First Sunday of Christmas 2024

 

Luke 2.41-52

Back when I was at theological college, Susie and Noah were in primary school and Elijah was a baby. Once, when Jo was away, I put Elijah in the pushchair and went to collect the other two from school, along with two of their friends, whose dad was also at the college. By the time we got home, it had started to rain. The house we rented had a covered car port that sheltered the side door, so we went in that way. I sorted out drinks for the kids. They disappeared upstairs to play. Some time later, I realised that I didn’t know where Elijah was. I searched the house, every room, without finding him. I went through the house again, even looking in places that, logically, I knew it was impossible that he would be. I asked the others if they knew where Elijah was, and they said “No.” Frustrated, I said, sarcastically, “Well, thanks a lot for helping me look for him.” It was later reported back to the other college family that Susie’s dad had thanked them all for helping look, but that they didn’t think I really meant it. After I had searched the house from top to bottom three times over, I heard a sound from outside the door to the car port. And there I found Elijah, still strapped in the pushchair, exactly where I had left him.

The biographer Luke records a story of Jesus accompanying his parents, Mary and Joseph, on pilgrimage from Nazareth to Jerusalem to take part in the festival of the Passover at the temple, when he was twelve years old. It is a journey that might take three days, possibly more, followed by the seven days of the festival itself. Then everyone sets off for home. At the end of the first day walking home, Mary and Joseph can’t find Jesus. They ask among their relatives, who have made the pilgrimage with them, but no one has seen him: “No, sorry, I thought he was with you.” They ask among the wider group of pilgrims. No one has seen him. No one can recall seeing him all day. By now, mum and dad are more than a little anxious.

There is probably nothing they can do until morning – which doesn’t help – but then they head back to Jerusalem. And then, for three more days they search the city, high and low. They do not find Jesus anywhere. By now, they are besides themselves with worry.

They say the thing you are looking for is always in the last place you look. At one level, that is obvious: once you have found the thing, you stop looking. But there is a sense in which the thing is found in the one place you are most anxious about looking, the place you do not want to go. This is especially true for a missing person.

Eventually, Mary and Joseph find Jesus. He is in the temple. He has been there all along. And Luke tells us:

‘When his parents saw him they were astonished; and his mother said to him, “Child, why have you treated us like this? Look, your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety.” He said to them, “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” But they did not understand what he said to them.’

But here is the thing. The Greek text does not say “in my Father’s house.” The word ‘house’ is not there. The Greek says, ‘in the of the Father of me.’ Duplicating the ‘the’ is how they highlight something – we might use bold or italics or underline – and the thing being highlighted is determined by the context. The translators have decided that the context is where Jesus is – the temple – and have given us “my Father’s house.” Because “my Father’s house” is what Jesus calls the temple.

Except that this is a very odd choice. The phrase “my father’s house” is found many times in what we call the Old Testament, and a couple of times in the Apocrypha, and it always means ‘my immediate family or relatives’ and/or what we would call ‘my family tree.’ That is what the phrase means. It would be very strange for Jesus to use it in an entirely different way. In John’s account of the life of Jesus, Jesus is recorded using the phrase on two occasions. Once, he says, “in my Father’s house there are many mansions.” Now, whatever he is speaking of – whether the life to come, or the family of God – he certainly isn’t speaking about the temple here. The other occasion is when he says, “Stop making my Father’s house [or family] a house [or family] of commerce.” This could possibly be the one place where “my Father’s house” could refer to the temple; but even here Jesus could be referring to his family tree, the people of God, and how they were supposed to relate to one another and the surrounding nations.

In any case, ‘house’ is an odd choice to supply as context. There is another word that makes more sense, in context. Mary has just told Jesus, “your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety.” That is the context. Surely Jesus’ response should be read, “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my father’s anxiety?” In the anxiety of my father. Or, in other words, didn’t you realise that I would be found in the place where my father was most anxious about finding me?

