Sermon, 11th Sunday after Trinity: Food for the Journey

The way to a person’s heart is so often through the stomach. As someone who loves food, this is a principle I’ve never had any difficulty with. As a parish priest, the obvious solution to potentially boring PCC meetings was to serve puddings. And this Foundation, in which the Hall is about as big as the Cathedral says a great deal about the importance of both food and hospitality. 

In today’s first reading, we heard of Elijah going a day into the wilderness, and being given food which set him up for a 40-day journey. Things were going badly for him, as they tend to for prophets who speak truth to power. The verses immediately before today’s passage give us the context to his running away. 

'Ahab told Jezebel all that Elijah had done, and how he had killed all the prophets with the sword. Then Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah, saying, ‘So may the gods do to me, and more also, if I do not make your life like the life of one of them by this time tomorrow.’ Then [Elijah] was afraid; he got up and fled for his life’ (1 Kings 19.1-3a).

There’s little doubt that Jezebel meant exactly what she said, and so it was hardly surprising that Elijah ran away. Everything was simply too much for him and so he ‘sat down under a solitary broom tree [and] asked that he might die (19.4).

But, as we so often see in the pages of the Bible, running away from God doesn’t work. Adam and Eve tried to hide and failed, Jonah took a boat in the opposite direction and ended up inside a fish, and here Elijah gets a strong dose of divine intervention.

Last week we heard of the Israelites being given quail and manna during their wanderings in the wilderness, and here, once again, God provides food. Elijah falls asleep, he encounters an angel who tells him to get up and eat. And there—wonder of wonders—was ‘a cake baked on hot stones, and a jar of water (19.6a).

This was obviously some cake because, after he’d eaten it, Elijah found he was strong enough to make a 40-day journey on foot to Mount Horeb. There, he encountered God in the ‘still, small voice’ and got his instructions: a succession plan to overthrow God’s enemies: anointing Hazael as king over Aram, Jehu as king over Israel, and Elisha as prophet in Elijah’s place.

The encounter with the angel, and the food and drink, had two effects on Elijah. The obvious one is that he went from being physically exhausted to being able to make a demanding journey. But also, the state of his mind and spirit changed. No longer does he seem to find life a burden, and no longer does he seem to be afraid. He finds that he now has mental and spiritual strength alongside physical strength.

As with the Israelites in the wilderness, Elijah discovered that God’s provision of food was about far more than meeting only his physical needs.

Today’s Gospel continues our reading through chapter 6 of John. You’ll remember that the chapter began with the feeding of the 5000: bread and fish to satisfy the crowd’s physical hunger. But Jesus expands on this, warning the crowd not ‘to labour for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you’ (John 6.27a).

And he clarifies this in one of the great ‘I am’ sayings of John’s Gospel: ‘I am the bread of life.’ In this week’s passage, Jesus repeats this great saying, but he gives it an added twist. He makes it clear to the crowd that their ‘ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died’ (6.49).

In other words, God met his people’s physical and spiritual needs, but their time to leave this world eventually came. God’s bread from heaven was for this life only. Elijah too, experienced fresh strength of body and spirit from God’s cake but, again, it was for this life only. He was strengthened to carry on doing God’s work, but eventually he had to hand over to Elisha, and his own days were over.

But here, Jesus transposes the whole concept of ‘food for the journey’ into a totally new key. He says:

‘This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever’ (6.50-51a).

Jesus’ hearers can’t get their minds beyond the life of this world. They travel – they get hungry – and they are fed. But they are locked into a ‘natural’ view of life and the world as it seems to be, whereas Jesus offers another—a supernatural—view of reality. He is saying that this life is not all that there is: that for the one who eats the ‘living bread’ life will be everlasting.

We are back once again to one of the great over-arching themes of John’s Gospel: life. In chapter 20, we hear the writer’s manifesto: 

‘these [things] are written so that …..through believing [in Jesus] you may have life in his name’ (20.31),

and the popular words in chapter 3:

‘God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life’ (3.16).

This theme of life—eternal life—shines through the whole of John’s writing and here, Jesus links his teaching on the bread of life, to the promise of everlasting life.

Many scholars are convinced that this sixth chapter of John’s Gospel was written from within the context of Eucharistic worship in the early Church. We know that, from soon after Pentecost, the first Christians obeyed Jesus’ command to share bread and wine. And what’s interesting, putting a liturgical anorak’s hat on, is that in the first centuries of the Christian Church, the Eucharist was focussed much more on the resurrection of Jesus than on his death. Bread and wine were shared in remembrance of him, but to remember the risen Christ who was present both in the Sacrament and by his Spirit within the believers. Only in later years did the cross become a major focus of communion.

The Eucharist is for us, too, an assurance of the promise of eternal life. It’s food for our journey – both in the sense of providing strength to live each day, each week, faithfully as Christ’s people in the world, but also in the sense in which it launches us into the life of the world to come. The Eucharist is food for the eternal journey: beyond the grave, to our own resurrection and life in the presence of God for eternity.

The Eucharistic Prayer begins by encouraging us to ‘lift up our hearts.’ This is both a lifting up of our hearts in praise and worship as God’s people on earth, but also a conscious lifting up of our hearts and minds, our spirits and our horizons. As St Paul puts it so well in the letter to the Colossians:

‘If you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God’ (Colossians 3.1-3).

That is always the context in which we celebrate the Eucharist. The prayer goes on to remind us that we join our earthly time-bound worship with that of the angels and archangels and the whole company of heaven, and the Sacrament is sometimes given with the words: ‘The body and blood of Christ keep you in eternal life.’

‘Keep you in eternal life’ not ‘bring you to eternal life’ because eternal life has already begun here and now – we pray that we may be sustained, kept going, as faithful Christians; but also ‘keep you’ because we pray that we may be ‘kept’ to await the fulfilment of that eternal life. It’s both a present reality and a future hope. The promise of eternal life is secure, and the Sacrament is the security.

There’s another point to make, and for that we must go back near the beginning of John chapter 6. After the feeding of the crowd, Jesus instructed the disciples: ‘Gather up the fragments left over, that nothing may be lost’ (John 6.12). That nothing may be lost. This is another great theme of Jesus’ teaching we see in John’s Gospel – the all-encompassing, inclusive nature of God’s love, which will never let us go. Jesus says, on another occasion,

‘My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand’ (John 10.17-28).

I believe that is a promise we all need to hear: for ourselves, yes, but also for those whom we love, but who are no longer with us. The faithfulness of God, and the all-encompassing love of God, are greater than we can ever imagine. They transcend boundaries of time, space, age, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation..... And no one, and nothing—no circumstance, nor theological system—will snatch us or them out of God’s hand. Nothing will be lost.

To conclude, some words by a sometime Student of the House, the great hymn-writer, Charles Wesley:

'[Christ] dispels our sin and sadness,
life imparts, cheers our hearts,
fills with food and gladness.
Who himself for all hath given,
us he feeds, us he leads
to a feast in heaven.'