disclosing new worlds

James 1: 17-27 NRSV text
Mark 7: 1-8, 14-15, 21-23 NRSV text

Christians, Jews and Muslims are “People of the Book” – that is, we all, in different yet ultimately similar ways, live according to God’s revelation within a set of scriptures which we believe are normative for faith and conduct. This means that we cannot escape the burden and responsibility of interpretation. It is a task that is necessary for at least two reasons: firstly, there is no obvious single way of reading the texts we regard as scripture, despite assertions to the contrary, and secondly, Truth is always contextual (which is to say that it is hammered out in a dynamic “conversation” with the concrete circumstances of the community of faith.

Faithless interpretation
Within the Reformed tradition, we find two attempts to avoid the complexity of the interpretive task. The first is the reformers’ doctrine of the Perspicacity of Scripture – the notion that the meaning is plain to the faithful reader. Actually, it’s more accurate to say that it is the way in which this has been understood that is the problem, because that is certainly not how it was intended to function! It’s important to understand the context and meaning of what the reformers were saying. The driving force was to make the bible accessible to ordinary readers. The scriptures were translated from Latin into the vernacular. Over against the teaching office of the Roman Catholic Church, the reformers wanted to assert “the right of private interpretation”. While in practice this was often taken to mean that everyone became the sole arbiter of truth, the intention was to free the interpretation of scripture from the stranglehold of a corrupt Church. The Church needed to be under critical scrutiny by the bible in order to be reformed. In practice, the (mistaken) notion that every individual can and should read the bible in whatever way seems appropriate, and that all such ways are equally valid, has bedevilled the Church ever since. The root of the problem lies in the excessive post-Enlightenment individualism, in which the individual has no necessary connection with a believing, reading community. It is faithless because God addresses us not only as individuals but as a whole world! God’s self-revelation addresses how we make our world – our faith, our politics, our economics. The community of faith is meant to live out the truth of the gospel collectively, not simply in some radicalised private, individual, inner world of the self.

The second attempt is the fundamentalist option, which says that we must “simply” be prepared to take the “literal” sense of scripture. This is underwritten by a raft of assumptions, the most important of which is the inerrancy of scripture. If the bible is the Word of God, the assumption goes, it must necessarily be free of “error”. There is no room in this view for contradictions between different parts of the biblical canon. The bible is assumed to speak with one voice – the Voice of God. God’s revelation is given through human intermediaries, but they function more as God’s scribe receiving divine dictation than creative theologians who have anything of themselves to contribute. Consequently, the bible may be approached like a divine encyclopaedia, pronouncing on every necessary subject. We don’t have to interpret the bible, merely consult it! Any attempt to “avoid” the “plain meaning” of scripture is evidence of faithlessness.

The fundamentalist option is a latecomer in biblical interpretation, despite the assumption that it is “the way that it has always been done”. It grew out of the 19^th century Princeton school, with B.B Warfield. In its contemporary form, it is actually profoundly faithless: it refuses to take the bible as it is, but seeks rather to impose an artificial schema on it. It goes something like this: “If a book is to be the Word of God, it must be free of error and contradiction, otherwise it cannot be the Word of God”. In other words, it’s a question of facts. If it can be shown that the bible does, in fact, contain errors, then the whole edifice falls like a house of cards. If the bible cannot be trusted on its statement that the world was created 6,000 years ago over 6 days of 24 hours each, then the bible cannot be trusted on anything! The fundamentalists therefore find themselves embroiled in endless controversies about “facts” and “history”. What is faithless is the notion that the bible is actually up for question as the Word of God! Theoretically, the fundamentalists regard the bible as potentially no more important than any other book! That is why countless former fundamentalists have that “all-or-nothing” experience, and, in rejecting fundamentalism, find themselves rejecting both faith and the bible. For the Christian community of faith, the bible is not referred to as the Word of God because it can be squeezed into a formula or be shown to conform to certain criteria: it is the Word of God because it is the way in which God communicates! That is not open to (faithful) question: it is what it means to be within the Christian community of faith!