I don’t know why the temple was the place where Joseph was most anxious about finding Jesus. Perhaps he was worried that he would lose his son, that the apprentice builder of Nazareth would follow a different calling. Perhaps he was worried about where that might lead, where it might end up. Perhaps he was right to worry. Perhaps he couldn’t help it – after all, isn’t that what parents do, even after their children have grown up?

What I do know is that Jesus is to be found in the place where we are most anxious. Wherever that place might be. Whatever those circumstances may be. That is where Jesus is, already, waiting for us to face the fear. For in that place, he is a non-anxious presence. In that place he is listening attentively and asking pertinent questions, desiring to know peace and to draw others into that peace.

So, what are you most anxious about today, right now, in this threshold between 2024 and 2025? Be honest with yourself, as honest as you dare. For that is where Jesus is to be found. In the last place you are prepared to look.

 

Fourth Sunday of Advent 2024

Lectionary readings: Hebrews 10.5-10 and Luke 1.39-55

Christmas is the Season of the Incarnation. The season of learning how to inhabit a body. The season of coming home to your body.

Perhaps you are uncomfortable at the prospect. Perhaps you feel that your body is too tall, too fat, too frail, too plain, too awkwardly clumsy to be loved. At puberty, our bodies can run ahead of us, demanding that we expand, to lofty elevation or ample bosom, before our peers, leaving us exposed to cruel name-calling. Whoever said ‘sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me’ was deluded or misguided at best. And in old age, our bodies demure to do the things we have been so long used to doing together, call on us to downsize our lives – but how can you downsize, when your body has accumulated so much baggage over the years?

This Sunday, Advent 4, the Church reflects on the visit of Mary, in her first trimester, to Elizabeth, in her third trimester. When their bodies were experiencing changes and where two new bodies are first formed.

In their world, children were seen as the fruit of the womb, a woman’s fruitfulness in life determined by her ability to bear sons and daughters. Elizabeth is barren, ground from which no tree has sprung. And this is a source of great shame, the belief that you are not worthy of love, not worthy of connection. That awareness (distorted, but no less real for that) that you are not enough, not good enough. ‘Poor Elizabeth,’ her fruitful neighbours say, ‘She has always followed God’s laws so diligently and yet he does not reward her’ (have they forgotten how many childless women have played such key parts in their people’s past?) and their condescending pity adds to the slick of shame.

When Elizabeth realises that she is pregnant, she keeps it a secret for five long months. The only people in her community who possibly understand her existence are other barren women, and she cannot risk losing them also, to envy. Not to mention the very real risk of miscarriage. And so, for five months, Elizabeth is hyper-vigilant, not to let slip her condition. Do nothing out of the ordinary.

For five months, she is utterly alone in the world. Unable to converse with anyone (even her husband has lost his voice). This is enforced solitude, even in the midst of everyday life. Perhaps the solitude is not much different from how she felt before, alone among the other women drawing water from the village well. But the need for hyper-vigilance is new.

First trimester: hiding morning sickness, back ache, stomach cramps. Second trimester: don’t respond to the joy of feeling that first flutter of your unborn child moving within; don’t respond to the discomfort when, bigger, stronger, they kick against the womb. No one can know.

As Elizabeth reaches the third trimester, as it becomes too hard to keep her changing body hidden, news of her pregnancy breaks. Now, at last, she can breathe. Now, at last, the community holds space for her, to focus on her coming child, and once she has delivered her son, to bond with him. Now someone else will go to the well. Now her relative Mary comes, quickly and purposefully, to be with Elizabeth. Now she has company, for solitude – so essential to the driven life – is dangerous for the soul that is in recovery from shame.

And even now, Elizabeth wrestles with the shame that God has moved to remove. ‘Who am I,’ she asks, ‘that the mother of my Lord should come to me?’ I am not worthy.

Even so, Mary comes; and with her, joy. With her, deep connection, woman to woman, womb-to-womb, unborn-son-to-son. This is the antidote to shame.

