12th Sunday After Trinity
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Readings: Ephesians 5: 15-20 and John 6: 51-58
An article in The Times this week caught my attention. Headed ‘Craving the physical in a digital world’, Libby Purves examined the phenomenon of hundreds of people gathering at the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, in Norfolk, to revere a sliver of human flesh which had been taken from the heart of the late Carlo Acutis. He was a teenage Italian website designer who documented Eucharistic miracles and approved apparitions of the Virgin Mary, and catalogued both on a website he designed before his death from leukaemia at the age of 15 in 2006. His canonisation was approved by Pope Francis earlier this year after being credited with two miracles, and he has been declared ‘Patron of the Internet.’
Relics may not have a prominent place in Anglican spirituality, and you and I may have our reservations about these supposed remains of the saints, such as the shoulder blade of St. Alban at St. Albans, or the toe-nail of St Silas that you can view in a cathedral in Crete, or even fragments of the true cross which were so popular in mediaeval times. In the Catholic world, such fragments of a holy person still draw great devotion, as did part of an elbow bone of St Thomas a Becket, when it was loaned to Canterbury Cathedral for a while in 2016. But at Walsingham, Monsignor Anthony Figueiredo observed that since England is “one of the most securalised nations on earth” he hoped the presence of the relic of Carlo Acutis would help people return to Jesus.
Libby Purves agrees that it is easy to shudder at the global tour of the fragment of Carlo Acutis’s heart, and asks why Catholicism has not outgrown this sort of thing. But she notes that in our age of 3D printing and virtual reality maybe there is a revived hunger for solidity. Objects can speak to us deeply of the universal consolation of feeling part of long humanity.
We might ask, however, what possible miracle would come from a fragment of a teenager’s heart tissue, and how this could work. But in today’s gospel, the Jews who had witnessed the feeding of the five thousand by Jesus ask a similar question. They had heard him say “I am the living bread that came down from heaven; the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” They then disputed amongst themselves, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” Jesus didn’t tell them how it worked, but replied, “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” Perhaps the only satisfactory answer to the question raised by the Jews and the question of how efficacious relics are, is that we are dealing with ‘mystery’ – the action of God beyond explanation; as my dictionary says ‘religious truth divinely revealed, beyond human reason.”
Today, we join millions of people across the globe in receiving the bread and wine of the communion; the eucharist; the Mass; the Lord’s Supper. The various Christian denominations differ in what they believe about the bread and the wine, and they differ over who may or may not receive the sacrament, and in what state the communicant should be. So, Roman Catholics tend to favour ‘First Communion’ for quite young children, whereas in the Anglican world, Confirmation is seen as the gateway to receiving the sacrament, though many churches are adopting a policy of ‘communion before Confirmation’ for older children. Some non-conformist churches welcome anybody at the table, but on the whole, Roman Catholics do not permit non-catholics to participate. As to what happens to the bread and wine in this celebration, again there are many differing view points. Anglicans generally have never spelt out what goes on at the moment of consecration, but I like this little verse apparently written by Queen Elizabeth I in the early days of prayer books: “Christ was the Word who spake it; Christ took the bread and brake it; And what his word doth make it; That I believe and take it.”
A discussion I read recently noted that churches must reconcile all these different points of view, or, perhaps we could say ‘truths’. Some denominations stress that this is Jesus’ meal and table, and not the Church’s. Nobody should be turned away. But of course we need to know some things about what we’re doing as we take the bread and the wine, and an element of reverence over what we consider to be the body and blood of Jesus is appropriate and desirable. One could have hours of discussion about ‘worthy reception’, as it is called; who should and who shouldn’t.
But in the account of the feeding of the five thousand, which forms the backdrop to today’s gospel, is it not pertinent that Jesus fed the crowd first before telling them ‘I am the bread of life.’ The feeding of the hungry came before the teaching. It almost seems that if Jesus hadn’t fed the crowd, he wouldn’t have had the same authority to give the teaching. And when the teaching came, it blossomed into promise: “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day.” We rightly talk about the sacrifice of Jesus, and the giving of his flesh and blood, but we remember too that the whole of Jesus’ life was an offering for us, and an offering of obedience to his Father. And in the gospel reading we come across that word ‘abide’ which Jesus uses in other places. ‘Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.’ How our lives might be enriched and focussed more if we could take to heart that Jesus abides in us, and we in him, for that is the promise. Jesus nourishes faith, forgives sin and empowers us to be witnesses. Better to proclaim the promises than to explain the sacrament.
Eternal life, says Craig Satterlee, does not come through understanding things correctly or doing the right things, but being in close communion with Jesus. Eternal life is being in close communion with Jesus. In eating the bread and drinking the wine, Christ remains in us and we in him.
Of course, the Church is the Spirit-filled community in which we live out our Christian faith with others. It is such a pity, a scandal even, that denominational differences and restrictions present such a barrier to some who would join us. I’ve heard stories recently about two student-age young men who have found faith on-line, but who have no connection with any church community. One is looking around for a church to baptise him, and the other has taken the unusual step of baptising himself. Perhaps here again is a sign that in a digital and virtual world, people crave some sort of solidity; that the sacraments do have meaning, even if they are not fully understood. I know that some people recoil at the very idea of eating Jesus’ flesh and drinking his blood, but I have also seen the attitude of reverence and wonder when I have suggested somebody does receive communion who may not have been confirmed or even grounded in the basics of the faith. The mystery is ever present.
Finally, a thought from the epistle reading today, from Ephesians 5. “Be careful how you live, not as unwise people but as wise, making the most of the time, because the days are evil” writes St. Paul. As I may have noted before, much of the New Testament was written in times of persecution, with the young church under pressure, so that it may have seemed to the faithful that the days were evil. We read Paul’s words in different circumstances. It’s as if we were reading today something written during the dark days of the second world war, since when times have changed. So, to say today ‘the days are evil’ is not the whole story. All days are God’s gifts, and those who make the most of their lives, and time, are people who live in a spirit of thanksgiving. The world is not unredeemably evil. Every bad bit of news, or tragedy, or act of violence, seems to bring out a story of kindness, or charity, or heroism. So time is for living in good works, and trying to understanding what the will of the Lord is. Paul desires that his readers are filled with the Spirit; giving thanks for everything and for everyone. To be filled with the Spirit does not lead to private projects or mystical experiences but to the common work of the community’s worship and mutual building up. Jesus told the crowd that ‘the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.’ Thus Jesus himself brings us where all Christian worship aims to establish us: joined in one body, through the sustenance of word and sacrament united in the person of Christ.