What the bible is, therefore, is what being “the Word of God” means. And a faithful, informed, searching reading of the bible finds itself grappling immediately with the interpretive task. We are compelled to engage in that conversation between the world of the texts, the tradition, and our own, contemporary context. It is a process – of formulation and reformulation in different contexts – that we see within the canon of scripture itself. And it is controversial! It is risky. It means making value judgements. It means changing what we once said, and saying something new – not simply saying the old things in new ways, but sometimes throwing out the old in favour of something that we believe and trust is more true. We see that, for instance, in the post-exilic re-reading of the tradition. And we see it right here in today’s gospel passage and in the selection of today’s epistle.

Purity laws and food: what was the problem, anyway?
Something very radical is going on in Mark’s gospel. Mark’s own context is the conflict between Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians. What is the status of the Law – particularly the Holiness Code? Note the structure of the narrative at this point: we have just had the feeding of the five thousand Jewish males. Jesus has crossed the lake to the Gentile side, where we will encounter the Syrophoenician woman as an example of faith in a discussion about healing within the metaphor of feeding (7:24ff). and where four thousand Gentile males will be fed (8:1ff). The parallel feedings are a clear indication that the Bread that Jesus offers is for all – both Jews and Gentiles. Sandwiched (sorry – no pun intended!) between is the debate with the Pharisees and scribes (who are significantly on Gentile territory) about the purity laws to do with food and washing. The text is multi-layered: it reflects the disputes between Jesus and the upholders of the tradition of his day, but also the post-Easter, post-Gentile mission situation of Mark’s community. It also forms a vital part of Mark’s presentation of Jesus as the Liberator who frees people from the chains of the purity system that declares them unclean and unfit for God.

What exactly is the issue here? We’re used to washing hands before meals – it’s simply good hygiene! The complaint by the Pharisees and scribes here, however, is not about coming to the table with grubby hands! It’s about ritual contamination. And here, Mark takes the exaggerated, “super-holy” version of keeping the Levitical laws about purity in regard to food. The tradition on this point held that touching food with unclean hands rendered that food impure. But that was a “second-degree” impurity: eating impure food could not contaminate a “pure” diner. The problem was liquid. Unclean liquid was “first-degree impurity” stuff, that, if present on food, would contaminate both the food and the eater. The “tradition of the elders” that Mark refers to here was thus a super-scrupulousness that sought to avoid even the remotest possibility of contamination through hand washing.

A new view of holiness
So what makes Jesus radical at this point? Jesus, in v19, not only declares all foods clean but effectively says that they were never unclean! In other words, he’s saying that the “tradition” got it wrong. He’s scathing about “the tradition of the elders” – a phrase that contrasts the tradition with the Law of God (which is why he quotes Isaiah). Whereas the Pharisees and scribes saw their tradition and the Law as one and the same thing, Jesus accuses them of substituting human precepts for the Law.

Jesus, you will remember, is in the business of building a messianic community that is non-exclusive. He refuses the categories of exclusion that were used to draw the “we/they” boundaries: class, “race”, wealth, and religious purity. Jesus’ special contempt for the “human precepts” is reserved for the ways in which the ability to exclude operated as a “gate”, with the religious leaders as the gatekeepers. It was a means of power – the power to exclude. What was intolerable for Jesus is that exclusion from the social and religious life of the community easily translated into apparent exclusion from the life of God. Archbishop Desmond Tutu always used to say that the tragedy of Apartheid (exclusion) was its ability to persuade [black] children of God that they were not, in fact, children of God!

In this passage, Jesus takes on the purity system. He refuses the notion that ever-vigilant scrupulousness (holiness) is the appropriate response to God. This is not because Jesus isn’t concerned about God’s holiness; rather, it is because of his radical reinterpretation of divine holiness. God’s “holiness”, for Jesus, is seen in God’s compassionate love that welcomes rather than excludes, is gracious rather than judgemental, and embraces the excluded, the despised, the marginalised and the unloved. This is the “holiness” that ought to characterise any true concern for the proper worship of God. And, if anything – even divine Law – leads to a conflict of purity vs inclusion, inclusion wins every time! True worship (note again Jesus’ citation in v7) is seen in compassionate inclusiveness. If there is any doubt about how we ought to act and decide, we must let these be our compass-bearing.

