Strength, safety and joy

Proverbs 9: 1-6 John 6: 51-58

 

On Friday I was listening to Radio 4’s book of the week ‘Hamilton and me’ – actor Giles Terera’s account of the staging of the musical “Hamilton” in London in 2017. He describes rehearsals, staging, lighting, music.. and the fact that before each performance a group of actors put their arms around each other – and prayed to God for ‘strength, safety and joy’. As we meet this Sunday – as we take in the news of the shooting in Keysham – as we read our Bibles and sing our hymns: God offers us strength, safety and joy.

Yet again the lectionary reading from John presents us with Jesus saying ‘I am the bread of life’. If we ask ‘what does the bread of life mean’, there is no simple answer – there are many answers, or many layers of answers, and it seems that John’s gospel wants to take our understanding deeper and deeper.

Alongside the listeners of Jesus wondering ‘how can Jesus be bread?’, we heard today from the book of Proverbs. 
This contains a collection of wise sayings and also many exhortations to take time to listen to the words of the wise and to become wise. The passage we heard uses the image of wisdom personified as a lovely woman, inviting people into her house to eat and drink and learn how to make the right choices in life and live as wise people do. 
Eating & drinking is used as a symbol of fellowship, of companionship – by ‘eating and drinking with Lady Wisdom’ people are committing themselves to seeking wisdom itself.

Strength, safety and joy are found in wisdom – which is not just knowing the sort of things which might give you good A level or GCSE grades – it is knowing God. Strength, safety and joy are found in knowing that there is a God whose love can make us strong, whose peace brings us safety and whose joy is given as a gift. ‘Lady Wisdom’ has prepared all these things as a gift for us – when we spend time receiving we can be filled with the good things God offers.


Similarly, by eating and drinking with the lost and the broken, Jesus has committed himself to them and to true friendship with them. In his teaching about bread, Jesus is offering life and he is offering the gift of friendship.

But there’s more… in today’s teaching in John, Jesus persists with the metaphor of bread & says ‘the bread which I shall give is my own flesh, given for the life of the world’. Not surprisingly, perhaps, those listening to Jesus have questions about what this means.

Jesus is speaking about bread as doing more than symbolising life or signifying companionship. 
He says:
‘My flesh is real food; my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood dwells in me and I in him’.

You really can’t blame the people in the synagogue for not being able to grasp what Jesus is talking about that day. If John’s chronology is to be believed, this is very early in Jesus’ ministry. But it really only makes sense in the light of Jesus’ death on the cross. More than that, it only makes full sense in the context of the Last Supper, Jesus’ subsequent death and resurrection, and his continuing presence with his followers in the Eucharist.

This may only be the beginning of the disciples’ understanding of Jesus’ teaching about the bread of life, but it seems that Jesus wants his followers to understand that he is giving himself, his own life, to be broken like bread in order to feed the world. 

Jesus tells them and tells us that if we want to share in the life that God offers his people, we must eat the living bread, we must accept the gift Jesus gives us, and take his life into our hands and into our very selves.

This is hard, deep stuff to understand and of course Jesus didn’t expect people to grasp it straight away, he spent his whole ministry trying to show people and teach people what God’s love with us really means. Jesus wanted his hearers to know God the Father, and so to receive strength, safety and joy.

Jesus is God’s gift of himself – given to the world. This is as necessary for us as daily bread, as healing as true friendship, it is a gift we are called upon only to accept.
God’s love for us knows no bounds: God is prepared to be broken for the world to be shared with the world. And so God’s presence, with us and in us, is as real as the bread we hold, and accept and eat.

When we share in communion we act out this way of sharing in Jesus Christ, the living bread. But as people in a Reformed tradition we know that Jesus is also present as the living Word, that Jesus is present when we break open God’s word as surely as he is when be break a loaf or a communion wafer.

God is present in this service of the Word, and feeds us as we remember that ‘humankind cannot live by bread alone, but by every word that comes out of the mouth of the Lord’.

God is present with us – offering strength, safety and joy.

God is here in Plymouth  - with the frightened, the shocked, the angry – offering life: the bread of life and the Word of life, today and always.

To God’s praise and glory. Amen.

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Spring IS coming!

I love to dip into Revgalblogpals, and though I don't usually 'play' at the Friday five questions, I thought that with no sermon to do I would, for a change: Sally writes: Candlemass is past, and Christmas is well and truly over, here in the UK February looks set to be its usual grey and cold self. Signs of spring are yet to emerge; if like me you long for them perhaps you need ways to get through these long dark days. So lets share a few tips for a cold and rainy/ snowy day.... 1. Exercise, what do you do if you can't face getting out into the cold and damp? I do find it therapeutic to clean the house vigourously - but if you could see the dust you'd know I don't often get round to it! I also make a point of always running, rather than walking, upstairs - something my mum always did until her stroke. 2. Food; time to comfort eat, or time to prepare your body for the coming spring/summer? I try to eat healthily, but my body craves carbohydrate. 3. Brainpower; do
Read more

Abraham and Isaac - a good question!

Genesis 22: 1-14       Matthew 10: 40-42 Isidor Rabi, who was born in Austria in 1898, moved to the United States as a child and won the Nobel prize for physics in 1944. He was once asked by an admiring friend, “Why did you become a scientist, rather than a doctor or lawyer or businessman, like the other immigrant kids in your neighbourhood?” Rabi responded: “My mother made me a scientist without ever intending it. Every other Jewish mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school: ‘So? Did you learn anything today?’ But not my mother. She always asked me a different question. ‘Izzy,’ she would say, ‘did you ask a good question today?’ That difference – asking good questions – made me a scientist.” I think we could say that living in a relationship with God – which for us means following Jesus Christ – is based on the same principle. Did you ask a good question today? What might our ‘good questions’ be as we read the scriptures today? Let’s look closely at the story of Abraham, bei
Read more

Faith and Guidance

Genesis 12: 1-9; Romans 4: 13-25   It’s been quite a week for politics. Whatever your party affiliations, there has been a lot of unpredictability and upheaval  - there are going to be 3 by-elections very soon - and we might all be left feeling breathless and wondering ‘what happens next?’.   We might wonder what guidance we might expect our political leaders to seek. And we might, this week, have had our own moments of wondering where to turn for guidance or direction in the turmoil of life.    So it’s rather helpful to look at the story of Abram.   Like all good stories this one is long and multi-faceted and well worth exploring.   Just before the part that we heard, we are told (in Genesis chapter 11)  that Terah, the father of Abram, took his son Abram, his grandson Lot (son of Haran, who had died) and his daughter-in-law Sarai, Abram’s wife, and set off from Ur of the Chaldees for Canaan. But when they reached Harran they settled there, and there Terah died, leaving Abram as the h
Read more