by CCW | 31 March 2019 15:43
This morning’s Gospel complements our Lenten Programme, ‘Thinking Sacramentally’. Taken from the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel, sometimes known as ‘the Bread of Life discourse’, it is profoundly sacramental. The whole chapter is about the idea of the sacramental, the idea of the invisible being made known through the visible. And perhaps nowhere in the Scriptures is the harmony of sign and the thing signified made more apparent than in that chapter as a whole.
This Gospel has exercised a strong hold on the liturgical and sacramental imaginary of the Church. It is read today in the midst of the journey of Lent as a signal and significant feature of the pageant of justifying grace. From Advent to Trinity Sunday in the eucharistic lectionary we are essentially journeying with Christ in his work of the redemption of our humanity. Something of the nature of that journey is wonderfully concentrated here for us. We live, it seems, and live abundantly from the crumbs that are gathered up from the picnic feast with Jesus in the wilderness. There is an echo here to the Gospel reading for The Second Sunday in Lent about ourselves as like “the little dogs who eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table”.
This Gospel has also been read for many centuries on the last Sunday of the Trinity Season, on what we have later come to call The Sunday Next Before Advent. There it is read as a signal and significant feature of the pageant of sanctifying grace, as a kind of gathering up of the fragments of grace in the course of our spiritual journey from Trinity Sunday through to Advent Sunday which is all about sanctification. What Christ has done for us is to be lived in us. Such is sanctifying grace.
The two are interrelated. Sanctifying grace always recalls us to the justifying grace of Christ just as justifying grace always requires our taking a hold of it in our lives in sanctification. The interrelation of these two forms is our incorporation in Christ, the meaning of our life in Christ. It is profoundly and necessarily sacramental. It has everything to do with the relationship between God and man in Jesus Christ and the ways in which we participate in his divinity and his humanity through the grand pageants of creation and redemption and the great pageants of justification and sanctification. They are concentrated for us in this Gospel reading.
“O God, who didst wonderfully create and yet more wondrously restore the dignity of our human nature, Mercifully grant that by the mystery of this water and this wine we may be made partakers of his divinity who didst humble himself to share our humanity”. It is a prayer that you may have heard me say quietly and privately at the time of the preparation of the elements at the altar. It captures the nature of sacramental thinking, the idea of our being with God through God’s being with us, through the interplay of creation and redemption, and the union of the divine and the human in Jesus Christ. Today’s readings teach us is that our life in Christ happens through the harmony of Word and Sacrament, through the things of the world being made the instruments of grace and salvation.
In the pageant of justifying grace, this Gospel reminds us of our lack, our emptiness, of the nothingness of human experience and life apart from God the author of all good things. Andrew says to Jesus, “there is a lad here, which hath five barley-loaves and two small fishes; but what are they among so many?” This is not unlike Mary at the wedding feast of Cana of Galilee who observes to Jesus that “they have no wine.” We are reminded of our insufficiency, of our incompleteness, of the limitations that belong to our created and, more importantly, fallen nature. Here we are in the wilderness, itself a potent image.
Lent is about our journeying in the wilderness, the world as wilderness. Not the pristine wilderness of our imaginations, the thinking about nature without humans, but the world as a wild and uncertain place because of our wildness, the wildness of our disobedience and separation from the will of God. The world is a wilderness because we have been cast out of the garden. We have made the garden a wilderness. How and why? Because we have denied the Lord God of all creation and the true nature of our relationship to the author of all being and goodness. We have cast ourselves out of the garden. And there is no going back simply on our own.
Yet it is in the wilderness that God makes a way for us back to himself. As Dante teaches in the opening canto of his Divine Comedy, it is in the “selva selvaggio”, the savage wood, the wilderness, that he discovers “a great good”, the great good of God’s redeeming and sanctifying grace that alone overcomes the wilderness of human sin. But only through our awareness of our situation, only through our naming the human condition. “They have no wine”, Mary says. “What are they among so many?”, says Andrew. We are suddenly aware of our need, our lack, our insufficiency.