Dealing with the tradition: a spectrum of possible responses
What happens when a changed context requires a re-evaluation and re-appropriation of the tradition? This is precisely what is happening here. What, then, is the status of what has gone before? And, to raise the stakes just as high as they can go, what is the status of what God has said in the past? Again, this is the conflict in which Jesus is engaged.

And look at how radical his answer is! He could have taken the conservative line, cited Leviticus and said: “This is what God has said, and it remains unchanged. We have no right even to ask the question in the first place!”

Alternatively, he could have taken a revisionist position: “This is what used to be, but now the old way no longer applies. It is not that it was bad, or deficient, or wrong: it has been superseded by something new, better and more appropriate to the changed context”. Interestingly, this is pretty much the position that Matthew and Luke both take.

Jesus, however, takes a third, radical option, which is to say that what has been believed in the past is quite simply wrong! Importantly, it is wrong because they have failed to understand God. Had they done so, they would have realised that the God whose kingdom is such Good News – especially to the poor and excluded – could never have intended a system that created poverty and exclusion. Therefore what has appeared to be divine Law and has been taught as divine Law – and can be justified as divine Law by appeal to “It is written …” – is in fact mere human precept, obscuring the true divine Law.

This is clear from vv 14-15. Jesus explains to the crowd that the problem isn’t contamination, but the evil that is within. Impure food passes through the system. What really does damage is the evil that is inside a person, is intrinsic to them, and cannot be got rid of either through ritual cleansing or even going to the toilet! You can’t flush these out of the system! They live inside – and they really defile!

Jesus’ option, in other words, is to set aside scripture on the grounds that it does not tell us the Truth about God! That is both radical and faithful. It is radical because it is extremely uncomfortable. We don’t find it too difficult … on this issue, because the question of obedience to the purity laws has long since to be a burning question for us. We find it quaint and anachronistic. It threatened to split the earliest Church, though! But what about our own burning questions? How uncomfortable are we, for instance, at the possibility of setting aside biblical pronouncements about homosexuality on the same grounds as Jesus uses here? I want to return to that issue in a moment, but first, I want only to note that Jesus’ option is faithful because it does justice to the nature of the bible itself. We do not believe that biblical “inspiration” is the same thing as dictation! The bible was not dictated verbatim from the mouth of God. Rather, God’s Spirit inspired the writers. Unsurprisingly, therefore, what we have is a record of faith. This is what people believed – genuinely and faithfully. But genuine and faithful belief itself is not a guarantee that we have got it right – something we have seen over the debates about slavery, the ordination of women and Apartheid! Instead, it is inspiration – the conviction that the bible genuinely contains the self-revelation of God – that compels us to engage in the risky struggle of interpretation. Jesus had to do it – so do we!

A slightly different model (James 1: 17-27)
We begin a study of the epistle of James this week. James, the brother of Jesus, was the leader of the Jerusalem Church. He was a theological conservative. In the debate over whether Paul’s Gentile converts needed to become Jews (Acts 15), James was Paul’s opponent. Look at Galatians 2. This is no mild disagreement, but a vitriolic dispute! Paul is positively venomous in his condemnation of Peter, James and the “Judaisers”. The presence of the epistle in the canon is the record of a fundamental conflict within the earliest Church about how to cope with tradition in the light of what is new in Jesus Christ.

Paul is radical. Without wishing to over-egg the pudding, it is important to state that Paul saw the implications of what God has done in Jesus Christ as setting aside the Law. This isn’t the time and place to go into exactly what Paul means; suffice it to say that he sees salvation in Christ as ushering in a new creation – a different order of things in which the Law is redundant. Paul was accused of being antinomian as a result.

James sees it differently. Jesus, for him, makes a better understanding of the Law possible. It enables people to fulfil God’s intention for the Law. James, then, is unsurprisingly characteristically “Jewish”, but with a Christian “spin”. His audience is the Jewish Christian Church, peopled by believers steeped in the Jewish faith. His emphasis is on the continuity with all that has gone before, rather than discontinuity. Nevertheless, it is important to note that (a) he is in deliberate, conscious debate with Paul over how to interpret the scriptures and (b) they disagree – profoundly!