And Mary sings a song of revolution. A song of God raising up and honouring those who are nobody in their own eyes, honouring them and establishing them in community, with others like them. Connection, with shared experience. You are not alone. You are worthy of love and connection, you and those like you who have known shame, who have felt yourself unworthy. And those who have looked down on you, they will be humbled. Brought low, sent away empty.

Elizabeth is the first person who Mary sings her song over.

But her song has echoed down the centuries. And Mary sings her song today, over all who live with shame – as all live with shame. Sings over you, and over me. Over the emptiness inside, the belief that we are not and cannot be worthy of being filled, with love.

Sing, Mother of God. Sing over your relatives. Sing, and may your song be poison to our shame, burning it away.

 

Third Sunday of Advent 2024

 

Third Sunday of Advent: Philippians 4.4-7 and Luke 3.7-18

I wonder if there is a smell that evokes this time of year for you? Perhaps it is a bowl of clementine oranges. Or the smell of wet wool, transporting you back to childhood mittens and rolling snowballs in your hands. Perhaps it is the clinical smell of the room in which a loved one died, at this time of year. More than any of our other senses, smell takes hold of memory and can transport us through time to some distant moment.

One of the big themes in our Gospel passage today is wrath. Wrath is the settled and ultimately victorious opposition to rebellion. And the root of the idea is connected to smell, to the drawing-in of air through the nostrils, before acting decisively.

As John calls the people to repent and return to God, he is amazed at who responds. Many in the crowd have sided with Rome against their own people, grasping opportunity as tax farmers or soldiers serving a local client king backed by Rome. John calls them vipers, a reference to the Garden of Eden, where the serpent deceived our first parents. God had created the human in God's own likeness, and declared us to be, like God, very good. Yet now sin had come to afflict us.

This did not, and does not, change our nature. Sin afflicts us, as does cancer. If you had tests and went to the doctor for the results, they might say, “The bad news is that you have cancer. The good news is, we have caught it in time and are confident in our therapy.” A doctor would not say, “You are a cancerous person!” Likewise, God comes in compassion to deal with sin. God promises Eve that her seed will crush the serpent’s head, even as its seed bites her seed’s heel.

John observes that God has taught even the vipers, those who sided with Rome, to flee to God from the coming wrath. That wrath is the wrath of Rome, and it is a bitter smell in the nostrils, evoking other bitter memories of national disaster. For wrath is always historical, not abstract.

Jesus also calls certain groups vipers, and asks how they will escape hell? The hell he refers to is the coming wrath of Rome, whose legions will burn Jerusalem to the ground.

There is a tradition in scripture of seeing something of the wrath of God being exercised through the wrath of empires. And Jesus asks the Father, if there is anything of your judgement falling on your rebellious people in the coming wrath of Rome, let that wrath fall on me instead, and let that be enough. In this Jesus is standing in the tradition of the martyrs of the time of Greek invasion and occupation of the Temple.

The Father accepts Jesus’ prayer. And so, when the Jewish people rebel against Rome in 66 CE, and, midway through an eight-year war, the Romans burn Jerusalem, this is not the wrath of God falling on a nation that rejected his Son. It is solely the overreaching wrath of Rome. And for this, Rome will experience the wrath of God.

But the wrath of God is quite unlike the wrath of Rome. It is not military. It is not violent. Instead, it looks, and smells, like this:

gentiles are embraced within the people of the God previously of the Jews;

women, slaves, and children are given equal status to free men;

Christians serve their neighbours in times of plague and disaster;

Christians refuse to recant their declaration that Jesus is Lord, even in the face of the lions.

What kind of lives are these? It takes a couple of hundred years, but Christ will topple Caesar, not by might but by the aroma of joy, of peace, of non-anxious people in the midst of an anxious world.

This is what the wrath of God looks like. And with Rome judged, in love, the age of wrath with which the New Testament is concerned comes to an end.

John takes up a different image for Jesus, that of removing the protective outer husks from the kernel of wheat. Jesus comes, not to transform some unacceptable husk into acceptable grain, nor to separate out inedible husks from edible wheat, but to remove the husk from every grain. He comes to remove that which keeps us from our neighbour, the hard shell. He comes to deal with our sin, and we are still called to repent and believe the good news.

