Author: CCW

“Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost”

The feeding of the five thousand is the only miracle found in all four gospels but our text about gathering up the fragments is unique to John. The whole of chapter six in his Gospel is sometimes called ‘the Bread of Life discourse’. It is, I think, quite a powerful theological argument about the essential doctrine of Christ as God and man and as Saviour and Lord and highlights the struggles that belong to grasping the meaning of the Incarnation. John provides an extended discourse on Jesus as “the Bread of Life” that belongs to his life with and from the Father and with us through the sacrament without which, he says, “you have no life in you.”

He points to the sacramental logic where bread and wine signify his flesh and blood. “It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.” For “he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him.” That abiding is our participation in his eternal life and in our being raised up into the divine life at the last day. “As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats me will live because of me.” Yet this is, as many of the disciples say, “a hard saying,” and “many,” John tells us, “drew back and no longer went about with him.” This prompts Jesus to ask the twelve, “Do you also wish to go away?” Simon Peter grasps the essential teaching of the entire chapter. “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life; and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.” This is Peter’s confession as given by John.

The chapter ends with an explicit reference to the betrayal of Christ, thus pointing us to the radical meaning of his going up to Jerusalem that we heard on Quinquagesima Sunday and to the image of Jerusalem as above and free, the mother of us all, as the symbol of our life as the children of promise, as we heard in the epistle reading from Galatians this morning. There is more to this Gospel than a picnic in the park with Jesus.

These readings provide us with a rich feast in the wilderness journey of Lent. They gather together and concentrate for us the themes of wilderness and paradise that belong to the first four Sundays in Lent. Jesus was “led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil” on the First Sunday in Lent; the Canaanite woman comes out of the coasts of Tyre and Sidon and meets Jesus half-way, in the wilderness, it seems, on the Second Sunday in Lent; and on the Third Sunday in Lent we have a graphic depiction of the desolating wilderness of our souls in our despair of the absolute goodness of God in whom we are meant to find our blessedness in hearing the word of God and keeping it. John in chapter six makes explicit reference to the word wilderness by recalling the Exodus when “our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness”; the other gospels simply say “in a lonely place.” Yet in all the gospels there is the sense of paradise in the wilderness, a transformation of wilderness into paradise, we might say, and so, too, for the previous Sundays in Lent. Paradise is always there; it is we who have exiled ourselves from it.

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“For ye were sometimes darkness”

At first glance, it seems so stark and dark and not a little foreboding and threatening. Yet the readings for the Third Sunday in Lent mark a crucial and critical moment in the journey of the soul to God. If Lent is the pilgrimage of love, of love setting our loves in order, then it must consider in a serious manner the nature of sin and evil as it appears in the negation of the goodness of our created being and thus the denial of the end or purpose of our humanity as ordered to God. Such is the darkness in the Epistle from Ephesians, on the one hand, and the compelling image of “the unclean spirit” in the Gospel reading from Luke, on the other hand, the one who takes to himself “seven other spirits more wicked than himself” and whose state “is worse than the first.” What is the devil except the explicit image of self-contradiction? Lucifer created to be the bearer of light contradicts his own being by claiming to be God. But God is God, not Lucifer. This kind of fixation upon ourselves as absolute is mere fantasy; it means willing a lie. Self-contradiction is self-deceit.

In other words, these readings require us to take seriously the destructive nature of sin and evil as belonging to self-contradiction and the spiritual emptiness that results. This is powerfully shown in the Gospel without which we cannot really understand Paul’s exhortation for us to “walk in love as dear children of light,” rejecting “the unfruitful works of darkness,” since light makes manifest or known the things of darkness. The light is greater than the darkness of human sin and evil. The psalmist’s words that “the right hand of the Lord bringeth mighty things to pass,” alluded to in the Collect, is further intensified by Jesus’s words that “if I cast out devils by the finger of God, no doubt the kingdom of God hath come upon you.” The light is the light of the Gospel, the light of Christ, the good news of the Word of God which alone overcomes the darkness of sin and evil.

What is this all about except a strong argument for the absolute goodness of God which sin and evil negate and deny? Like last Sunday, we have a healing of the soul. Jesus casts out a devil and the one who was dumb or mute, meaning unable to speak, is now able to speak. “The people wondered,” we are told. But in what way? There is a division among the people but even more there is a division in our hearts and minds that goes to the very nature of sin and evil. It is about calling what is good evil. That is to will a lie. Every lie is nothing in itself. It depends utterly and completely upon the truth which it negates but renders us paralyzed and obsessed with what is only partial and incomplete. This is what is meant by demonic possession however differently we might want to speak about it in the language of mental health.

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