“The words that I have spoken unto you are spirit and life”
(John 6. 63)
“Prayer the Churches banquet, Angels age,
Gods breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage”
These are the opening lines of a wonderful poem by George Herbert called Prayer (1), a poem which presents a collection of images, biblical and natural, domestic and exotic, historical and experiential and which ends with two words, “something understood.” Prayer is something understood in and through the images of our journey in faith to God and with God.
It speaks, I think, to the rich marvel of today’s readings from Galatians and the Gospel according to St. John. There is a banquet in the wilderness. “Prayer the churches banquet” happens in the wilderness of human experience.
The theme of the wilderness is a fundamental feature of the season of Lent. By extension, the wilderness is a profound and important metaphor for the journey of our souls in faith.
The wilderness in the biblical accounts is the place of revelation: God reveals himself to Moses in the burning bush in the wilderness as “I am who I am.” The whole exodus is about the going forth of the people of Israel into the wilderness. There the Law is given to them. The wilderness is the place of the giving of the Law and the context of the giving of the Law is liberation; the law itself is about a greater freedom, a freedom to God. “I am the Lord thy God who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage,” the Ten Commandments begin.
This sense of liberation ultimately finds further expression in Paul’s evocative description of Jerusalem as the city which “is above”, which “is free” and which is “the mother of us all.” This passage takes us back to Quinquagesima Sunday where Jesus tells us that “we go up to Jerusalem.” What does that mean? It means learning to live from God’s Word and will. It is in the wilderness that the people of the Hebrews become the people of the Law, after all, learning what it means to be God’s people, defined by the intellectual and spiritual realities of God’s word and will. How much more so when we are in the wilderness with Christ, learning about the darkness of our sinful hearts and about the light of Christ’s love?
For the wilderness, too, is the place of our kevetching and murmuring, the place of our complaining and whining, the place of putting God to the test. It is the place of temptation, the place of the hardening of our hearts. The lines from the Venite, Psalm 95 emphasise this point. “Harden not your hearts as in the Provocation, and as in the day of Temptation in the wilderness,” God says, recalling exactly the kevetching of the people of Israel. “Forty years long was I grieved with that generation,” he says. We provoke God and put God to the test in the wilderness of our hearts. And yet our hearts are to be the place of pilgrimage, the place of our learning God’s will for us and for our humanity, the place, too, of the Churches banquet. For there in the wilderness the people of Israel are fed and sustained. It is above all the pilgrimage of learning.
All of these aspects of the wilderness are recalled and reworked in the story of Jesus. We go up to Jerusalem but only by way of the wilderness where Jesus is tempted, and where he reminds us of the spiritual dignity and truth of our humanity that we do “not live from bread alone but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God,” as we learned on the First Sunday in Lent. We encounter the greater desolation of our souls when we are bereft of God and his mercy and truth as we saw in the Gospel for the Third Sunday in Lent.
And yet we are fed, too, in the wilderness. We learn to live even from “the crumbs which fall from the master[’s] table” in the wilderness, a reference to the Gospel story of the Canaanite Woman on the Second Sunday in Lent. Those crumbs, as it were, are “the fragments that are gathered up” and which “fill twelve baskets,” food enough for the wayfaring people of God in the pilgrimage of our lives, a basket for each of the twelve tribes, one for each of the apostles and so for the apostolic church. The crumbs and the fragments become our banquet in the wilderness.
We are in the wilderness. On this mid-Lenten Sunday we are reminded of the provisions that God makes for us in the pilgrimage of our souls. It is a pilgrimage to God but it is also a pilgrimage with God. Jesus is in the wilderness with us and that makes all the difference. There is revelation and there is learning. There is a feeding and there is teaching. His word is “the food of our souls,” as Cranmer puts it.
Our Gospel is part of a very rich and complex chapter in John’s Gospel known as the ‘bread of life discourse.’ All of the themes of the wilderness converge in this chapter. There is controversy and debate, uncertainty and wonder, feeding and teaching. Why? Because the Jesus who takes the few barley-loaves, gives thanks and gives them to the disciples who in turn give them to the multitude hungering in the wilderness where they – we – are with Christ, goes on to identify himself as “the bread of life,” “the bread of God,” he says, “which comes down from heaven.” He challenges us about how we have no life apart from him being in us and we in him. His words, he says, are “spirit and life.” And he says these words in the face of our doubts and betrayals. It is “a hard saying” and there are those who murmur and turn away and no longer journey with him.
Ultimately, this story along with the epistle reading from Galatians about Jerusalem and our freedom point to the greater exodus, the going forth of the Son of God into the greater wilderness of our sins and wickedness in the pageant of holy week. There we may learn and there, too, we may be fed by him who “takes bread” and “gives thanks” and bids us eat and drink, having named the bread and the wine as his body and blood. He provides for us through the continuing means of his being with us in Word and Sacrament. He provides for us in the wilderness of our sins, on the very night in which he was betrayed. His words are spirit and life.
Word and Sacrament. These are closely connected. There is the Word spoken and audible, we might say, the word proclaimed in the witness of the Scriptures; and there is the Word visible and tangible in the Sacraments. These are the words which are spirit and life. “Thou hast the words of eternal life,” Peter will exclaim. We live in and from the words of Christ. As Cranmer reminds us “he that keepeth the words of Christ, is promised the love and favour of God and that he shall be the dwelling place or temple of the Blessed Trinity.” Spirit and life, indeed, and all through what is proclaimed, prayed and understood. “Prayer the Churches banquet,” … “something understood.”
“The words that I have spoken unto you are spirit and life”
Fr. David Curry
Lent IV, March 10th, 2013