Of course, we still live in a world where we see the bitter wrath of nation states and would-be emperors falling on men, women and children. In such a world, we are not to be vipers, siding with power, but instead, like the early church, might also be joyful, gentle, non-anxious, prayerful, thankful, peaceful.

May that be, increasingly, your experience. And if it is not your experience today, may you be transported to a time when it was. May this Season evoke the memory of the One who came to us, who comes to us still, and who will come to us again. Amen.

 

Remembrance Sunday 2024

 

Lectionary readings: Hebrews 9.24-28 and Mark 1.14-20

Jesus and his first followers lived under the occupation of the Roman Empire. Indeed, Galilee had been successively occupied, over a period of seven hundred years, by the Assyrian, the Babylonian, the (Persian) Achaemenid, the Ptolemaic, Greek-Seleucid, and Roman Empires.

Around the time of Jesus, the Roman Empire invaded Britain, defeating the indigenous tribes with whom they had previously traded, and whom they had unsuccessfully invaded, twice, a hundred years earlier.

The Romans ruled over us for four hundred years, bringing Christianity with them. Then they were summoned home to defend Rome, though many simply refused to go.

In their wake we had two centuries of Germanic migration – pagan Saxons, Angles, Jutes, and Frisians;

followed by two centuries of consolidation into around a dozen Anglo-Saxon kingdoms competing for dominance (Northumbria, Mercia, and Wessex among them) and efforts to convert them to Christianity by both their neo-Celtic British neighbours – the fabled Northern Saints – and by missionaries from Rome;

followed by two centuries of Danish migration.

Then, in the eleventh century, the Norman invasion, the most comprehensive dispossession and replacement of the ruling class.

For the next three hundred years, the boundaries between English and French were blurred and bloody, while England also laid claim to Wales, Scotland and Ireland.

The fourteenth century saw the Black Plague wipe out half the population of England.

The fifteenth century saw the War of the Roses.

The sixteenth century saw Tudor England, and a violently contested break from the Church of Rome, pulling the country back and forth, Catholic and Protestant factions fighting for dominance.

The seventeenth century saw Union with Scotland; Civil War and the state execution of a king; a restoration of the monarchy; and the Glorious Revolution, the deposition of a Catholic king.

The eighteenth century saw the upheaval of the Industrial Revolution;

the nineteenth century saw the Napoleonic Wars and expansion of the British Empire;

the twentieth century saw the First World War – as German expansion in Europe threatened Britain’s global Empire – and a Second World War, followed by rapid decolonization, and new – ongoing – waves of migration from nations we had claimed our own.

What does it mean to be British? What does it mean to be British and Christian? What do these things mean, at any given point in time?

Jesus and his first followers lived under the occupation of the Roman Empire. The emperor in Rome justified his claim to their land, and to their lives, by declaring himself to be the bringer of Good News, the herald of universal peace, the Pax Romana.

And Jesus arrives on the scene proclaiming a different kingdom, the kingdom of God, a divine rule that is not concerned with claims over nations or nationalities but is demonstrated in addressing the needs of those who experience crushing poverty, in healing the sick, feeding the hungry, standing with those marginalized by their communities.

I have a confession. I find Remembrance Sunday the most uncomfortable day of the year, because it is a day on which we are reminded of how utterly addicted we are to violence in defence of a moment in history we cannot hold on to. We have done this every year for the past hundred years, and still we are surrounded by war, and still we see the rise of neo-fascism around the world as strong men declare themselves to be anointed by God to defend Christian values, with bloodshed if necessary.

And I have absolutely no skin in this game. I am not looking for the downfall of this nation, I just know – history shows us – that it will continue to change, as will all the other nations. But as I get on with my life, as best I can, in the moment in history that has been allotted to me, Jesus comes to me and says, Follow me.

Follow me, and together we shall scoop others up into this utterly different kingdom, with this utterly different king, whom Empire put to death but whom God raised again to life.

