Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and Christ Church, Bulkington
Ephesians 4. 25-5.2; John 6. 35, 41-51
“Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
Do you find some of the teachings of Christianity a little hard to swallow? That eternal life is a reality? That Jesus Christ actually rose from the dead? That Christ is actually present today whenever Christians break bread and share wine in His name? All this stuff is quite challenging to the common viewpoint of our times that only material things that really matter and that the main goal of the Church is to change the world.
These days, we tend to put the difficulties that many people have with these mystical beliefs – difficulties, indeed, that some of us here probably have with these beliefs – down to living in an era of science and reason. When people find the more mysterious teachings of the Faith hard to accept, it is tempting to reduce Christianity to the Cult of Militant Niceness, where the Church is all about its good works, and we don’t talk too loudly about the weirder stuff Jesus Christ taught.
But none of this is new. The section of John’s Gospel from which this morning’s reading comes from is all about that. People got into little boats and sailed across the Sea of Galilee to keep up with Jesus, because they wanted to see Him feed them and heal them—but instead He gave them a cryptic message that the He was bread come down from heaven, that whoever ate this bread would live forever, and that the bread He would give for the life of the world was His flesh. No wonder they started muttering. Soon after today’s Gospel reading, the complaints got so bad that even some of Jesus’ closest followers abandoned Him. The things that Christ taught about His own nature, about death and eternal life, have always been hard for people to believe.
If we say the Church is all about its good works – which is what most people who aren’t particularly committed Christians want to hear – then we are making the same mistake as the crowds who muttered when Jesus didn’t give them the good works they wanted. Here’s one problem with a Gospel of good works—I hope none of us thinks that we are better people than others because we are Christians. That’s not what Christ taught at all. We all know atheists, and Jews, and Muslims whose basic goodness puts us to shame; we all know that being a Christian hardly makes us perfect.
That isn’t anything new either. Look at what St Paul had to write to the Christians in Ephesus – warning them against bitterness and anger and squabbling. Of course, they were called to live better lives than that, but they clearly often failed, otherwise he wouldn’t have had to write.
