Sermon by Mark Wakefield on 16^th August 2009

The Bread of Life: John 6:51-58

Do you ever ask yourself the question why you come to church?  I do – and a very good question it is to ask too.  After all, if coming to church is just a matter of routine or of doing one’s duty then we’ve surely missed the point.

When I ask myself that question I find a variety of answers coming back, depending on my mood.  Sometimes it’s the thought of beautiful music and liturgy, sometimes that of seeing friends and feeling part of a community.  At others it’s the prospect of a moment’s peace, an hour or so out of the week spent on contemplating higher things than the usual round of work, getting and spending.  But the one sustaining reason for me is summed up in those words from the beginning of John’s gospel that we hear so much at Christmas time: “the light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.”

As I get older I become more and more aware of darkness in the world – or as our reading today from Ephesians puts it – aware that “the days are evil”.  Quite why this is I am not sure.  In part I think it’s to do with the fact that it’s much more difficult to escape bad news than it used to be.  The electronic news media can now beam reports and pictures from around the world in an instant and such that a massive quantity of often bad news is all too graphically represented to us. Just this last week we’ve been reminded of the awful details of the Baby P case.  For my part this has just been too much to bear and I’ve switched of from listening or reading. As T.S.Eliot memorably said “human beings cannot bear too much reality”.  How true is that?

I also think it may have something to do with having children.  Mine are pretty much grown up now and at university but my concern for them is as visceral and undiminished as it was on the day they were born.  There is something about being a parent that heightens your sensitivity to the darkness of the world and its many threats.

Whatever the reason, the church - for all its failings - remains a place of hope because of the story it tells. And at the heart of it all is the cross: an horrific symbol of cruelty and suffering turned, by an act of breathtaking audacity on the part of the early church, into a proclamation of victory.

But what kind of hope is this?  I ask this question because Christian hope is so much more than a vague hope that things will turn out OK in the end.  And this is important because what we believe about the future has a real impact on how we live our lives now. 

The hope we have as Christians is rooted in a distinctively Jewish view of the world and it looks like the following.

The physical world is God’s good creation, as we learn in Genesis.  But that good creation has been somehow spoiled in ways that we can’t quite understand by human sin.  Despite this God is faithful to his creative purposes and the Old Testament is the story of God promising and acting to put things right through his chosen people, the Jews, the ultimate promise being that of a world made new – one that will be freed from sin, death and decay. 

Good Jewish teacher that he was, this is the eternal life of which Jesus spoke of in today’s gospel when he said: “I will raise you up on the last day” – this is the mindboggling promise that at the last, as part of that mighty act of recreation, we will all of us be reclothed with imperishable bodies. 

The person of Jesus is, of course, the point at which the Jewish and Christian stories diverge.

In today’s gospel Jesus becomes the bread of life itself such that by partaking of his body in the eucharist we are filled with his spirit and it is this spiritual food that carries with it the promise of eternal life.

And his resurrection – we believe - was a guarantee of and pointer to that glorious act of new creation so keenly anticipated by the Jews.  But I must stress here – and this cannot be stressed too much – that Jesus’ resurrection was not a matter of resuscitation.  It was not the bringing back to life of his earthly body.  This much is clear from the gospel accounts which strain at the boundaries of language to explain the sheer strangeness of what they saw before them – Jesus who was recognisably himself but who was also weirdly, bafflingly,different.  The resurrection was, in other words, an act of new creation and it’s for this reason that St. Paul says that “if anyone is in Chistt there is a new creation.”

Now, contrast this with the story that the modern atheist tells and that goes something like this.  The world came into being of its own accord as part of the extraordinary event known as Big Bang. Millions of years hence it will self-destruct and implode, along with the rest of the universe.  Now of course, all the scientific evidence suggests that there was indeed a Big Bang and that yes, in the future, the universe will implode but it’s the lack of belief in a divine cause of the Big Bang that leads the atheist to the inevitable conclusion that between these two events life on earth proceeds according to the blind laws of nature – and that is that.  In other words, as Richard Dawkins has famously said “life has no meaning and we’d better get used to it.”

Of course meaning does matter to atheists – it’s just that they argue that you simply have to create your own meaning.  And to an extent they have a point.  But there is ultimately a world of difference between meaning you create for yourself and meaning that exists beyond and independently of all of us.

This point was brilliantly made from me in a book I read on holiday by a man named Viktor Frankl, who some of you may have heard of.  Frankl was one of most significant figures in psychotherapy since Freud and Adler.  His life’s work was focused on the importance of meaning to well-being and in his book “Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning” he says that there are – broadly – three ways in which we create meaning in our lives.  We create meaning through creative acts such as work. We create it through loving relationships and we can also create it through dealing with circumstances we cannot change and which require a change in ourselves if we are to cope with them.  For instance: illness, disability, cruelty, unemployment, injustice – hurts and disappointments of all kinds

It’s in this third category – which we could put under the heading of “suffering” – that Frankl argues that faith in “ultimate meaning” has a critical role to play.  Now I must stress here that these are not the mere musings of an albeit brilliant Viennese intellectual but someone who survived Auschwitz and Dachau with his faith not just in tact but strengthened.  And this is what he said about that experience:

“…survival cannot be the supreme value. Unless life points to something beyond itself, survival is pointless and meaningless.  It is not even possible.  This is the very lesson I learned in three years spent in Auschwitz and Dachau and in the meantime it has been confirmed by psychiatrists in prisoner of war camps: Only those who were oriented toward the future, toward a goal in the future, toward a meaning to fulfil in the future, were likely to survive.”

It’s here that we see how important the Jewish-Christian story is to us in that it looks forward to God redeeming and renewing this world in an act of re-creation that is quite properly unimaginable to us as is any consideration of the beginning and end of things – just try getting your brain around the Big Bang.  For it means that there is continuity between where we are now and what God plans for the future and that in turn means there is real value in this world and what we do in it.

More than that, the New Testament tells us that we can help bring about what St Paul calls “the new creation” here and now by behaving according to the pattern set for us by Jesus and acting in his spirit.  This means that we can and should take encouragement whenever and wherever we see the signs of this new creation.  As Paul put it in Philippians:

“Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things”.

We should think about such things because once we see them with the eyes of faith they achieve a new significance.  They are no longer independent of each other – random signs of goodness in an evil world – but part of a pattern that points to an ultimate meaning for all of us that is truly the bread of life and every bit as necessary for our well-being and fulfilment as the bread that sustains our mortal bodies from day to day.

Amen