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.