Flesh and Blood

A sermon based on the 2nd service Gospel for Trinity 10, John 6.51-58 :-

I want to focus tonight on the reading we’ve just heard, from St John’s Gospel. It’s quite blunt, sometimes uncomfortably so for our modern ears. Jesus talks about “whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood . . .” At the service of holy communion many of us if not all of us will regularly gather to eat a pinch of bread and to drink the wine, and we hear words like “The body of Christ, broken for you.” And indeed, regular attendance at the Holy Communion was an absolute fundamental for John and Charles Wesley, and is rightly therefore a central part of Methodist practice today. But somehow what Jesus says here seems altogether more stark, more blunt, more shocking, than our usual gentle celebrations of communion.

The saying, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” is only needed because it isn’t true. Words can hurt and they do. Words can shock and they do. Words are powerful things. They can inform us and cheer us, but they can also challenge us or even appal us.

But we can also use words to massage the truth away, to cover over difficult things, or just to get people off our backs. Simple example: “How are you?” “Fine, thanks!” “Sh’mae?” “Da iawn, diolch!” Now that could be true; but it isn’t always. And while I can think of one or two people to whom I daren’t say “How are you?” because they’ll start telling me and I’ll still be there an hour later - on the whole I’d rather people were truthful than just polite (or politely dismissive). Sh’mae? Ah, wedi blino; or, as my old granddad used to say, “To be honest, I’m - (word I really can’t use in chapel)”

I passed a friend in the street the other day, and he asked, “How are you?” “Fine,” I replied, but I mustn’t have looked it (to be honest, it was a bit of a heavy day). He looked at me and commented, “Who are you trying to convince - me or yourself?”

In one sense I was fine. I was on time, I had a lot of things to do, but I was pretty much up to speed, meeting the deadlines, fulfilling the commitments, getting it all done. But inside I wasn’t so fine. I was like the toy rabbit that doesn’t have the Duracell battery in the advert, beginning to slow up and run down, getting a bit tired.

So, what will recharge my battery? What works for you when you get run down? Actually, on that day, an honest and perceptive response to my slightly dishonest answer was part of what helped. We went off and had a coffee and a chat, and my schedule slipped a bit but it didn’t matter. When I restarted my chores for the day I was in a better place, things were better inside me.

Someone said, “Life is something that happens to you while you’re making other plans.” It can certainly often feel that way. In the tough words of this evening’s Gospel reading, Jesus is talking about life, not as something that happens to you, but as something that is within you. And there is a difference. When I said I was fine to my friend that day I was doing life OK, I was getting through it. But my time out with him and the coffee and chat we shared helped rekindle life within me. Friendship does that. The times when someone is perceptive and caring enough to not take our throwaway and dismissive responses at face value.

“My flesh is real food; my blood is real drink,” says Jesus, and the bluntness of his words can seem quite shocking. Maybe they might have been less shocking then, but actually I think Jesus did mean to shock, to startle anyway. He is saying to those who hear him (and to us): “What about the life within you? How is it being sustained? How is it being fed? How real is it?” Indeed, further than that, even: “Is there life within you?”

And all this stuff about “my flesh” and “my blood” means we can’t simply brush him off with a “Da iawn, diolch” kind of answer - “I’m fine” “I’m good”. He pushes us to admit to the hunger within us, to admit to our need for the life with which Jesus seeks to gift us, the food with which he seeks to feed us.

So he says, “Eat me. Drink me.” And he tells us that this is the only way we ever have real life within us; he’s quite clear and blunt about it. My flesh is real food and my blood is real drink: in other words, any other source of sustenance is not enough. It will leave us unresourced, empty and hollow, lacking in life. Jesus says, “Very truly, I tell you: unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood you have no life in you.” Challenging words that we need to take seriously.

This is about holy communion, but it isn’t just about holy communion. Holy communion as a physical receiving of bread and wine as body and blood is in part - whatever we believe about what happens to or within the bread and the wine - it is in part representational. Terry Waite when held captive in Beirut for all that time was not able physically to receive communion - and yet he still felt within himself the resourcing of the body and blood of Christ.

It is about being intimately connected with Christ, seeking his presence in prayer, in meditation, making time for him in the busyness of our day. This isn’t something just for monks and nuns or other people like that who spend all their time in holy places and doing holy things. But it is I think about saying to Jesus, “I want you to be part of all that I am and all that I do; I want there to be no part of my life that is not enriched by your presence.”

Have I ever managed to pray a prayer like that and completely mean it? I suppose not; however much I may want to make Jesus the centre of my life, there are still bits of who I am that I sort of shut away into cupboards and don’t let him in there. Most of us spend a fair amount of time, energy, and prayer trying to create and possess the life we want. But as the words in the annual covenant service remind us, “Sometimes we may please both you and ourselves, but at other times we cannot please you except by denying ourselves.” That prayer, by the way, is a wonderful expression of what I’m trying to preach about, and I hope you don’t only pray it once a year. We’ll end this sermon with it.

For here’s the truth of my life. In spite of all my best efforts, I still end up - yes, living, yes, doing all right, but really less than fully alive. The outside and inside of who I am don’t match up. “Is this all there is?” I can find myself asking.

Jesus offers me treatment for my condition of not being fully alive, of not being sure where I belong; he offers me food for my hunger. The message for today is this: Our destiny is life in Christ, not death in the wilderness. Think of the flesh and blood of Christ as medicine that saves those who otherwise are lost, “the medicine of immortality” in the words of Saint Ignatius. And like most medicines, we need to take it in a disciplined way, we need a daily dose.

Jesus today seeks to awaken us to a hunger we too often deny we have, to our fundamental need for what only he can give. To eat his flesh and drink his blood is to open our lives to his: to consume his life so that he can consume and change ours; to eat and digest the love, mercy, forgiveness, compassion, that are the marks of his life, and that spring from the relationship with the Father that he now opens to us. And if Christ lives in us we can bring his life to the world.

The Covenant Prayer :-

Lord God, I am no longer my own, but yours.
Put me to what you will, rank me with whom you will;
put me to doing, put me to suffering;
let me be employed for you or laid aside for you;
let me be full, let me be empty;
let me have all things, let me having nothing;
I freely and wholeheartedly yield all things to your pleasure and disposal.
And now, glorious and blessed God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
you are mine and I am yours. So be it.
And the covenant now made on earth, let it be ratified in heaven.