It’s interesting to tie up what James says about defiling with today’s gospel passage – particularly in relation to the tongue. We know how destructive that can be in Christian communities! And, in Jesus’ terms, it is the destructive, community-shattering words that equate to the evil within that defiles.

However, for the moment, I wish only to note the way in which the very texts of the New Testament face us with the intractable problem of controversy and conflict in seeking to interpret scripture and understand God.

Bringing it all back home
Those of you with a developed musical taste (!) will recognise the Dylan album title here! I want us to grapple seriously with the implications of today’s gospel passage by asking the question of what application this might have to the sexuality debate that churches are currently facing (even if they’re avoiding it). This is the equivalent of the debate over ritual purity at meals, with as radical and far-reaching implications – and the same temperature-raising capacities!

Once we accept that there is a need to interpret (rather than merely consult) the bible if we are to get some access to what we believe God’s will might be, we are faced with at least 3 possible ways to go – all of which might justifiably claim to be “biblical”! I want to stress that they can all lay claim to being biblical, because the discussion about sexuality has, at least in the United Reformed Church, been sabotaged by accusations and counter-accusations about “not taking the bible seriously”, when in fact, the issue is about biblical interpretation.

We could take the conservative option, that says, “Leviticus calls it an abomination! That is the Law! That is God’s opinion, and we have no right to deviate from it at all”. Those of us who take this option have a barrage of texts at our disposal. It is quite clear that homosexuality is viewed with outrage and horror. It is condemned. And, if reading the bible faithfully means finding the burden of the textual evidence, the case is open and shut.

A second, revisionist option, says that the biblical treatment of homosexuality takes place within a context that bears little or no resemblance to today’s context. The story of Sodom and Gomorrah, for example, is not about homosexuality: it is about the abuse of hospitality through homosexual rape by “straight” men. This option says that we cannot sort out the matter by appeal to biblical texts: we understand far more about human sexuality than can be gleaned from the texts and need to make judgements on different grounds than textual ones on the subject. So, for example, the fact that God clearly calls homosexual people into ministry (at least, clearly does so by every canon and criteria we currently use to discern a call) means that we cannot assume that homosexuality is itself a disqualification for ministry.

A third, radical option says that we ought to judge the issue by what includes and what excludes. Because the blanket condemnation of homosexuality leads to exclusion, it shows that we are wrong if we assume that the texts that condemn it give us an indication of the mind of God. On the contrary: they are “human precepts”, uncritically equated with the divine will, and need to be set aside because they were never right in the first place! And the warrant for this approach is none other than the Markan Jesus himself!

The priority of compassion
Mark presents us with a Jesus who is alive to the deep-seated human tendency to exclude people who are “different”. The most effective way to do so is to declare them “unclean” – beyond the pale. Jesus makes a messianic community out of these excluded people first – on the grounds that this reflects the will and heart of a God who is primarily compassionate and loving, and whose “holiness” is expressed not in disapproval but in loving welcome. Ironically, Mark goes on immediately to show us that Jesus himself was not immune to this tendency, as we will see next week with the story of the Syrophoenician woman! May God bless us all as we wrestle with the biblical texts, day by day and week by week! And may God keep giving us the courage to persevere!

Amen.

In response to a number of requests, I’ve published my three studies on the theme of “Grace”, which I did for the United Reformed General Assembly 2006 last month. They are in the “pages” section. They can also be found on the Windermere Centre website – probably in more readable form! Cutting and pasting in this programme generates all sorts of layout difficulties, as you’ll see: when I have more time, I shall have a fifth go at getting the layout perfect!

