to keep coming to Jesus. When we feel the guilt and shame of our sinfulness, to keep coming to him, laying hold on him, trusting in his death and resurrection for our salvation. To keep coming to Jesus for sustenance as we journey on through this life.
Once we were dead in our sins, and yet now through faith, not only have we been made alive by the Holy Spirit, as we believe in Jesus, as we trust in his death and resurrection for our salvation we find we are fed not just for this life, but into everlasting life.
So with the horse firmly in place, onto the cart, as I begin to draw to a close. Because whilst Jesus is not looking ahead to the last supper and his institution of the Eucharist as he says these words in John 6, he’s almost certainly looking back to them as he breaks bread and pours wine in the upper room the night before he dies.
For here at this table is the connection between us in the here and now and his death and resurrection, here as we share bread and wine do we partake of his sacrifice upon the cross for our salvation. Here we feed on him in a spiritual and heavenly manner, as the 23rd of the 39 Articles of Religion puts it in our formularies. But it’s not magic. As we share around this table we do so through faith. It’s the faith that makes the sacrament effective.
Here in communion Jesus gives us the physical rendering of John 6. As we share in bread and wine, as we eat physically, so he has promised to feed us spiritually. He can do so without it, he often does, but for the strengthening of our faith, and because we are physical beings, he gives us the physical to aid our trust in his words, to enact what is happening spiritually at this moment. As the first Bishop of Liverpool JC Ryle puts it ‘We may eat the Lord’s Supper and yet not eat and drink Christ’s body and blood. We may eat and drink Christ’s body and blood and yet not eat the Lord’s supper’.
Faith is the key.
As I say when I invite you to receive ‘feed on him in your hearts by faith with thanksgiving’. Faith must come first. Which is why I’ve laboured on that for most of the sermon. Here is the physical sign, of what should be going on much deeper within us. Eating and drinking this bread and wine won’t make you live forever, but the faith which it is built upon, the faith which it feeds will. For by faith day by day we feed upon the flesh and blood of Jesus, broken and poured out for us, that we may have life, and have it everlasting.
Amen.