The first two readings today are full of advice about how to live:
‘Lay aside immaturity and walk in the way of insight.’
‘Brothers and sisters, be careful then how you live, not as unwise people but as wise, making the most of the time.’

And there’s advice too about eating and drinking:
‘Come, eat of my bread and drink of my wine.’
‘Do not get drunk with wine, but be filled with the Spirit.’

All sensible advice of course!

We are now several weeks in to the Gospel stories about bread in John’s Gospel – and how are you finding it so far – have you had enough bread yet?!

For me – well, I can’t actually eat bread – at least not the sort that you really want to bother about eating – the delicious, crusty, fresh-tasting bread that once you start, its really hard to stop eating!

But in last week’s reading Jesus seemed to be hinting that the bread he is talking about isn’t like this – instead the bread that comes down from heaven to give life to the world is his own flesh – and now this week its right there in black and white – in your face – even rather, between your teeth! Six times in this passage he talks of eating his flesh – and then just to add to this, he also now brings in drinking his blood!

Those listening to him at the time must have been appalled. And not simply because it sounds horribly like cannibalism – in Jewish tradition it was absolutely forbidden to eat meat with any blood in it at all – let alone to actually drink blood itself. Jesus, in choosing to talk this way is deliberately setting out to shock his hearers. He certainly seems to be overdoing the references – almost literally sticking it down their throats. It makes us feel uncomfortable now – then it must have been outrageous. Why did he do that? What was he hoping to achieve?

To us it might seem less shocking because it’s there in our Eucharistic Prayer every week:
‘Accept our praises, heavenly Father, through your Son our Saviour Jesus Christ, and grant that by the power of your Holy Spirit these gifts of bread and wine may be to us his body and his blood.’

And we repeat Jesus’ own words at the Last Supper:
‘Take, eat; this is my body which is given for you; do this in remembrance of me.’
Drink this all of you; this is my blood of the new covenant. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.’

For 2000 years people have argued over what all this means. For much longer than that people have found meaning in food and drink as part of religious rituals – and it was precisely because of the Jewish food laws, and because of what the pagans got up to with food offerings to gods, that the early Christians had a great deal of trouble coming to an agreed way of understanding what all this meant.

And people have died as a result of these arguments – does bread and wine actually become flesh and blood when consecrated by the priest? Or are we simply saying the words of Jesus as a way of remembering him? And the truth is that really we don’t know, cannot know, what happens in the Eucharist – scientific tests on consecrated bread and wine will not show any chemical change – but then neither is there any way of measuring the effect of receiving communion on a human life – on our hearts and souls.

Why do we feel somehow changed by eating a tiny wafer and drinking a sip of wine?

Words again from the Eucharistic Prayer might help here:
‘As we eat and drink these holy gifts in the presence of your divine majesty, renew us by your Spirit, inspire us with your love and unite us in the body of your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.’

When we eat the bread and drink the wine of Holy Communion – we are becoming part of the Body of Christ in all kinds of ways at once. And there is no other way to describe what happens than to say that it is a
mystery – a holy mystery – which is after all one way to describe the sacrament of Holy Communion.

‘Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life.’ says Jesus.

‘Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed. Lay aside immaturity, and live, and walk in the way of insight.’ Says the writer of the Book of Proverbs.

Its an invitation to a moment of feeding, of nourishment on the deepest level, and at the same time, to grow up into wisdom, into our full stature in Christ, and, following Paul’s advice too to the Ephesians – to be careful how we live, making the most of the time because the days are evil.

We know how difficult our days can be. Violence and division, competition and hostility – it can often feel like the world itself is out to get us. And thinking about eating and drinking brings us up against the reality that more and more of us have life-threatening or certainly life-affecting intolerances or allergies and inevitably this week the tragic events that caused the death of beautiful young people like Hannah Jacobs in 2023, and Natasha Ednan- Laperouse in 2016 are in the forefront of our minds.

It raises all kinds of questions of course about our food industry and what we are doing to our well-being. Jesus is promising us of course, something way beyond food and drink – simple bread and wine –– he is speaking of spiritual nourishing that changes our lives and helps us change the world.

In Holy Communion we take into ourselves the very essence of Jesus through the power of his Spirit – we become him because he becomes us. Communion is a foretaste of heaven – both because, I am absolutely sure that we will be able to feast on all the finest food and wines we could possibly desire at the heavenly banquet – no more limit on what we can or can’t eat or drink – but also because there is no limit to how many are fed – we all gather around the table and join the party – as we say at the very end of the Eucharistic Prayer ‘in the unity of the Holy Spirit, with all who stand before you in earth and heaven’.

But the absolutely central thing that Jesus was trying to explain to the people back then and to us now is that it is he himself and only he, that gives true life. We cannot pick and choose a bit of Jesus this week and a bit of something else or nothing at all the next! If we need food and drink to live each day – then we need Jesus even more so to live life to the full and not just survive. He is the food on which we depend – his life gives us life, and his life is the life of God, the source of all life that is.

There is only one true bread that gives life to the world – it is Jesus Christ – the living bread, in all whom our hungers are satisfied. Amen.

Service: Reverend Michelle Dalliston 18th August 2024. (St John The Baptist Church Peterborough UK)

Readings: Proverbs 9.1-6; Psalm 34.9-14; Ephesians 5.15-20; John 6.51-58