Sermon preached at the Sung Eucharist on the Eleventh Sunday after Trinity 2024

Early Christianity was a scandal! At least, that was how it registered for much of the surrounding culture. For the Jewish matrix out of which the Jesus movement emerged, messianic claims were blasphemous, and the proclamation that the Lord’s promised Messiah had suffered death on a cursed cross was impossible. In his letter to the Galatians, St Paul refers to the cross itself as a skandalon: a stumbling block. For the wider pagan, Roman culture, there was something strange and unsettling about Christianity which was similar to what they knew of Judaism: unlike their own cults, Judaism and Christianity demanded weirdly exclusive allegiance, the One God not ‘fitting in’ with a supposed heavenly community of many deities, each with their own responsibilities. 

As earliest Christianity became established in some of these communities, more scandals emerged, the vast majority of them fake news. There were rumours that early Christians practised incest: a complete (and perhaps wilful) misunderstanding of the Christian use of sibling language for one another, and the Christian insistence that through the Eucharist and other distinctive communal practices they were united as one family. Another scandal was that of supposed cannibalism; in some cases, gross slurs about eating babies (which rather fascinatingly mix up the stories of Christ’s birth and death), whilst in others, rather more obvious accusations that these strange Christians were feasting on the flesh of their leader. Writing around the year 176 or 177 AD, the Church Father Athenagoras of Athens addresses this head on in his Plea for the Christians addressed to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. Christians cannot be cannibals, he explains, because cannibalism requires that the flesh of the victim be dead. Christians are not cannibals because the flesh of Christ which is consumed is not dead flesh, but his resurrected and glorified body, given to them by Christ himself. An elegant, if esoteric, rebuff to the populist chatter of the ancient world. 

In today’s Gospel, Jesus describes himself as the bread of life, and refers to this living bread as his flesh. This is one of seven so-called ‘I Am’ sayings, part of the deep structure of St John’s Gospel. The context of this teaching is that the crowd have been asking for a sign as to whether they should believe in Jesus. Their ancestors, they tell him, were given the sign of manna in the wilderness – the original ‘bread from heaven.’ ‘What do we get?’ you can hear them ask. Jesus tells them that he himself is the Sign. His ministry is one of endless, intense attraction, which will feed them in a way both intimate and corporate, a food which is necessarily shared and cannot be hoarded jealously to ourselves, because it is quite simply the ultimate reality. 

We hear this Gospel today at a moment where fake news and threats to social cohesion have been bubbling away in a significantly dangerous cocktail.  The scandal that Christians have to offer our neighbours amongst all this is the gratuitously free love of God in Jesus Christ. We do not get to choose whom we eat alongside, luckily for us! As once again, refugees have been instrumentalised and the vulnerable threatened. But the ultimate sign of Jesus the Bread of Life stands in loving judgement on what we choose to set at the centre of our identities. Jesus’s ministry, his life, death and resurrection, is not only the ultimate reality, it is also the focus of all our hope and all our longing. For that reason, ‘whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.’ When we allow other issues, people or ideologies to obscure that central sign, we risk falling into the trap of idolatry, relying on other markers to define us or to seal the deal. As the Israelites learn on their long forty year journey through the wilderness, even as the manna rains down, the hand that feeds you will ultimately be the hand that owns you. ‘Whoever eats me will live because of me’ says Jesus just a few verses later. What we rely on will define us.

One wake-up call we have heard over the last couple of weeks is that of solidarity. Solidarity acknowledges our interconnectedness, our reliance on one another. Christians know a particular kind of solidarity in the Body of Christ: it was this kind of solidarity of which the pagan world was terrified in those early centuries after Christ’s resurrection.  For Christians to once again become well known as people of solidarity would be a wonderful and transformative thing. And what could be a greater image of solidarity than Jesus’s description of himself as bread. Not just his teaching or his personality, not just his movement or his miracles, but his flesh. Jesus’s own very vulnerability, his self-offering, his radical love which is constantly shifting the centre of the circle of power and influence towards the victim and the excluded, is the sign and food of the Christian faith. In this sign and through this food all our own weaknesses and vulnerabilities can find a home and find their healing. That is the message we offer to the world, as we necessarily share our own distinctive inter-Christian solidarity with the wider world, conscious that the God who gives his flesh has got there well before us, inviting others into its dynamic. 

Some of the early stories of Christian martyrdom open this up for us in very striking ways. St Ignatius of Antioch, himself a disciple of the gospel writer St John, and by beautiful early tradition one of the children taken up into Jesus arms and blessed, used eucharistic language to describe his own death in the arena,

‘Allow me to become food for the wild beasts…  I am the wheat of God, and am ground by the teeth of the wild beasts, that I may be found the pure bread of Christ…’

The death of St Polycarp, again by tradition a disciple of St John, and certainly a correspondent of Ignatius, was an event recorded in detail slightly later. As he was executed at the stake, the writer of his Martyrdom testifies that from the flames Polycarp stood,

‘…not as burning flesh, but as bread that is being baked, or as gold and silver being refined in a furnace.’

Ignatius’s words are his own. Polycarp’s martyrdom is, of course, a Christian family story, some of it, quite possibly eye-witness material. But what is so clear is the link between Jesus’s teaching of himself as bread, sustenance, and source, with the way in which Christian discipleship can be lived. At the Eucharist we become what we eat, grafted into that great scandal. We, too, are to become bread for the world, given away, yet united with one another in fragile, costly acts of grace. Our Christian message and our Christian practice might again be food for the communities in which we live, insisting on the great sign of the Bread of Life at its heart. 

The Roman authorities quite misunderstood early Christianity. They did not realise that in their persecution of Jesus’s followers and in their scandalous accusations about the intimacy of Christian family life and cannibalism they were actually encountering the Jesus Movement’s strengths. They missed the point, and in their violent panicked hyperbole failed to notice what they had started perhaps to detect. A love stronger than death. A self-offering so that others can live. A risen life which can sustain all life. 

Jesus said, ‘Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.’