A sermon preached at St. George’s Anglican Church, Calgary, by the Rev. Clara King, July 29, 2018.
Proper 17 – Year B
Ephesians 3:14-21
John 6:1-21
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts, be always acceptable in Your sight, O Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer. Amen.
For the past few weeks, our Gospel readings have been leading us to the climax of today. The tension, the excitement has been gradually building. A growing number of people have been watching what Jesus has been doing: healing the sick, casting out demons, defying the religious logic of the day – and as rumours have spread, so the question has been growing in everyone’s mind: “who is he?” “Who is he that he can do all this?”
Perhaps he is a prophet? But he is clearly greater than a standard prophet. Perhaps he is a great prophet – maybe Elijah come again! Or maybe he’s John the Baptist raised to life once more! But Jesus has proven himself greater than them, again and again. And the question that will be growing soon in everyone’s mind, if it hasn’t already, is the almost-unthinkable: could he be another Moses?
And they watch as Jesus now feeds the people of Israel in the wilderness; and they watch as Jesus now crosses the water – and with more power than Moses ever had.
And as the people watch, the answer to their deepest question, their most ardent hope, is answered on this one day: He is the Messiah they have been waiting for for centuries. And the people, overcome by this revelation of who Jesus really is, immediately seek to make him king – even if they have to take him by force.
But here’s the interesting twist of the story. Jesus didn’t come to be crowned king. Yes, he came to be the Messiah, but Jesus didn’t come to be the kind of Messiah they really wanted him to be.
For centuries, the Jews had been waiting for a messiah who would become a great military leader, and deliver Israel, by force, and establish a new era of peace and freedom, and be crowned king like David.
But while Jesus did come to be the Messiah, he was never going to be that kind of messiah. He didn’t come to be raised up on a throne, and dressed in fine cloth, and command a military victory over Israel’s oppressors.
Instead, he humbled himself; he got down out of heaven, and came down into our midst: into the dirt and the sweat and the pain and the suffering that we have down here – not in order to sit on one of our thrones, but to touch the sick; to speak tenderly to the outcast; to offer mercy to the fallen; to show love to the poor; and to bind up the broken and brokenhearted.
He came down here to be close to us – close enough to touch us; close enough to eat with us, and hug us, and speak to us and listen to us; and to break down the walls that divide us. He asked a sinful tax collector for an invitation to dinner, and then invited his observant Jewish disciples to come with. He saw the faith of a Gentile soldier, and pointed it out to those around him. He watched a poor woman give all that she had to the Temple, and proclaimed, against all logic, that she was blessed by God in her poverty. He rehabilitated outcasts and sinners and those who were violently possessed, and made them members of his fellowship.
In almost every conceivable way, Jesus came to bridge the gap – Jesus came to bridge many gaps. That’s the kind of Messiah he came here to be.
And of all the gaps he bridged, perhaps the one we most overlook is the one with the most power to change our lives – and it’s the simplest. It’s the gap he bridged when the Son of God reached out his hand for these few peasant loaves, took them, gave thanks, broke them and shared it with the people. And in that moment, he was revealed to them just as he is revealed to us in the Eucharist every Sunday.
It’s hard, when a sign becomes so familiar, to understand why it is so radical. Especially when the thing itself – bread, wine – is so ordinary. But that is what is radical about the sign Jesus does – it is so ordinary.
In the Disney movie Aladin, Aladin gets himself a magical lamp that gives him incredible power. And how does he choose to demonstrate his power: wealth, fabulous animals, rich clothes, jewels, a golden throne, dozens of slaves – he shows himself to be special by every special and costly thing he can imagine.
The religious version of this would be precious incense or perfume, pure lambs and calves with no blemish, donations of money, precious or jewelled objects; costly dyed fabrics, and purity rules around behaviour and access. Jesus could have chosen to show himself special by identifying with special and costly things – things that are hard to find, or buy, or states of purity that are hard to achieve.
Instead, Jesus takes bread. Just… bread. The most ordinary thing imaginable – so ordinary, that all these peasants who have come running to him from all over the countryside just happen to have a few, ordinary peasant loaves in their bags. And the Son of God reaches out his hand, across the gap that divides what is special and important from what is ordinary and overlooked – and he takes these ordinary things, and blesses them, and breaks them, and gives them to the people, and we all hear him saying in our heads, “this is my body, given for you.”
This ordinary bread; this ordinary hilltop; these ordinary people – revealed in that instant to be immeasurably precious to God the Creator, and His Only Son. So immeasurably precious, so deeply and profoundly loved that they are worth giving everything for. No throne was worth more to Jesus. No jewels. No precious incense or costly robes of purple cloth.
It was for this that he willingly humbled himself; stepping down from heaven to be here, amidst the dirt and the sweat and the suffering: to reveal clearly, for all time, how much God treasures the ordinary. The ordinary people; the ordinary moments; the ordinary days; the ordinary things of life; ordinary challenges and struggles; ordinary joys. This is what Jesus consecrated when he took ordinary bread on that ordinary hilltop on that day that was, in all other ways, ordinary; surrounded by ordinary people, just like you and me.
All through the Gospel stories, time and time again, Jesus takes what is ordinary and shows that it is extraordinary. And every Sunday, when we take bread and wine, and we remember what Jesus said: “this is my body; this is my blood”, we are instructed again that it is in the very midst of the ordinary that God comes to meet us: in an ordinary moment with someone we see every day; in the midst of a task we perform all the time; in a meeting or a session on any ordinary day; on an ordinary hilltop; in ordinary bread, and ordinary wine.
It is in the ordinary world that God created; in the ordinary life God gave us as a gift that God is revealed and Jesus makes himself known and we are redeemed and transformed and sanctified.
That is the heart of our Christian faith.
So may you find, in your ordinary life, the love and light of God shining in the midst. May you feel the hand of the Messiah reaching across that gap to touch the places of your life that need transforming. May you see the grace of Jesus glimmering in your ordinary moments, and may God help you to believe that it is for the most ordinary of people – like you and me – that Jesus came into the world; to save us, and transform us, and make us sparkle, shining in the world which he so loves.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, may it be. Amen.