Order.Homily preached by Brs. Simeon at Springwood and Maroubra on Sunday 16th August 2015
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| Andre-Rublev's Saviour |
TWELFTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST. YR B.
“Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him.”
In the Name of the One God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Some of you may remember that back in the 1970’s, a soccer
team crashed landed while flying over the Andes Mountains. After quite some
time had passed, they realised all rescue efforts had been abandoned, and they
had run out of food. How would they survive? After much debate, they decided to
eat the flesh of those who had died. As horrific as that seems to us, because
they ate the flesh of others, they survived.
Thankfully we don’t need to resort to such drastic measures for our
daily survival,.... yet Jesus tells us that unless we eat his flesh and drink
his blood, we have no life in us.
Two
dimensions of Jewish worship provide the context of today’s Gospel, the fourth
part of the “bread of life” discourse in John 6.
John’s discourse about the bread of life in Chapter 6 of his
Gospel is his way of dealing with the Eucharist, especially since his Gospel is
the only one of the four Gospels that does not include the story of the Last
Supper. The story is told in its own way in all four Gospels because each one
was written for a different audience. In John’s case, his Gospel was written
for the church in Greece approximately 60 years after Christ’s Ascension. At
this time in history, the Greeks were leaders in politics, philosophy ideology
and culture, so their interpretation was much different than that of the
Hebrews, for example.
When
an animal was sacrificed on the temple altar, part of the meat was given to
worshippers for a feast with family and friends at which God was honoured as
the unseen “Guest.” It was even believed
by some that God entered into the flesh of the sacrificed animal, so that when
people rose from the feast they believed they were literally “God-filled.”
In
Jewish thought, blood was considered the vessel in which life was contained: as
blood drained away from a body so did its life.
The Jews, therefore, considered blood sacred, as belonging to God
alone. In animal sacrifices, blood was
ritually drained from the carcass and solemnly “sprinkled” upon the altar and
the worshippers by the priest as a sign of being touched directly by the “life”
of God.
With
this understanding, then, John summaries his theology of the Eucharist, the new
Passover banquet (remember that John’s Last Supper account will centre around
the “mandatum,” the theology of servanthood, rather than the blessing and
breaking of the bread and the sharing of the cup).
To
feast on Jesus the “bread” is to “feast” on the very life of God -- to consume
the Eucharist is to be consumed by God.
In
inviting us “to feed on his flesh and drink of my blood,” Jesus invites us to
embrace the life of his Father: the life that finds joy in humble servanthood
to others; the life that is centred in unconditional, total, sacrificial love;
the life that seeks fulfilment not in the standards of this world but in the
treasures of the next.
In
the “bread” of the Eucharist, Jesus shows us how to distinguish the values of
God from the values of the marketplace; he instructs us on how to respond to
the pressures and challenges of the world with justice and selflessness; he
teaches us how to overcome our fears and doubts to become the people of
compassion, reconciliation and hope that God created us to be.
In
the “bread” he gives us to eat, we become the body of Christ with and for one
another; in his “blood” that he gives us to drink, his life of compassion,
justice and selflessness flows within us, and we become what we have received:
the sacrament of unity, peace and reconciliation.
Amen.
