We murder to dissect    

Gandhi once said, “There are so many hungry people in the world that God

could only come into the world in the form of food.”

In these weeks we have heard over and again from the Gospel of John that

Jesus is the bread of life. While we naturally associate the symbols of bread and

wine with Eucharist, we need to remember also that the 6^th chapter of John’s

Gospel begins with the feeding of the five thousand. All of these words about

Jesus as bread follow an experience where the hungry were fed so abundantly

that there was plenty left over. Richard Rohr has said, “God comes to feed us

more than teach us. Lovers understand that.”[1]

When I read those words I thought of how true they are. Intimate partnerships

that are genuinely loving don’t think it is all about teaching their lover how to be

different or what they need to do to improve or what rules they should be

obeying to be acceptable. Truly loving relationships of mutuality genuinely want

the other to flourish- they want them to be fed with all they need to thrive.

But while we may embrace the truth of a God who feeds our hunger and sustains

us in life, this particular section of the discourses on bread is more confronting

than the previous sections, even to our modern ears. We can only imagine how to

a first century Jewish audience, the words of eating flesh and- worse still

drinking blood, must have sounded. There is the connection made by Jesus to

the bread that came down from heaven for the Israelites in the desert during the

Exodus, and a more hidden allusion to the craving of those in the wilderness for

meat instead of bread. (Numbers 11:13) It seems there is always more grace to be

found- the very body of God is offered for those who cry for flesh, but it will

prove to be food that satisfies for eternity. 

But the language is hard, isn’t it? No wonder many turned away in Jesus’ day too.

Aside from the taboos around eating flesh and drinking blood, it is scandalously

intimate and physical. Yet we cannot miss the message that if God comes to us in

bread and in wine, then our body become united with God’s body, our being with

God’s being. We are to be transformed, from the inside out. We are dealing with a

great mystery.

We are perhaps living in an age which has struggled to deal with mystery.

Modernism, as Anne van Gend suggests, learnt to view the world as ‘an object to

be examined, dissected, used, and above all, controlled.’[2] She quotes Paul

Ricoeur saying, “We have turned mysteries to be pondered into problems to be

solved.” The problem is, where we have explained everything away, believing

that there is nothing beyond the reach of our understanding, we inadvertently lost

what matter most about being human. Turns out, “when you destroy a sense of

mystery,’ says Anne, “you take down meaning with it.”[3] This is reminiscent of

Wordsworth’s poem, The Tables Turned which shines a light on the mystery to be

found everywhere in creation, and the dangers of treating everything physical

like a cadaver on a scientific table where surgical probing might reveal all the

secrets of life;

 Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;

Our meddling intellect

Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—

   We murder to dissect.

From The Tables Turned, by William Wordsworth

When we look back on the many ways the Church throughout history has sought

to explain what happens in the Eucharist, we might recognise the same

reductionism that ends up robbing symbols of their power. I think there has been

 a sense in contemporary culture to return to the power of mystery, but where it

appears today, it tends to be divorced from the material physical world. The

mysteries we speak of today are all a bit insubstantial or otherworldly. We point

to things that seem to be supernatural or spiritual-  the physical world, having

been dissected and explained, apparently offers no further enchantment. What

Jesus life and teaching can do is return mystery to the natural rather than the

supernatural, joining the physical to the spiritual. Jesus continually used material

things to reveal the nature of God and communicate grace- bread and wine, trees

and seed, dirt and even spit. I think we would get closer to a spirituality that can

heal in our time if we allow the physical to again be joined with the spiritual, and

 the whole world revealed to us as charged with the glory and mystery of God.

Recovering a way of seeing where we recognise the presence of God in all life is

not just about our individual spiritual journey.  Peace in the world and care of the

planet depends on us developing a different way of seeing; one that appreciates

all creation teaching and sustaining us, rather than being seen as a commodity to

be used and marketed. In the previous century a scientistic view of relentless

human progress brought forth the horrors of social Darwinism, where some races

and groups of people were thought to be superior to others, and therefore of

greater value. When you look today in a world where there is sufficient

resources, yet famines are allowed to spread unchecked in certain parts of the

globe, and where whole peoples can be destroyed in military action, there is

evidence of that same twisted view that some groups are superior and others

more disposable. We live in a society that evaluates people in terms of their

function and usefulness, meaning that age and disability can reduce the worth

attributed and the respect shown. A lack of mystery and wonder, it seems, can

make us less human. Justice and peace require that we recover a sacramental

view of the universe.

So many, too, struggle for a sense of worth and dignity for other reasons. Worth

for many is found not in their inherent value as human beings and bearers of the

image of God, but on the social expectations they embrace and the arbitrary

definitions of success. Every time we believe this, we give power to those who

would see the world only in terms of a competition for success with profits to be

made. What if instead, our worth is found in the very mystery of our own

existence? That we, too, all of us, are bearers of God’s glory? The church has

sought at times to define terms of who may come to the table- who may receive

Christ in bread and in wine. But Jesus tells us something quite different. Jesus

tells us the terms are defined only by our hunger. God is the food that breaks into

our time, sustaining the hungry in life and joining us with the forever being of the

living Christ. The sacraments we have been given are a doorway between the

material world and the very being of God. It is a glimpse of what is more real

than real- but it is hidden in the very physicality of the earth…of our bodies…in

a mouthful of bread and sip of wine.

But we do need our hunger. Often those others would call sinners know their

hunger more than the righteous. Righteousness so easily become “self-

righteousness’ where we have no need. If we are sufficient unto ourselves,

assured of our own superiority, we have no need of another. We have no need of

God. To be hungry is to make room for the presence of the other

and for the mysterious reality that is God amongst us, present in all our

physicality.

Perhaps the last word should be with Wordsworth in the final words of his poem. As he refuses to give in to a world that has been fully explained away, devoid of wonder, he counsels…

Enough of Science and of Art;

Close up those barren leaves;

Come forth, and bring with you a heart

That watches and receives.

From The Tables Turned, by William Wordsworth

+Amen