TRINITY IX, Year B: August 13 2006

Preacher: Revd Dr James Rigney, Chaplain of Magdalene College

Gospel Reading: John 6.35; 41–51

This morning's gospel is concerned with two foundational Christian themes: identity and its transformation. As Christians we possess an identity which is our own but also one which is shared with other Christians and with Our Lord from whom we acquire our particular and collective identities. And as Christians we are people endlessly being transformed by God. Sometimes we co-operate with this transformation, sometimes we drag our heels or sit at the back and try not to be noticed, but because our transformation is God's will and our destiny we cannot escape it for ever. The highs and lows of our lives are each part of that transforming process, each a means by which God is at work.

In Deuteronomy chapter eight Israel is reminded of God's dealings with them:

'He humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna, with which neither you nor your ancestors were acquainted, in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.'

These words, to which Jesus makes reference in His rejection of Satan in the wilderness, are a reminder to Israel of God's means of sustaining us — not by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.

This morning's gospel sees Jesus developing His teaching in the aftermath of the feeding of the five thousand, a miracle profoundly focussed on bread, but also a miracle profoundly focussed on the identity of Jesus. This miracle is the only event in the entire public ministry of Jesus before Passion Week which is recorded in all four gospels. It had an enormous impact on contemporary thinking about Jesus and what He had to offer and who He was. It must have left those around Him wondering, as they did when He stilled the storm, 'what manner of man is this?'

Jesus' reply to this question on this occasion — 'I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty' — is the first of the 'I am' sayings that are such a feature of John's gospel. Six times John records Jesus using such statements about Himself: 'I am the light of the world', 'I am the good shepherd', 'I am the resurrection and the life', 'I am the way, the truth and the life', 'I am the true vine' and 'I am the bread of life'. Each time the phrase is used Jesus' hearers would have been confronted with an echo of God's disclosure to Moses in Exodus chapter three — 'I am who I am' — and therefore with an assertion by Jesus of His identification with God.

And each time there would be the same confusion and opposition among His hearers; as we read this morning: 'Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say "I have come down from heaven?" Identity and transformation again: how does something we know so well become transformed into something we can barely comprehend?

It is characteristic of John's gospel that we are invited to look beyond what we see and touch and taste. Looking beyond is at the heart of John's theology. In chapter three, for example, Jesus says to Nicodemus: 'Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.' Nicodemus' puzzled response — 'How can anyone be born after having grown old' — is a reasonable enough objection, but Jesus seeks to take Nicodemus beyond birth as he understands it, and is familiar with, to the notion of re-birth, a new order of being and becoming to which Jesus gives access: 'Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and the Spirit.'

Likewise, in the following chapter of John's gospel, in His encounter with the Samaritan woman by the well, Jesus invites her to look beyond water as she knows it:

'Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.'

In today's gospel Jesus points His listeners beyond that bread that they have received, beyond the manna that their ancestors knew in the wilderness, to the true bread that comes down from heaven and which gives them eternal life. 'Eternal life' is John's favourite term for describing salvation. 'Living forever' is not living without chronological end, but living in fullness. It does not hold out to us some future we cannot imagine; rather, it discloses a new world — not some other world to which we might escape — but this world: transformed, re-named, eternally fed and watered by the living word of God in scripture and sacrament.

Our own experience within this church day by day ought to give us some experience in dealing with this concept of identity transformed. The church is filled with domesticity that has been re-named: dishes become patens for the bread and cups become chalices for the wine; napkins and tablecloths become purificators and corporals; candles are torches; bread is a body, wine is blood; and a book is the living word of God. Things that are, in themselves, so well-known as to be undervalued become charged with grace.

John Calvin, who is probably not often mentioned in sermons here, wrote that 'Flesh cannot perceive spiritual things and therefore the beginning of salvation comes from God, who changes our nature, so that we, being inspired by Him, may remain to be instructed and saved by Christ.' Calvin is right, I think, to stress the transforming work of God but (and this is perhaps one of the reasons he is not often mentioned in sermons here) is perhaps overstating things when he asserts that 'Flesh cannot perceive spiritual things'. Because as the prologue to John's gospel reminds us:

'The Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth.'

The figure of Jesus, the word made flesh, shifts back and forward between the ordinary and the indescribable, between that which we can analyse and understand and that which always remains beyond our competence and capability. The debate over the identity of Jesus permeates the gospels. We hear it in Satan's repeated challenge to Him, 'If you really are the Son of God, turn these stones into bread'. We hear it in Jesus' questions to His disciples: 'Who do men say I am?' and 'Who do you say I am?' We hear it in Peter's fearful admission in the courtyard of the High Priest's house: 'I tell you, I do not know the man.' And we encounter it with the two disciples on the road to Emmaus where Jesus reveals Himself in the opening of scripture and the sharing of bread. We also encounter Jesus most vividly in word and sacrament, the two forms by which we are perpetually nourished and transformed.

We can keep ourselves at a distance from this process, set ourselves against God's will — it is probably where most of us are most of the time. But to do so involves a choice to which we have perhaps never given a name. That is the choice to eat the Bread of Death instead of the Bread of Life.

What is the Bread of Death? For each and every one of us it is something different. The one common feature is that it is the thing that consumes us while we think we consume it. It is the thing which has no power to nourish, no power to transform. It is the thing that the prophet Isaiah warned about when he cried: 'Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labour for that which does not satisfy?'

As we come this morning into the presence of God we are invited, as always, to be taught by God to share in the bread of life, to know its abundance and its power to transform us. Believing in God is nothing less than believing in that power of transformation and opening our eyes to see it in operation.