August 18th, Trinity 12: Proverbs 9:1-7, Ephesians 5:15-20 and John 6:51-58
How often have we heard the phrase: “You need to eat something!” Off the back of nerves or grief; as we’re recovering from illness; before going to school or as we prepare to head out.
We need to eat.
Returning from holiday means re-adjusting to meals for one after precious time eating with or cooking with my sister.
That need to eat is primal and functional - whether we eat to live or live to eat. It can be full of delight - tables set and wine poured - savouring conversation as well as flavours.
But that need to eat can also be disrupted - satisfying cravings or a means of control; the compulsions of speed or convenience; illness, stress, cost of living, eeking out what we have; being so caught up in things, we forget; patiently holding a spoon to the lips of a loved one.
We need to eat to live. But though we eat, we will die.
Today, as at every Eucharist, we are invited to eat, to share in ordinary food which carries an extraordinary promise: that we will come alive, live more fully.
We hear bread breaking and smell the wine. We are invited to touch and taste and see. The one who is the living bread promises life in him, promises to raise us up, promises eternal life.
In a world where advertisers and influencers shape what we should eat, what we should crave, even the basic stuff of bread is repackaged and marketed to us at every price point.
This was something that Sister Corita Kent - a member of a progressive and creative order in Los Angeles - cottoned onto in the 1960s. She used pop art made famous by Andy Wahol and others to speak about the love of God. She took on the bold colours and messaging of ad agencies and offered life.
In one screen print, she presents an image of the familiar circles of thin wafers we share under the slogan Enriched Bread: these fragments feeding us and building up our bodies.
In another piece, she says God’s not dead he’s bread. She dares to offer social commentary informed by faith - inviting us to see and to act, to be bodies fed by the Body of Christ called into loving service.
Alongside that bold invitation to know the living bread she writes: they say the poor have it hard but the hardest thing they have is us. To share in enriched bread is to soften our hearts and strengthen our resolve.
One of her most striking pisces takes us to the heart of today’s gospel and the shock and strangeness of Jesus’s words. Sr Coria’s print says:
When I hear bread breaking I see something else; it seems almost as though God never meant us to do anything else. So beautiful a sound, the crust breaks up like manna and falls all over everything and then we eat; bread gets inside humans.
We understand the way food gets inside us - the processes of digestion and nourishment. The way in which the bread of life gets inside humans is something we place our trust in without having to define the manner how.
In a recent interview (the "Late Show", here) the musician Nick Cave offers something of a way into this space of worship and remembering. In confronting the truth of grief and what he calls our mortal value, he finds something more joyful and hopeful.
He talks about the way in which music gets inside of us as a 'sacred act' - something which not only binds us together but which has the capacity to 'change hearts and minds'. Music reaches the core and helps us become more human.
No wonder then that in Ephesians we hear of the emphasis on song and making melody together as an expression of our life together in Christ. Music expressing our thanks to God for that there is in the name of Jesus, but also opening us up to share in that ongoing Spirit-led drama of living.
To live with care and wisdom, to move beyond naïvity, immaturity, indifference or the waywardness of our unchecked hearts and desires. To find, as one commentator on Proverbs puts it, an invitation to 'grow up, rather than down' [Ellen Davies' commentary], in our moral stature.
Cave names the risk of 'wrapping ourselves around' our hurts and griefs, the danger of turning ourselves away from the world; of becoming hardened to it. Instead we are part of it - to know that the world is full of people who have lost things, but towards it and see and seek the beauty not the cruelty. To find joy out of the devastation.
Perhaps the urgency and boldness of Jesus’ words as he talks about who he is comes from knowing how much we need the life-giving, life-sustaining food that he offers. God’s word of love becomes flesh in him - knowing precisely the precariousness of life of which Cave speaks.
Jesus carries the grief and tears, fears and hopes, in his own body. Our remembering of him is a re-membering of who we are. We come to his table, stretching out our hands to receive the bread he offers. We come to the cross, carrying the burdens and longings, seeing it through the light of his resurrection. Glimpsing the possibility of being fully human, the promise of a joy that frees us.
The musical fruit of Cave’s journey, of the small kindnesses that go beyond words when life falls apart, is the album Wild God. He describes it as a ‘warm embrace’: as vulnerable and fragile as we are; as vulnerable and fragile as the bread that gets inside us.
Bread breaks and gets inside humans. It reminds us that hospitality is our core social value - not as a matter of correct etiquette but as an unconditional imperative to all.
It challenges the hardness of our hearts and reframes all that we have - all authority and resource, all energy and influence, every fibre of our being and every gesture, word and silence around loving service.
Or as Cave puts it to a father in one of his Red Hand File letters: such hopefulness - such hospitality - is far from neutral. It can ‘lay waste to cynicism, each redemptive or loving act as small as you like. Reading to your little boy or showing him a thing you love or singing him a song or putting on his shoes’.
Bread breaks. Bread gets inside us.
Jesus gives himself for love of the world; and invites us still to sit and eat. To gather around one table; to share one food; coaxing us to be fed with life.
Whoever eats this bread will live because of me, he says. He is our bread. Here we are invited to eat something. To discover who God is. To be reminded who we are. To be grounded and restored; to find insight and be enriched. To eat and live.
© Julie Gittoes 2024