As we come to the end of what we know as the “bread of life” discourses from the gospel of John, what we’ve been reading and listening to these past weeks, the matter comes to a head. It’s decision time. And it doesn’t go well.
In unambiguous terms Jesus says, “…unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” And the crowd, being supporters of Jesus to this point, are confronted by a choice, they are offended by it, and for all their past enthusiasm for Jesus as a teacher, a healer, a spiritual leader, they say, “This teaching is difficult: who can accept it?”
The assertion that Jesus is speaking figuratively of the need to eat his flesh, is not supported by this gospel story. 1st century Jews understood metaphor; and through the course of the conversation these past few weeks, the matter has been clarified, and what Jesus says is now understood as a literal assertion. The Eucharist is what he says it is: and for many it’s outrageous, and so, they reject it; they reject it even before it is instituted through the Last Supper and consummated on the cross.
We come to decisive moments in our lives, as individuals and as societies. We must choose among options; we must set a course upon which we cannot return. We may retrace our steps, but we can’t walk back in time. We know this from history and hard personal experience. And these “inflection points” of history, either in terms of the grand narrative or in terms of our personal lives, will be reflected upon and give rise to either regret or rejoicing. What I’d also assert is that for all the suddenness of the arrival of the crisis moment, the time of choosing, it can nonetheless be a long time coming.
Today we celebrate our patronal feast, we salute our patron, St. Augustine. And if there was ever someone who took their time coming to a decision for Christ, it was him.
I won’t rehearse the whole of his biography, but we know we was born to a Christian family: a devout mother, St. Monica, and a father who was something less than exemplary in his practice of the faith – he was unbaptized until just before his death, and so a pagan up to then, even as he was on occasion seen in church with his family (indeed, he allowed Monica to teach their children the faith, but refused to have them baptized!). I guess we know where Augustine’s spiritual dithering came from!
Augustine was a clever boy. It would appear that his parents, while not poor, nonetheless could only afford to send one of their children for advanced education, and so, it was Augustine who was sent away to school. He excelled, and in his studies and in his work developed a career as a rhetorician – sort of a precursor to the modern lawyer – he was good at arguing, and eloquent in his speech; learned, and able to comport himself well in the company of his social betters. There were many things he could have done: the law, or politics, or imperial administration; teaching.
Throughout this time of career-building he toyed with different philosophies and religions. Most notably he was a follower of Mani and adopted Manichaeism as his creed as a young adult. That religion conceived of the world in very black and white terms: the physical, the material was evil; the spiritual was good – this was the central idea in its doctrine.
Augustine took a position as a professor of rhetoric in Milan in his late twenties; in that great city, the effective capital of the Roman Empire at that time, he met St. Ambrose and that encounter prompted a spiritual crisis that took him years to resolve. He quit his job, he moved back home to North Africa; he did take up his Christian faith seriously, but he admits that these were all steps toward decision, but none of these were, how shall we say, decisive. To paraphrase our patron, his prayer at this time to God was, “Make me good, but not just yet.”
He understood what was being asked of him, and he balked at it; he held back from it in a strange kind of fear even as he knew what the promises of Christ are, but more importantly he knew who Christ is, and so, had an assurance that those promises would be kept. And yet… he held back. His eventual surrender to God at the age of 36, as he would understand it, was at last a work of God’s grace and not his will; that he was at last overpowered, ravished, by God’s love for him, and he could resist no more. If he had any hand in his redemption, it is in that he persisted in receiving word and sacrament, by his weak will, he was kept from running away, and so came to stand, head bowed in humility, and no small measure of shame, before God.