I take three familiar Lukan passages or blocks, and look at how a failure to understand grace makes them appear far less radical than they are. My basic thesis is that we (Christians) actually don’t like grace! It’s unfair, it’s dangerous, and it drives a coach and horses through our settled world of just deserts. The resistance to grace innoculates us against seeing things in these familiar texts that are converting and transformatory. So I look first at Luke’s treatment of Jesus and John the Baptist, under the theme of “The priority of grace over judgement”. The second study is the parable of the Prodigal and his brother, under the theme of “The grace that refuses to disown us”. The final study is Luke’s account of the death of Jesus, and how grace saves us. The theme is “The grace that does not abandon us to the darkness of our choices”.

I’ll welcome any comments you have to make!

1Kings 2: 10-12; 3: 3-14 NRSV text
Psalm 111 NRSV text
Ephesians 5: 15-20 NRSV text
John 6: 51-58 NRSV text

“I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh” (6:51). This is the culmination of the “Bread of Life” section. It has been a complex section – complex, rather than complicated. John has explored different aspects and implications of the image through a series of misunderstandings. It began in 6:26, with Jesus telling the crowd that they were looking for him only in order to have full bellies, whereas he was offering eternal life. John then uses the question about manna in the wilderness (6:31ff) to emphasise the theme of “bread from heaven”, picking up one of his key themes about Jesus being “from above”.

At this point (6:41), Jesus’ opponents (“the Jews”) appear in the narrative. There’s a certain artificiality about their appearance. Until now, the story has “worked”: there’s a crowd who has been fed miraculously in the wilderness, who has also realised that Jesus performed some sort of “teleporting” miracle from one side of the Lake to the other, and this leads fairly naturally into a discussion about physical vs soul hunger, and comparisons between what has happened to them and what happened to the proto-Israelites in the wilderness. Suddenly, though, “the Jews” appear in the narrative – as though Jesus were in Jerusalem or a synagogue. Their appearance signals something important: there’s a serious theological dispute in progress here!

“The crowd” are the hangers-on and would-be followers of Jesus. Jesus doesn’t “dispute” with them – he teaches. He speaks to them as possible followers. The issue is that they need to see in him much more than the miracle worker who will keep their bellies full: they need to see him as the Living Bread who satisfies the soul-hunger that mirrors starvation of the body. “The Jews”, however, are Jesus’ opponents (see the section on The role of “the Jews” in John’s gospel in last week’s post). They have already decided that the are not going to be followers of Jesus. They are his “persecutors” (5:16) who are seeking actively to kill him (5:18). Their opposition is rooted in their refusal to recognise Jesus’ authority and the truth (grace and truth) he proclaims, and justified by appeal to the established religious norms and traditions. Hence their appearance in the narrative signals that John’s Jesus is about to engage in a theological dispute, centred on the person of Jesus himself.

It is centred on the person of Jesus because this is precisely what Jesus offers: himself! He is the Bread of Life. His flesh is given for the life of the world. He is the true bread that comes down from heaven. And so the dispute is divided into two parts. In last week’s section (6:41ff), the first dispute is over the “came down from heaven” bit. Jesus’ authority is vested in his origin: he knows what he is talking about! So now, in v51, he repeats the claim in order to deal with second part: “the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh”. This leads to the second “complaint” of “the Jews”: “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” (v52).

Bread, flesh and the Eucharist
John’s is not only the most overtly “theological” gospel, it is also the most overtly “churchy”, in the sense that it is a sustained presentation of the Christian Church’s gospel – it’s message of salvation in Jesus Christ. To that extent, it is unapologetically a “post-Easter” gospel: John’s primary intention in presenting a “life of Jesus” is to draw out the meaning of it all – the “grace and truth” to be found in Jesus. It is furthest away from what we would understand as “biography”, and most expressly reflects the context of a post-Easter, established Christian community. We find, then, precisely what we might expect: things which are implicit in the synoptic gospels (eg Christology) are made most explicit in the Fourth Gospel.