This is actually good news, a form of grace already moving in us. For God’s grace is an active principle in us; we are not simply passive. “God does not save us apart from our wills”, as John Donne suggests, “but only through our wills”. We are aware of our own contradictions and failings only so as to see and seek our good in God. Andrew’s question is really a rhetorical statement of despair. Yet it becomes the occasion for grace.
“Make the men sit down”, Jesus says, and so the miracle unfolds. How? Well, it is impossible for us to ignore the sacramental action here, impossible to overlook the reference to Jesus’ actions at the Last Supper, and to what becomes the Holy Eucharist. Here “Jesus took the loaves”, just as “in the same night that he was betrayed, [he] took bread”. Here “and when he had given thanks, he distributed to the disciples, and the disciples to them that were set down”; just as “and, when he had given thanks, he brake it; and gave it to his disciples saying, Take, eat, this is my Body which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” You can see the parallels to the Last Supper and to the Holy Eucharist. In this sixth chapter Jesus will clearly identify himself as “the bread of life”, as “the bread which came down from heaven”, as “the bread which I shall give for the life of the world”, “the bread”, he says, which is “my flesh”. This in the Eucharistic prayer is the “sacrament of the holy Bread of eternal life”, drawing upon this chapter, for “he who eats this bread will live for ever”.
It is “a hard saying”, John tells us, and one which occasions murmuring among the disciples such that “many of his disciples drew back and no longer went about with him”. Jesus challenges the twelve, “do you also wish to go away?” to which Peter wonderfully answers, “Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life”. Words conveyed sacramentally.
God and God alone can make something out of nothing, such is creation and such, too, is the greater wonder of redemption. Here we are being opened out to the idea that God can make something great and wonderful out of the little things in our lives. What are five barley-loaves among so many?, we may think with Andrew. We have no wine, we may realize with Mary. But such awareness only occasions the miracle of grace, the wonder of the abundance of God’s goodness and the way in which that is conveyed to us, the way in which we are taught about the nature of God’s engagement with our humanity. It is profoundly and essentially sacramental.
It can’t be any other way without denying God’s creation. This is the constant problem that belongs to our gnosticisms. Gnosticism is essentially dualist and runs counter to the logic of the Incarnation and the sacramental forms of our participation in Christ. Gnosticism in its ancient and modern forms denies the essential goodness of the created order such that salvation is a flight from the world, from the body, as being something intrinsically evil. Or it can take the perverse form of indulging in the lusts of the flesh and the body because of an assumed superiority on the part of those who claim to be the elect for whom the physical and material are nothing, and so, too, to the kind of moralistic dualism that contributes to our self-righteousness and judgmentalism in our forgetting of the ethical principles that govern our lives morally and spiritually. Either way there is a critical denial of the inherent goodness of creation and of the idea of redemption. The sacraments are about both. God uses the things of the world which we abuse and misuse to gather us to himself while we are in the world. The sacraments belong to our journey in the wilderness at once recalling us to the pageant of justifying grace and to the pageant of sanctifying grace; at once gathering us to Christ and providing us with the sacramental provisions of the soul’s journey to God.
“Gather up the fragments that remain that nothing be lost”, Jesus commands the disciples and us. This is the counter to all forms of dualism, to all forms of gnosticism. Thinking sacramentally is our freedom and our joy. It grounds us in the life of Christ who as mother nourishes and feeds us. Such is the meaning of our sacramental life in his body, the Church, the “Jerusalem which is above is free; which is the mother of us all”. The twelve baskets signify the apostolic church, a basket for each and so for all. Our life in the apostolic church, in the apostolic faith, is profoundly sacramental.
“These fragments I have shored against my ruins”, T.S. Eliot famously says at the end of The Waste Land (1922), the poem of the wilderness of modernity. And yet, the idea of fragments gathered up in the face of the ruins of culture and civilisation – he is writing just after the devastations of the First World War – is the only and true counter to the empty despair and nihilisms of our contemporary culture and day. There is something more than our destructive folly and evil. Eliot recalls this Gospel reading precisely in the awareness of our folly and evil. In Christ we have always more than enough.
Fr. David Curry
Lent IV, 2019
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