Sermon preached at the Sung Eucharist on the Ninth Sunday after Trinity

This time last year, if you were to leave this Abbey and walk down to the river, then turn south to walk upstream, following the Embankment past the Tate toward Vauxhall Bridge, you would have been greeted by an unexpected fellow traveller. Just above you, on your right in Riverside Walk Garden was a statue. Painted in muted colours, the statue was of a young black man, dressed in a grey jacket, white t-shirt, blue jeans, carrying a holdall - one foot in front of the other - his lips slightly parted as he gazes out into the distance across the river. But the extraordinarily moving thing about this young man was that he was missing his middle. In a great slash, everything from his left knee to the top of his right shoulder was just… not there. A void. An ever-changing emptiness filled with either the transforming sky across the river, or the flowing traffic on Millbank.

This sculpture is a part of a series by Sculptor Bruno Catalano. His “Travellers” have appeared all over the world, and each sculpture features a man, woman or child, holding some item of luggage, walking forward, with a central portion of their body missing. Catalano himself was born in Morocco in 1960, before the family was forced to leave in the 1970s and settled in Marseille. Catalano became a sailor, and this life of unrooted travel left a deep impact on him. A sense that he was fragmenting as he left people, places, loves and losses behind, carrying forward only the baggage of memory. For Catalano, and for his sculptures that so movingly render visible his experience and the experience of millions across the world, there is a sense that absence and separation are part of the foundations of our identities – and yet there is always hope in their frozen-ever-moving-forward. Maybe they will find something to fill that emptiness.

I think that sense of emptiness, a sense of something missing, a dissatisfaction with how things have turned out is something that we have all experienced at some point in our lives. It may be small trivial things – eating a meal you thought was just exactly what you wanted, and finishing feeling full but somehow it wasn’t quite what you did want or need. It may be something far more profound – perhaps you share something of Catalano’s story of displacement, or another personal grief or loss. Things are… not what they ought to be. Something, someone, someplace is missing. There is a void in us.

I wonder if that’s what the crowd was feeling when they followed Jesus – over the Sea of Galilee, up a mountain. A sense that something was missing, that they were not satisfied, and perhaps he could fill that void. But in their approach to Jesus, to try to find that satisfaction, they (as we do) have two choices. They can approach him for who he is. Or they can approach him for who they think he should be. As the Son of God, or as an image of our making; and only one can grant true satisfaction.

It is perhaps telling that the crowd are following him because of the signs he has been doing for the sick. If we are to put this passage in context: at the end of the previous Chapter Jesus has been clear about who he is and what he has been sent to do. ‘I have come in my father’s name’ he tells those gathered around him. ‘Very truly, I tell you, anyone who hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life.’ Yet it is not because of this extraordinary statement that the crowd follows him, but because of what he might be able to do for them: his apparent ability to magically make it all better. And Jesus, in his compassion and love sees their need, and feeds them until they are satisfied, and that which is left over fills twelve baskets. The crowd recognise this unsurpassed feast for what it is: a miracle. And not only a miracle, but a semeion. A sign. A miracle that points to something specific. Perhaps remembering the miracle of Elisha, when he fed 100 people with 20 loaves of barley (2 Kings 4:42-44), they deduce that Jesus is ‘the prophet who is to come into the world.’

They are not wrong. In the previous chapter Jesus says that Moses had written about him. Deuteronomy 18 reads: ‘The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own people.’ Yet the crowd still try to fit Jesus into their own image of what such a prophet will be, and they plan to seize him to try to make him King. Their kind of King (indeed, their kind of prophet) is not who Jesus is. The satisfaction of the loaves has already passed away, and they long for another temporal, worldly fix – rather than the eternal satisfaction granted by belief in who he is: ‘anyone who hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life.’

This conflict between who Jesus is, and who people want him to be, is underlined by what happens next. When evening came and his disciples get into trouble upon the lake, they are alone, and they see Jesus coming toward them across the water and they are terrified – and is it any surprise? They have seen miracles, they have heard his words, but it is still not part of any worldview to expect to see a man walking upon the water. Their image of Jesus cannot encompass the idea that he is the Lord of Creation. And into the midst of their fear Jesus speaks: ‘It is I; do not be afraid.’ “It is I” has a resonance far beyond those three words. In the Greek it is only two: “Eimi Ego” – I am. There are five of these “I am” statement in John’s Gospel, and each one of them is somehow revelatory of who Jesus is. ‘I am the true vine,’ for example, in John 15. ‘I am the bread of life;’ we hear later in this chapter. It calls back to God’s revelation of himself to Moses at the burning bush. When Moses asks who he shall say sent him, God answers ‘I am who I am.’ In the Septuagint – The Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible current in Jesus’s time: “Ego Eimi.” This isn’t Jesus being forced into other people’s images, it is a clear statement of who he is, and the disciples accept it – they want to take him into the boat – and in doing so, they come to land, and safety. They are satisfied.

We see how that satisfaction plays out later in the chapter: when the crowd once again follows Jesus, and he rebukes them that they are only following him because they were fed, and reveals that he is the bread of life. Many of those following him because of their own image of who he is fall away. They cannot cope with that reversal of their hopes, cannot be satisfied with who Jesus is. The disciples, however, when Jesus asks them if they will leave respond: ‘We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.’

We all try to make God in our own images: born out of the holes left in us by absence, fear or loss. We approach him as Father, Brother, Teacher, King, Poor – born in a stable, and he is indeed all those things, but we approach him as our version of a Father, a Brother, a Teacher…Our true satisfaction comes when we know him as he is: Son of God, Son of Man, “Ego Eimi,” “I AM.” – and that is a work that will go on into eternity. We move always onward through our lives, like Catalano’s statues, ever bearing our desire to be complete. But I do not agree with Catalano that separation is part of our identities. Our identities are rooted in the satisfaction of knowing Christ in whom we live and move and have our being. We may only know it in glimpses, we may only know it in the hereafter, and like St Peter who denied and St Thomas who doubted even when we know the story there are times when we return to making God what we want him to be. But Jesus saw that crowd and knew that not all of them were there for who he was, and he still fed them. Unlike ourselves, who try to limit Christ to something we can understand, Christ does not limit himself. He feeds all who come to his table.

When I first saw that statue next to Vauxhall Bridge, I thought that the young man was going to meet someone. As we come here in our fragmented and searching selves, we come to meet Christ – in word and in Sacrament - to be fed, and to be satisfied in him who is I AM.

Amen.