We have seen how the Eucharistic shaping of the feeding story (which is present in the synoptic tradition) is deliberately heightened in John’s account. And here, in the dispute about “how can he give us his flesh to eat?” the answer is quite explicitly Eucharistic: we “eat his flesh and drink his blood” (vv54-5) through the Eucharist! This is where it all comes together: Jesus is the Living Bread which has come down from heaven to give Life to the world. How is Jesus “Living Bread”? By giving his life on the cross. But why “Bread”? This is a strange image! Bread is something which is eaten. And that’s the point, isn’t it? We “eat his flesh and drink his blood” (remember: Jesus talks about satisfying hunger and thirst – being food and drink in 6:35) in the Eucharist. This is what gives eternal life! Far from being a passage that makes it apparently easy to distinguish between the so-called “physical” (body hunger) and the so-called “spiritual” (soul hunger), John’s gospel is almost disgustingly “bodily”! It’s not only “the Jews” who recoil from Jesus’ words in vv53-57: just ask any vegetarian how it sounds to them!

In fact, just ask any good low-church memorialist what they think! The high sacramental theology here is a real problem for them. I know – because I was one! It was this passage, in fact, that made me realise a non-sacramental understanding of Communion just wouldn’t do. You’ve got to do an awful lot of insupportable spiritualising gymnastics to avoid the clear sense of what Jesus says here in John’s gospel: there is a direct connection between eating Eucharistic bread and receiving not only bodily nourishment but eternal life; between eating the bread and literally (sorry, sacramentally!) being fed on the body of Jesus, which is life for the world. Put it this way (or at least, I did): whatever the disputes we may have about how the sacrament “works”, the sacrament is more than mere symbolism (“eat this bread and remember what it symbolises: Christ’s sacrifice”). Furthermore, however we may want to argue about “what happens” at the moment of consecration, whatever does happen is what makes it “eating Jesus’ flesh and drinking his blood” as Jesus says we do, here in this passage! What John is playing on here with mischievous delight is the fact that non-Christians – particularly Jews – mistakenly thought of the early Christians as cannibals, who feasted on their saviour’s body and drank his blood. That was the rumour in the local inter-faith meetings – and John lays the blame for its origin squarely on the lips of Jesus himself!

Sacrament, Incarnation and salvation
It’s a novel position for me to find myself in at this point, banging the drum for a highly sacramental view of Communion. But then, John’s theology (and that of his Christian community) is highly sacramental! The Eucharist is the means by which we (literally) ingest salvation. God – or at least salvation – is present in the bread and wine. Eating and drinking is the means whereby we “abide in Jesus” (v56), “live because of him” (v57) and “live forever” (v58).

That is not the same thing as saying that much high-church Eucharistic theology is right, though – or at least, that it is “biblical” in the sense that John’s community is sacramental! To say that John’s community has a “high” sacramental theology is not the same thing as saying they are “spikey” as we understand high church theology and practice! The Christian Church has struggled over sacraments. Christians have killed each other over how Jesus is present in the Eucharist. The Feast of Life for the world has been the cause of bitter, deadly wrangling. Christian division over Eucharistic theology means that Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians will not share Communion with Christians of other denominations. It means that huge amounts of energy are spent over trying to “solve the differences” between understandings of the feast that expresses our fundamental shared union and identity in Christ. “High-Church” people refuse to recognise the validity of other practices. “Low-Church” Christians accuse their “higher” brothers and sisters of “selling out to superstition”. The Eucharist becomes the outward, visible sign of an inward, invisible refusal to recognise shared Christian faith! We would do well to look more closely at John’s view of the relationship between sacrament, Incarnation and salvation.

Unlike extremely “low” understandings of the Eucharist, John’s community has a real theology of sacraments. They convey grace – the “grace upon grace” that we receive in Jesus, who is the Word made flesh (cf 1:14; 16). John doesn’t buy into a distinction between receiving salvation through faith alone (“belief”) rather than through the sacraments. Look at Jesus’ words in 6:47: “Very truly I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life”. So salvation comes through faith – but then Jesus goes on immediately to talk about “eating bread” – his flesh! And that is the means of eternal life! On the one hand, then, it appears that salvation is through the person of Jesus (low church), while on the other, it is through the sacraments – ie the Church. This latter position is the reason for the doctrine of extra ecclesiam nulla salus – “there is no salvation outside the Church!”