We read in the first lesson today that great moment in the history of Israel, when the Israelites accepted God’s commission to become his holy people. Joshua, gathered the people at Shechem. Remember, they did not yet possess Jerusalem – that would be for David to conquer. But at Shechem they gathered, and interestingly enough, we can go there even today and stand on the very spot because it is marked by a great carved standing stone. Go there today, it doesn’t look like much. Indeed, the stone’s been broken and it’s not even half its original height. Archaeologists tell us the stone had been plastered over to make a giant slab upon which was written the law. And it was there, before that monument that gave expression to the covenant, that laid out for Israel the necessity of keeping the law, that Joshua, and then the nation swore to serve the Lord. And Joshua puts it as a choice: serve the God who has been our shelter and strength, or serve new gods lately encountered in the land of the Amorites.
Now, we don’t present ourselves week to week before a great stone, inscribed with the ten commandments, but we do present ourselves for communion. That act is a full expression of our commitment to God’s covenant in the blood of Christ, sealed in his sacrifice on the cross, renewed with our receiving his body and blood in the Eucharist. Jesus embodied the covenant, the law, the greatest commandment of love of God and neighbour, Christ is the substance of these things, and to partake of the substance is to bind yourself to them. Indeed, it is to choose; to choose Christ.
And yet, how many forsake this! So many aren’t here despite baptism and confirmation in the faith; they’ve become like the crowd who turned away from Jesus. I know they’ll say it is the demands of the Church they are rejecting, but this is what Jesus left as the means by which communion in him is kept. We’re not called to a communion through our private prayer and lonely meditation on scripture; one found in our good deeds in the world. Disappointment in the church’s hierarchy, in me as the pastor, are not reasons to reject the sacrament, and not find a way, if not here, to an altar of Christ. Jesus has said this is indispensable to life. Do you disagree with our Lord? To be here is to ponder the question, to stay away is to avoid it, and to do so at one’s peril.
It’s interesting to see the politics of the west in such upheaval. Of course, a lot of people mistake politics as the source of community life, and so, also their own. Politics is completely derivative – you need to constitute life first, in oneself and in community, and that’s done at the deeper level of meaning and commitment to the transcendent, to what is ultimate. And we find that in Christ, and live it through the Holy Spirit.
In our politics we see a pursuit of power, not meaning. We see the fight to keep power, not achieve humanity’s ultimate end; communion in God.
No, in the trap of politics, we are told to life there; and the fount of life is power, and that it is power that binds us together, forges the nation. This is the rhetoric of the French Revolution, of the Russian Revolution, of the quiet secular liberal revolution that banished Christ from the public square even as it let imposters take his place.
So, the ballot is the sacrament, the political sloganeering our prayer, the election of our candidate the source of our greatest joy – sure, we never get anything close to what is promised, but if we’re near enough to the powerful who’ve fought their way to the top, and can convince them of our loyalty, what crumbs might drop from their table for us to feed on!
Now, for quite a while, this was not so explicit, rather this pursuit of power was given a Christian veneer, an appearance of the apostolic, a resemblance to service in Christ, even as the Christian references were discarded.
But as people increasingly see through this, they are growing alienated from their governments. They see they are being made to serve power, and so, are enslaved.
This is a time of confusion, of anxiety, but also of choice, has been a long time coming. We’re the best educated society in history by the measure of how many diplomas and degrees have been earned, but we’ve proven to be the least in terms of common sense and wisdom. In the past decades as an ostensibly Christian society, we’ve experimented with other faiths and philosophies, and now come to a point of profound social division as the consensus that once guided our communities is gone, and there is nothing in its place right now, but there is that choice Christ gave us. Augustine, couldn’t turn back the clock, and restore his Christian virtue retroactively. He could only come as he was, a man of moral failing, but also as someone who had arrived at a decision, and the knowledge of who Jesus Christ is, and that it is Christ who as what humanity needs: truth and life that can only be obtained through him, through a communion in his body and blood.
This is a choice we must make plain to those who avoid it; who want to live in the comforting lie that those in power will sort it all out even as the evidence of their incompetence increases day by day in our indebtedness, in the threats of war, in the growing criminality in our community.
And that’s something to be made known from compassionate concern, and in sincere invitation to come, and taste and see that the Lord is good. Where else can they go? He has the words of eternal life; he is the Holy One of God; he is our life and our salvation.
Amen.