An early follower of Jesus wrote to Christians scattered by the ebb and flow of Empire, saying the signs and symbols we see now are at best pale imitations of reality. Today we wear poppies, a flower that grew in fields that had been soaked with the blood of a generation. A symbol of life returning again, even after utter and comprehensive destruction. A symbol of the unimaginable goodness of God towards us. But the poppy can become an opiate, numbing us to good as well as pain. So, I shall wear my poppy, but I shall look to Jesus, and choose to follow him, to hold out good news to those on the underside of our society, including those maimed physically and scarred emotionally by war.

 

Twelfth Sunday after Trinity 2024

 

Lectionary readings: Proverbs 9.1-6 and John 6.51-58

I wonder, what is your favourite meal? [This is not a rhetorical question.]

And what is it about that meal that makes it your favourite? [Again, not a rhetorical question.] Perhaps it has to do with the flavours and textures of the food. Perhaps associations with particular people or special memories are factors too.

I wonder whether there is a meal that you like to make, to share with others? That is, of course, a labour of love. And I wonder whether you have ever taught someone else to make that meal; or, indeed, whether someone else taught you? There is a world of difference between following a recipe from a cookbook and a family meal passed down from generation to generation.

In our reading from the Old Testament today, wisdom is personified as a hostess. Again and again throughout the Bible relationships between people, and between people and God, are built around a table. This is the place of encounter, to which we are invited, and to which anyone who wants to live in harmony with their neighbour comes.

There is something we need to note and take to heart here. We need to learn to eat with others, not simply to feed others. When we feed people but do not eat with them, we create a power dynamic that places them in our debt; but when people eat together the barrier between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is dismantled. I appreciate that some people are shy around folk they don’t know, and the kitchen is a safe place to hide in—I am one of those people myself, and my neurodivergence is a big factor; whenever I spend time with other people, I need to go away and recharge. But, collectively, we need to learn to eat with people, not just feed them. It isn’t, primarily, about physical hunger, but about our common need for connection.

There is a proverbial saying that You Are What You Eat. At a physical level, a healthy diet increases our fitness, while, over time, an unhealthy diet harms us. The same is true spiritually speaking. What we consume shapes us, for good or evil. If our daily diet is a particular newspaper or other news source, it will shape us in very particular ways, and largely, in a context of constant and instant news, towards anxiety. If our daily diet is social media, we will be intentionally shaped by algorithms to be quick to judge, harshly, on matters about which we are very largely uninformed, and to never be satisfied but to always want more. Social media might be an alien world to you, but we all consume something, and we are all being consumed by the thing we consume, whether by hate or by love.

Jesus says, make me your daily bread. Eat of me. Take me into you, and see how you will be transformed, over time, into the fullness of what God intends for you.

How do we do that? By building our lives around him. By finding, through experimentation, daily, weekly, and less frequent patterns that enable us to eat his flesh and drink his blood. Patterns such as setting apart some time each day to prayerfully read and meditate on scripture, perhaps a psalm or Gospel passage, perhaps using the daily prayer resources of the Church of England so that we are reading along with many others, or perhaps using resources prepared by 24/7 Prayer or Scripture Union or BRF with people of different ages and stages of life in mind. Patterns such as taking communion week by week; and by eating food with others, at a table, on a weekly basis. I know of at least one member of our community, who lives alone, who goes out or breakfast with friends every week. And patterns such as reducing or restricting less healthy food. Watching television is not wrong, but if we are watching too much, perhaps we need to set ourselves limits, not in a legalistic way, but in a way that sees it as a treat rather than a staple of our diet.

Wisdom says come to the feast. We feast on God in worship, in acknowledging that God is good all the time, in every circumstance and situation, and in contrast to the impact of sin and death in the world, which is insubstantial in comparison and fleeting, but gets a lot of attention.

And if this is already your pattern, who might benefit from what you have learnt?