John doesn’t buy this “either/or” because of Incarnation! Jesus is the Word made flesh – the sacrament! Jesus is heaven come down to earth – the presence of God in earthly, created things. He is “the Bread come down from heaven”. Therefore salvation is nothing other than Jesus. It is Jesus who is the Bread that gives life to the world. But just as Jesus was God’s sacramental, saving presence among us as a human being, so Jesus continues to be God’s sacramental, saving presence among us in bread and wine. To eat and drink, believing, is part of whatever we mean by “saving faith” – or whatever Jesus means when he says “whoever believes has eternal life”. “Believing” is a whole-life-involving matter. It is following. It is believing. It is eating and drinking. The point is that all of these involve and are part of being drawn into the life of Jesus and therefore into the very Life of God. Our encounter with Jesus in the sacraments is no less a saving encounter than is conversion – or daily discipleship of Jesus! To try and make those sorts of distinctions is to do violence (in John’s terms) to the fact that Jesus is God in human flesh, come among us to save us – to transform every aspect of our lives, daily!

This means that there is no place for a theology of the Eucharist that treats it as “the Church’s possession”. When we say, liturgically, “This is the table of the Lord”, we are criticising any church-attempt to “take over” the Eucharist and control it. When we make it some sort of Gnostic mystery, with access controlled by the Church and surrounded with arcane requirements about the ordained status or gender of the president, we have lost the plot – the “salvation plot”. This is the feast of Life for the world – not a celebration of the “in-status” of the Christian community! The Eucharist is no more “ours” than is the cross! And that is no more pronounced than in John’s gospel, where Jesus says, “And I, if I am lifted up [on the cross], will draw all people to myself!” John presents the “lifting up” of the cross as the great, free invitation to all! How dare we do less with the Eucharist! The Eucharist is the anamnesis – the remembrance – of the cross. It symbolises the cross, and ought to do so by virtue of its radically open invitation: “whosoever will may come”.

True bread and false bread (1Kings 2: 10-12; 3: 3-14/Ephesians 5: 15-20)
John presents Jesus as the True Bread. The manna in the wilderness was not the true bread – it merely foreshadowed it. It did not give Life in the sense that Jesus does.

I want to look at our other two readings in terms of this gospel theme of discernment – distinguishing between what is true and what appears to be true. Solomon asks Yahweh for the gift of wisdom in order to be able to discern between good and evil (3:9). Now we often naively suppose that the difference between the two is as clear as black vs white, light vs dark, death vs life. For all the fact that John talks in these terms of absolute opposites, today’s gospel passage should caution us against supposing that he is as dualistic as he is often accused of being! “The Jews” claimed that the manna in the wilderness was “the bread that came down from heaven” – the True Bread. The weren’t saying, “The Golden Calf is the true God”! They had taken something good and used it as a means of resisting the truth about God in Jesus. Solomon knew what John portrays: it is sometimes intensely difficult to distinguish between good and evil, truth and falsehood. And the stakes can be enormously high!

Similarly, the Ephesians are enjoined to be wise (Ephesians 4:15), exercising discernment. There was apparently little difference between a good old drunken sing-along and Christian services of worship in Ephesus (Hmm! It would be pretty darn difficult to mistake some of our exquisitely ordered services, solely with hymns written by people who have been dead for at least a hundred years, for anything like a riotous party! Wonder what that says?). Yet Paul says there is a difference, and it isn’t about appearance.

I don’t want to get bogged down in the implications for the types of spiritual freedom that were clearly commonplace in the early Church and which we might do well to discover! The point I want to make is that “living as wise people” is about the spiritual discipline and task of discernment – of distinguishing between true and false claims to truth. The fact is that a lot of stuff – from froth and bubble to dangerously evil things like Apartheid, Nazism and contemporary Israeli nationalism have been “justified” by appeal to Jesus, the Church, the bible, tradition and God! Things which are good in themselves (like manna in the wilderness) can be misused to resist the truth of God in Jesus – the grace which saves. It’s about discerning what is true bread, and what is false. And failure to discern which is which means that people miss out on the True Bread and the Life which is offered in Jesus – the True Bread whose flesh is given for the Life of the world.

Amen.