Christ Church

“And Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed to the disciples, and the disciples to them that were set down”

Jesus identifies himself as the bread of life in the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel. It is one of the seven so-called “I am” sayings of Jesus in John’s Gospel which point to his essential divinity at the same time as providing a host of metaphors that concern our humanity in terms of our dwelling and abiding in him. Such is the whole matter of thinking sacramentally. “I am the door”, “I am the way, the truth and the life”, “I am the resurrection and the life”, “I am the good shepherd”, “I am the light of the world”, “I am the vine” and “I am the bread of life”. They are all really sacramental in scope and application. They speak to the forms of our incorporation in Christ. But the most ostensibly and obviously sacramental is when Jesus says he is “the bread of life”.

The Gospel for the Fourth Sunday in Lent is John’s account of Jesus’ feeding the multitude in the wilderness. It comes from the sixth chapter where Jesus says he is the “bread of life” and belongs to its sacramental intensity. It belongs, in other words, to what Christ is teaching us about himself and his relation to us. First, he is saying something profound about himself in relation to God who reveals himself as “I am who I am” in and through the burning bush, itself a sacramental image about the invisible made known through the visible, and without the destruction of the natural. The bush burns but is not destroyed. Secondly, he is saying something profound about us in our relation to him. In other words, his relation to the Father in the Communion of the Trinity is the ground of his relation to us through these metaphors of incorporation; in short, metaphors about our life in Christ.

Articles XXV through XXXI of the Anglican Thirty-nine Articles of Religion deal with the matter of the sacraments in a reformed understanding and in the context of the intense debates about the sacraments at the time of the reformation. Article XXVIII deals explicitly with the Lord’s Supper. It is crucial to keep in mind Article XXV which treats of the sacraments in general and makes the important point that they are “effectual signs of grace”; in other words, they effect what they signify. What is critical for the Anglican reformers is preserving the essential nature of the sacraments as “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace”. What that means is the necessity of preserving the sign in relation to the thing signified and that requires maintaining the integrity of the natural in relation to the supernatural. This is the key point which shapes the Anglican Reformed understanding of the sacraments. Grace does not destroy nature but perfects it.

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“What are they among so many?”

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.

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Behold the handmaid of the Lord;  be it unto me according to thy word.

This text speaks profoundly to our Lenten theme of thinking sacramentally. It embodies, I use the term intentionally, the harmony of intellect and sense that lies at the heart of our thinking sacramentally. A text familiar from the Advent and Christian pageants and seasons, it belongs primarily and essentially to the Feast of the Annunciation which marks the very beginning of the Incarnation. The Annunciation is the conception of Christ in the womb of Mary, not biologically through sexual intercourse but intellectually and spiritually, and not by the denial of nature but by virtue of the grace which does not destroy but perfects nature.

“Those who are not good Marians are often Arians”, as a 17th century maxim notes, suggesting something about the essential role of Mary in the understanding of orthodox Christianity. Arianism, named after Arius, denies the essential and absolute divinity of Christ, treating Jesus as something less and other than “God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God”, as we say in the Nicene Creed. She is the theotokos, the God-bearer; in short, the mother of God. A celebrated (and contested) term, it belongs utterly and entirely to the essential doctrines of the Christian faith, to the doctrine of God as Trinity, to the hypostatic union of God and Man in the Incarnation of Christ Jesus, and to the doctrine of human redemption; or perhaps should I say, the central dogmas of the Christian Faith. This means that they are the essential and fundamental features of Christianity which embrace a number of different though not necessarily opposed doctrines, meaning ways of thinking about these essential principles of the Christian faith, and which are central to any form of principled engagement with other religions. Mary is therefore not an extra, not a sentimental add-on. She is altogether essential to the understanding and life of the Christian faith and in its engagement with other religions, to boot.

With Mary we are obliged to look back to the Jewish Scriptures to Hannah and Miriam and others even as we can also look ahead to the Islamic Qur’an. Mary, the mother of Jesus, as the Qur’an puts it, is mentioned more times there than in the New Testament. But the number of mentions of her name is altogether secondary to the essential role Mary plays in the economy of salvation. In the New Testament, for instance, Mary appears at all the essential moments in the story of Christ and is always to be understood in relation to Christ.

What is that relation? She is the source of Christ’s pure and true humanity. As such she is inescapably an important part of the Chalcedonian definition which argues for the full and perfect humanity and divinity of Christ united in the one person of Christ. Mary embodies the fullest truth of our humanity qua human. She shows us something of what it truly means to be human. She embodies the very idea of one who having heard the Word of God keeps it in her heart and gives birth to the Incarnate Word. At once unique – none of us are without sin and as Augustine and others after him have thought, there is something special about Mary on this score – yet she is totally and perfectly human, fully human we might say.

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