 

Eleventh Sunday after Trinity 2024

 

I wonder how your days are? Collectively, it might be said that we are going through difficult times; though I am not sure that these times are very different from any others. At a personal level, as we grow older we may become more comfortable in our own skin; and as we grow older still, we may feel that our bodies begin to let us down. You don’t have to be an Olympian to know that our moments can have real highs and lows – and that sometimes the deepest lows come hard on the heels of the most dizzying heights. That was certainly so for the prophet Elijah. I wonder whether you can relate to his story? Let’s take a closer look at it.

As we do so, a couple of things to be aware of. Ancient Hebrew has far fewer words than modern English, and so the same word can have multiple meanings. Also, language conveys our understanding of the world, and ancient Hebrew works at both a literal/material and metaphorical/spiritual level.

We read that Elijah ‘went a day’s journey into the wilderness.’ Let’s break that down.

The word for wilderness/desert is, at root, also the word for mouth/speech. This is both fascinating and unsurprising, as the wilderness is the place where God speaks, or, more accurately, where humans speak with God.

The word for journey is also the word for Way, as in a way of life, which is worked out through conversation – which is also the same word.

The word for day is also the word for daily.

So, at a literal/material level, Elijah ‘went a day’s journey into the wilderness.’ And at a metaphorical/spiritual level, it is Elijah’s practice to be in daily conversation with God. We would call that prayer.

Now, some would argue that we work out which of the possible meanings a word should be given by the context. But I would argue that where a word can be understood in more than one way, it should be understood in more than one way. Because the context for the spiritual is always material, and the material is always spiritual. They belong together.

So, I would take it at face value that Elijah, whose practice it was to be in daily conversation with God, took a walk into the wilderness. And there he sat down under a broom tree.

Now, the broom tree also appears in Job chapter 30 and Psalm 120. For Job it is a symbol of those expelled by society, which Job applies to himself to say he feels rejected by God. That is interesting, given the days we live in, where some are calling for immigrants to be expelled from our society, and others are calling for the expulsion of racists. Are we brave enough to see ourselves in the eyes of immigrants and racists, alike, and to lament where we find ourselves as a society? Psalm 120 links the wood of the broom tree, which was prized for how well it burned, with a peacemaker dwelling amongst those who hate peace. That also feels pertinent to our days. In any case, this is where Elijah chooses to sit down, to stop walking on the way, to end his conversation. He has had enough. Perhaps you have had enough, too.

God sends a messenger, an ambassador, who comes to Elijah as he sleeps, breaks off some branches from the broom tree, heats some flat stones on them, and bakes flat bread on the stones. (I love cake, but it is a misleading translation.) That is to say, God answers Elijah (who was not asking a question or seeking a continuation of their conversation) with food and drink. Again, I would take this at both a material and a spiritual level. Sustenance for body and soul. These, also, go together.

Elijah awoke, ate and drank, and lay down again to sleep. Later, the ambassador returns, wakes him again, provides him with more food and water, and tells him that he needs to eat and drink if he is to have the strength [this word also means chameleon; weird, huh?] that he needs to undergo the journey ahead of him. That journey takes him to Horeb, the mountain of the Lord.

Horeb means Desolate. God waits for us in the place of our desolation. In the place where nothing else can console us. God waits for us, and, moreover, sustains us on the conversation that will bring us to that place, to confront ourselves, stripped of all the many outer layers with which we have tried to blend in, to mask ourselves [chameleon].

This is necessary work, and it is hard work. To find ourselves standing before God, defenceless against divine love, is not something we can do in our own strength. It is only possible because we are strengthened by Jesus, we are incorporated into him – and through him, into the inner life of God – because we are clothed in Christ [chameleon].

God sends his Son into the world, saying, ‘Get up, eat and drink. Come to me, feast on me. You shall find rest for your bones and healing for your soul.’ Day by day, walking with him on the Way, meditating on God’s word, sharing in this communion.

So come, eat and drink.

