Bread of Heaven
Proper 12B
28 July 2024; 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Homily Delivered by the Rev. Dr. Anthony Hutchinson
at the Church of the Holy Spirit, Sutherlin, Oregon
2 Kings 4:42-44; Psalm 145; Ephesians 3:14-21; John 6:1-21
God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.
Today’s reading from the Gospel of John tells us a story where five barley breads and two fish, once blessed by Jesus, feed over 5,000 people. The story occurs in all four Gospels. In Mark, Matthew, and Luke, the story demonstrates the power of Jesus and his role as Messiah. In John, it forms part of that Gospel’s Book of Signs, a recounting of marvelous deeds by Jesus that point beyond themselves to inner, hidden truths about Jesus: turning water into wine shows he is the true Vine, multiplying the loaves shows he is the Bread of Life, curing the man born blind shows he is the Light of the World, and raising Lazarus from the dead shows he is the Life of the world.
Jesus’ feeding of the 5,000 here is a sign pointing to and embodying the truth that Jesus is both nourisher and nourishment. Right after this story, Jesus gives the sermon of the Bread of Life, where he says, “I am the bread of life. The one who comes to me shall not hunger. The one who believes in me shall never thirst. … I am the living bread come down from heaven. Anyone who eats this bread shall live forever. The bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh. … Unless you eat of the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. The one who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I shall raise him up at the last day” (John 6: 35-54).
Where the Synoptics say Jesus took the loaves and fish and “blessed them and gave them” to the people, John alone uses the language, “he gave thanks and distributed” them. Those words in John link this story to early Christian sacrament of the Eucharist, which, after all, means “Thanksgiving.”
St. Paul, writing about 25 years after the death of Jesus, described the origin of this sacrament in this way: “For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, ‘This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.’ For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Corinthians 11:23-26).
Matthew, Mark, and Luke all follow Paul in this same basic story. But John, for his part, does not tell of a Eucharist at the Last Supper, instead he tells of the washing of feet, the dipping of bread into the mezze sauce, and a long prayer of intercession by Jesus. It is part of John’s general tendency to remove references to sacraments in stories about Jesus and replace them with stories and speeches that focus on their meaning. Jesus never is pictured being baptized by John the Baptist in the Fourth Gospel; instead he works a sign by offering himself as “Living Water” to the Samaritan woman at the Well, teaching Nicodemus about birth “by water and by the spirit,” and having water flow from his pierced side on the Cross.
Similarly, in John there is no Eucharistic prayer at the Last Supper. Rather, the feeding of the 5,000 points to and embodies the fact that Jesus is the Bread from Heaven, which we must eat in order to have eternal life.
For what it’s worth: in the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion that served as the basic confession of faith of Anglicans during the first 3 centuries of our existence, we read: “Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation.” The fact that John places inauguration of the Eucharist in a field with over 5,000 random people who may or may not have followed John the Baptist suggests that the Prayer Book Canon of absolutely requiring baptism before communion, no matter how well this supports baptismal theology, is perhaps an overstepping by liturgical legalists.
However that may be, the Bread of Life Sermon in John and the Last Supper
narratives in Paul and the Synoptics brought the Church early on to recognize
the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharistic celebration and in the consecrated
bread and wine themselves.
An early Christian hymn by Ephrem of Edessa, writing in a form of Aramaic in the fourth century expresses the wonder and reverence of this belief well:
…In your bread, [Lord,] there blows what no mouth can devour.
In your wine there smoulders what no lips can drink.
Gale and Blaze in bread and wine: unparalleled the miracle we taste.
Coming down to earth, where human beings die,
God created these anew, like Wide-eyed Ones,
mingling Blaze and Gale and making these the mystic content of their dust.
Did the Seraph’s fingers touch the white-hot coal?
Did the Prophet’s mouth do more than touch the same?
No, they grasped it not and he consumed it not. To us are granted both.
Abram offered body-food to spirit-guests.
Angels swallowed meat. The newest proof of power
is that bodies eat and drink the Fire and Wind provided by our Lord.
(tr. Geoffrey Rowell)
We live today in an age where much of the wonder, awe, and reverence has been removed from life, a world where the realm of the sacred and holy is getting smaller and smaller. And due to our past abuse of minorities and exclusion, the things we Christians hold as most sacred can become the butt of dirty jokes and parody, as we saw in the Olympics opening ceremony this week in Paris, where Leonardo’s Last Supper visually served as a pattern for a drag-queen Bacchanalia. It probably serves us right, and is a joke that, I think, Jesus, joke-telling companion of drunkards and prostitutes, would have appreciated.
But if we are to be fully human, and true to our nature, we must not lose our sense of the holy, our sense of reverence, and our ability to see the holy, to see divinity, in ordinary things of daily life, like bread and wine.
When I hear people mock belief in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist and reverencing its elements as superstitious “cookie worship,” I question their capacity to wonder or hold anything in awe or reverence. Part of the problem, of course, is that some people do indeed have superstitious and magical ways of seeing the Eucharist. “Hocus-pocus” as a way to mock such superstition is a corruption of the Latin translation of Jesus’ words when he instituted the Eucharist, “Hoc est corpus meum (This is my body).”
But some peoples’ bad opinions or misuse of doctrine should not lead us to the opposite error of rejecting the true doctrines that can lead us to salvation. We need to follow here the example of the young Elizabeth I, who affirmed her faith the Real Presence while declining to over-define the matter. When queried under threat of possible torture or death as a heretic by Queen Mary’s inquisitors about her belief regarding the Eucharistic elements, Elizabeth referred to Jesus’ words “this is my body, this is my blood,” and replied with the ideas summed up in this quatrain:
Christ was the word that spake it.
He took the bread and break it;
And what his words did make it
That I believe and take it.
Key in experiencing and honoring the
presence of Christ in the Eucharist is having a general idea about what a sacrament is. It is, just as in our Gospel story today, a
sign, a symbol, an outward and visible expression of inward, hidden
reality. A symbol does not just point
beyond itself to something else; it participates in and embodies the reality to
which it points. It makes the reality it
indicates available to us by the very fact that it is there. It is for this reason that any understanding
of the Eucharist that does not encompass a belief in the real presence of
Christ is to my mind flawed.
It is hard to express the reverence and awe I feel at the presence of Christ in
the sacrament. But hymns, like the one
of Efrem the Syrian I quoted earlier, manage at times to capture elements of
this awe. In the hymn, “Lord you give
the great commission” we sing: “Lord,
you make the common holy, this my body, this my blood. Let us all, for earth’s true glory, daily
lift life heavenward.”
When we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we ask “give us this day our daily bread.” But this is not simply a prayer for basic physical sustenance. The words translated by “our daily bread” actually mean something more like “our bread for the morrow,” the bread of the great feast on the Day of the Lord, or even “the bread beyond the one you meant when you said, ‘man shall not live by bread alone.’” It is for this reason that the Lord’s Prayer has always been recited as part of the Great Thanksgiving, just before the breaking of the bread.
I would invite all of you, this week, to remember to say the Lord’s Prayer at least once a day. And when you say the words, “give us this day our daily bread,” think of the Bread of Life, come down from heaven. Think of Christ made present to us in God’s gifts of bread and the wine, at his table of plenty. And then in your silent time, your private prayers, feed on him in your hearts by faith, and be thankful.
In the name of Christ, Amen.
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