Sermons
Midnight Mass
So you should by now have finished your Christmas shopping, and what a relief that is, and what a difficult task that was, a difficulty caused by excessive choice.
The difficulty of buying presents is particularly felt I think by men, and particularly when buying for their wives or partners, so pity then you poor vicar in High Street Kensington on Friday afternoon trying to buy something for my wife to wear and utterly failing. What I thought might be a simple task proved itself most complex and as I said in each shop ‘I would like to buy a nice skirt for my wife’ I could tell immediately by the look on the shop assistants faces that they knew they were dealing with someone who was quite out of his depth, quite unprepared for the complexity of choices that lay ahead.
One of the striking things about modern life is the range of choices presented to us as consumers. To enter a supermarket is to begin a little journey of choices. If the market economists are right, variety is offered to us because variety is what we demand. As well as clothing on other area where great choice is offered to us in the supermarkets is in the bread section. No longer just white or brown, but thin sliced, thick sliced, wholemeal, granary, nan bread, pitta bread, French bread, cheese bread, garlic bread, the list seems endless. In the up market shops all these breads are packaged to look not only delicious but necessary, ‘must have’ items or at least ‘must try’ items. But shops don’t sell the one bread necessary for life, the bread that came down from heaven, the bread of life.
You might try asking at the bread counter in Waitrose or Tesco for the bread of life. You could say that you’d read about it in a book, a very good book. You might say that this bread is very special; communicating life to those who eat it and satisfying their hunger, and you could say where it comes from, because the book says it comes from heaven. If your enquiry met with incomprehension (not an unknown reaction for more ordinary requests), you might want to check at the other counters, because if this bread of life were a commodity, which section would we expect it to be sold at? The bakery? the medicine counter? leisure goods?
Jesus says, ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry’, what could he have meant? John’s gospel often uses this phrase ‘I am’, which would have reminded his hearers of the great I AM of the Old Testament, the name of divine self-revelation. In the book of the Exodus Moses, asks God by what name he should lead the people, he asks God his name.
(and) ‘God said to Moses I AM WHO I AM.
(and) ‘say to the Israelites I AM has sent me to you’.
The ‘I am’ used by John is emphatic, literally meaning ‘I, I am’, and John follows the ‘I am’ with several different metaphors which illustrate something of the life and work of Jesus. I am the door, I am the true vine, I am the good shepherd, I am the resurrection and the life, I am the way the truth and the life, I am the bread of life.
And now as then people are mystified and not a little upset by this claim of Jesus. They murmur against him, asking how he can claim to be the bread from heaven, they already know who he is, Jesus bin Joseph, they know his mother, what can he mean, to say that he is the bread of life?
Jesus tells them to stop murmuring, like the crowds murmured at Moses, and he tells them that the bread of life is not like the manna from heaven which was necessary to sustain the lives of their ancestors in the desert but did not feed them with eternal life; the bread of life is Jesus himself who is both the gift and the giver. God feeds the hunger of the soul not the stomach, and his food is His Word, and God’s word is Jesus.
In our gospel reading tonight John tells us that the word became flesh, and it is the fleshed-out word that is Jesus’ self-offering to the Father for the life of the world.
But how can this word, this bread of heaven be received? By faith. Because Jesus is the living word, he communicates the gift of the life that he possesses to those who believe in him. Jesus is the living bread capable of communicating life, and this life is communicated through faith. Jesus says that we cannot generate this faith from our own resources but that we can only respond to the Father’s initiative, the Father whose will it is that all who believe in the Son will be drawn to Him.
We come to Jesus in faith, drawn by the Father’s action in our hearts, wholly unworthy of the gifts we receive. We come to Jesus in faith, drawn by the Father, and we must abandon our own desires, and surrender our own wills. For how often is the ground of our unbelief not a perplexed mind, but a stubborn will? Real bread and real life are found in belief in Jesus who is the gift that he brings, the giver and the gift, the bread from heaven, the Word made flesh.
So your Christmas shopping is done for this year, and it is done because there was a deadline; tonight your presents needed to be ready. But how is your schedule going for receiving the gifts of God? There is no deadline for receiving these gifts, and actually, again and again, we turn away from God and refuse to accept what he offers, we say ‘I will come back to that God question later, I have so much to do first, I’ve got the presents now but I still have the dinner to cook, or the kids to look after, then there are those awkward relations dropping by, and a hundred plates and glasses to wash, and…the list goes on.
Well if coming to church provides one thing tonight I hope it might be a little bit of space in which you might open yourselves up to the God who says ‘receive my gifts’, the God who says, ‘you know, I formed you in your mothers womb and I want you to flourish’, the God who says ‘receive my Son for he is the Word made flesh, he is the bread of life, the bread that has come down from Heaven.’
The God who says, ‘if not now, when?’