 

Tenth Sunday after Trinity 2024

 

Tenth Sunday after Trinity: Exodus 16.2-4, 9-15 and John 6.24-35

Our Gospel reading this Sunday (John 6.24-35) gives us the aftermath of the feeding of the five thousand. The context is this. Galilee was a hotbed of rebellion against Roman rule. There had been an uprising in 6 CE sparked by a tax census (this is the census that gets mentioned in Luke’s account of the birth of Jesus, albeit badly handled in translation: Luke’s point isn’t that this was the census that displaced Joseph and Mary, but that this was the most famous—or, notorious—census; and it was the most famous because of the rebellion it sparked). There will be another uprising in 46 CE and yet another in 66 CE, but at this point, in the early 30s, a crowd of men are chasing Jesus around the Galilean countryside with the intent of making him the focal point of an uprising. There are five thousand of them, plus women and children; but the unnumbered women and children aren’t an afterthought: the point is this, that five thousand men is roughly the size of a Roman army legion. They are coming to Jesus and saying, ‘Look, we have a legion at your disposal: lead us!’ [1] Jesus responds by instructing them to organise themselves into groups of between 50 and 100—that is, the size of a ‘century’ of soldiers led by a centurion (‘At last! Now we are getting somewhere!’)—but then, instead of handing out weapons, he hands out bread and fish.

When it becomes clear that the crowd still intends to make him their king by force, Jesus slips away. They don’t realise until the next day, when eventually—and confused as to how this had happened—they find him once more on the other side of the lake. ‘How did you get here?’ they ask.

And Jesus engages them in a wide-ranging conversation. A conversation about what it is they truly desire, and how deep that longing goes. A conversation about work, and how or even whether God can be encountered in everyday life or revealed through our everyday actions. A conversation about wisdom, someone in the crowd quoting from the Wisdom of Solomon (a Jewish text translated into Greek in Egypt; Wisdom chapter 16, which speaks of divine judgement and mercy, of God’s word as nourishment and healing, and of God leading mortals down to the gates of Hades and back again).

And in this conversation, Jesus calls them—and us—to believe in him: that is, to be with Jesus, in order to become like Jesus, and do the things that Jesus did (this is what distinguishes disciples from the crowds) [2].

In that conversation, Jesus claims to be the bread—the sustenance—of God that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world: ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.’

Many in the crowd will decide that this is not what they are looking for, will go back to their homes and wait for someone else to come along. But some will take Jesus at his word, as God’s daily provision for their deepest desires, to live in harmony with God, with themselves, and with their fellow human beings.

Jo and I have just spent a week camping with some fourteen thousand other people—including two thousand children and another two thousand teenagers—at a festival of worship and hearing from God. And we have heard testimony from around the country of how hungry the younger generations—children, youth and young adults—are for God. 95% of them aren’t in our churches. Their hunger is, in part, because they are starving, because they haven’t been fed, spiritually, by the generation that raised them. But we have heard, and even seen with our own eyes, stories of children and teenagers asking their parents to bring them to church (that is to say, bringing their parents with them). We have heard stories of young adults having dreams about Jesus and turning up at churches saying, ‘Tell me about this Jesus I have been dreaming about!’ At St Nic’s we have welcomed children and prepared them to receive communion, because they are hungry for Jesus, who feeds us with his very self in word and in sacrament. And my expectation is that we will see more of this, over the months to come; and that we need to be ready.

This weekend we have seen violence on the streets of our city. People without hope, whose fear is exploited, who feel that they need to project a show of strength to hide how scared they are. People offered scapegoats and a society to rail against. These people, many though not all of them young, are hungry too. We can turn their anger back against them and perpetuate division; or we can love them and pray for them, pray that they might meet Jesus, and that we might have opportunity to introduce him to them.

And if you are hungry for the bread of life today, come, take, eat. There is more than enough to share.

 

[1] With thanks to Bishop Ruth Bushyager for highlighting this, in her bible readings on Mark’s Gospel, at the New Wine 2024 festival.

[2] John Mark Comer writes about this well in ‘Practicing the Way’ (SPCK 2024).