by CCW | 6 March 2016 15:00
What’s this? Have I got the wrong Sunday? Am I having a senior’s moment? Didn’t we have that Gospel story and text two Sundays ago? We did and no, I am not losing it – at least not any more than usual! It’s just that this text also speaks to our readings today. It illumines an interesting sacramental emphasis to the traditional Gospel readings for the Lenten Sundays which culminates on this Sunday at the same time as today’s overtly sacramental Gospel reading catapults us ahead to Maundy Thursday, to the beginning of the Triduum Sacrum, to Christ’s Last Supper. That event anticipates and inaugurates the sacramental life of the Church established through his sacrifice on the Cross.
The Gospel readings for the Lenten Sundays anticipate the concentration of the Lenten journey in the events of Holy Week. There is, too, a sacramental focus to the readings which belongs to the form of our participation in Christ’s sacrifice. “We go up to Jerusalem” sacramentally, it seems to me, journeying in the wilderness and contending against temptation including the temptation to “turn stones into bread,” learning instead to live not “by bread alone but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God,” as we heard on The First Sunday in Lent. Yet that is the basis for the sacraments, too. The Word of God made flesh takes bread, gives thanks and breaks it, saying “Take eat; this is my Body.” We are not to tempt God, to put him to the test, but to worship him and serve him. On The Second Sunday in Lent, we learn from the Canaanite woman precisely about the goodness of God in Jesus Christ through her incredible insight into how God provides for us through the struggles of our lives, learning through a kind of humility that even the crumbs which fall from our master’s table are enough to sustain us and to bring healing and salvation to our wounded and broken souls.
It is when we forget God’s provisions for us and deny God and his truth that we discover we are most empty, our souls swept bare and empty because we have not looked to God for our blessedness, hearing his word and keeping it, as we learned last Sunday, The Third Sunday in Lent. And now, lo and behold, we find ourselves at a feast in the wilderness where many are fed from so little, “five barley loaves and two small fishes” and so much is gathered up, “twelve baskets of the fragments which remained.” It is such a powerful and significant story. Here are precisely the crumbs which fall from the master’s table and lo, and behold, it is enough for the Church of God, a basket for each of the twelve tribes of Israel, a basket for the apostolic fellowship of twelve apostles. We participate sacramentally in such a communion and fellowship at every Mass.
Crumbs and fragments signifying grace and redemption. So much from so little. So much for so many down throughout the ages. And yet, the Gospel story today from St. John’s Gospel, the only Gospel reading from St. John in the pageant of Lent, at least until the Gospel for the Liturgy of Maundy Thursday which is all about “the bread of life” and which together with Paul’s epistle reading from 1st Corinthians places us in the meaning of the Holy Communion, also recalls us to the night of his passion, to the events in the Upper Room, through his taking bread and giving thanks. “For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do show the Lord’s death till he come,” Paul tells us on Maundy Thursday. “Do this in remembrance of me.” John gives us the theological significance of the sacraments. Jesus is the bread of life. “For the bread of God is he which cometh down from heaven, and giveth life unto the world.” And here in the Gospel for The Fourth Sunday in Lent, sometimes known as Refreshment Sunday because of this Gospel, not to mention Mothering Sunday because of today’s Epistle, is the cause, too, of our rejoicing, hence Laetare Sunday, from the words of the Introit Psalm, “Rejoice, O Jerusalem.” A real feast day, it seems, and a feast in the wilderness, the wilderness of our world and day, the wilderness of our fears and worries.
God and God alone can make something great out of something very little. God and God alone can make something even out of nothing, out of the nothingness too of our sins and follies. The sacramental aspects to these Gospel readings teach us something about the essential goodness of God and they challenge us precisely about our relation to God’s goodness and provisions for us. Do we take that for granted or do we simply dismiss all such things as just so much pious nonsense and silly preacher talk?
Today’s Gospel points ahead to the night in which he was betrayed, the night in which he takes himself in his own hands, as it were, celebrating at once the Passover festival of ancient Israel’s deliverance from the yoke of Pharaoh and instituting a new and greater Passover, a new and greater liberation. The Holy Communion becomes the way in which we participate and celebrate his passion and death, his resurrection and life. God in Christ takes the things of this world and uses them to open us out to the things of God. God’s life is the real life of the world, the real life of our humanity. Here in this wilderness feast, twelve baskets of crumbs, of fragments gathered up, become symbolically the means by which the Church of Christ is fed and nourished in the journey to the Jerusalem of God.
But can we think in this poetic and symbolic way any longer? Have we become so immersed in our consumer lives that we have become dead to the living spirit of God and blasé about the provisions which God constantly makes for us? The Lenten Gospels seek to awaken us to the wonder of his provisions for us. It is always a feast in the wilderness, always a banquet of crumbs which fall from the master’s table, always about our being drawn into the motions of his love for us in his love for the Father, always about our communion with the Trinity and with one another. What is wanted is for us to have the eyes of faith which the Canaanite woman had so that we can see the wonder of God’s provisions for us in the wilderness of our lives and so learn to rejoice that “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us”. He is our freedom and he is our life if we can say with her,
Fr. David Curry,
Lent IV, 2016
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2016/03/06/sermon-for-the-fourth-sunday-in-lent-6/
Copyright ©2026 Christ Church unless otherwise noted.