Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost
1 Kings 2:10-12, 3:3-14; Psalm 111.1-10; Ephesians 5.15-20; John 6.51-58
St Andrew’s Scots Kirk, Colombo, August 18 2024
It’s good to be back! As some of you may remember, I was here in February with five others from the Church of Scotland congregation in Geneva, Switzerland, to look at your life as a congregation and talk with the kirk session and others about how you see your way forward on the threshold of the second quarter of this century.
Now I’m back again, to join with Rev Roshan this morning in ordaining seven new elders – as I like to think of them, the magnificent seven. We have another new elder to ordain next Sunday.
This is an important day for them – one more step along the road in learning how to serve God and their neighbour. But it’s not just important for them. It’s an important step in the life of this whole congregation, as you face not one but many changes in the years ahead. More about that in the congregational meeting next Sunday.
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Brian Wren is an English Baptist and a prolific hymnwriter. Half a century ago, he wrote a hymn about the church taking stock of itself. And since that is where St Andrew’s Scots Kirk currently finds itself – taking stock of where you’ve been, where you are, and where you would like to go, this seems a good place to begin.
We are your people: Lord, by your grace,
you dare to make us Christ to our neighbours
of every nation and race.
Glad of tradition, help us to see
in all life’s changing where you are leading,
where our best efforts should be.
Joined in community, breaking your bread,
may we discover gifts in each other,
willing to lead and be led. [1]
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In our Old Testament reading, God tells Solomon, newly ascended to the throne after his father David dies, to ask what God should give him. Solomon is wise enough to ask for wisdom, and God is so pleased with this answer that God gives him a whole basket of goodies on the side.
The letter to the Ephesians encourages us, as it encouraged the Christians of the first century, to be wise rather than foolish, to make the most of our time, to understand what God wants for us and what God wants from us, and to be filled with the Spirit of grace.
And the Gospel of John tells us that Jesus is the word of God and the wisdom of God and, if we are wise, we shall ask for this wisdom above all else.
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It’s difficult to preach on John’s Gospel.
It’s difficult, in the first place, because the short extract I read from John this morning is just a small part of chapter 6 of the Gospel – a chapter of 71 verses. If we read the whole thing, we’ll be here till tomorrow.
It’s difficult, because in this chapter, John is busy with many things. He kicks off with not one but two of what John likes to call signs: Jesus feeds the five thousand, and Jesus walks on water. But John is not fascinated by these signs. His real interest is in what these signs mean. So most of the chapter is taken up with a long debate in the synagogue in Capernaum between Jesus and a crowd of his fellow Jews, and, as usual in John’s Gospel, the crowd keep missing the point. We need to be careful not to do the same.
And it’s difficult, in the third place, because John isn’t just referring to God providing the Israelites in their wilderness wanderings with manna to keep them alive or alluding to the pattern of the miracle stories in the cycle about Elijah and Elisha.
He’s also quietly drawing our attention to the Last Supper and to the Lord’s Supper.
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Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Paul tell us how at the Last Supper, Jesus took bread and blessed it, giving thanks to the Father, and gave it to the disciples, saying, “This is my body”. With the cup he did the same thing.
We read what they say not just as four accounts of what happened at the Last Supper but also as instituting the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, or holy communion.
John doesn’t do any of that. As usual, his focus is much less on what happened and much more on what it means, and so he tells instead a story of Jesus washing his disciples’ feet and instructing them to do the same.
The meaning of the Last Supper then, the meaning of the Lord’s Supper today, is the meaning of the whole life and death of Jesus.
As Jesus puts it in Mark’s Gospel, “… the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.” And as Jesus says to his disciples a verse earlier in Mark, and also says to us, “whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all.”
So John doesn’t tell the story of the Last Supper as the other four writers do; he tells us what their story means. He does this in the story of the foot washing; but he does it even earlier, here in chapter 6.
The link to the Last Supper and the Lord’s Supper is, perhaps, clearest in the verse from this morning’s reading on the slide in front of you, where Jesus says, “… the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
This is close to what Luke writes in his account of the Last Supper, where Jesus says, “This is my body, which is given for you.” Body in Luke and flesh in John both translate the same word in Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke.
This is my body, given for you. This is my flesh, given for the life of the world. It’s the same thing.
But in a sense the whole of John’s chapter 6 is about the Last Supper and the Lord’s Supper. Earlier, in chapter 3, John uses the image of a birth from above that gives eternal life, even as birth from parents gives earthly life. But now he tells us that it’s not enough to be born. “Once born, those with earthly life have to take physical food and drink to remain alive; once born, those with eternal life have to take eternal food and drink to remain alive.” [2]
That eternal food and drink is what we share whenever we celebrate the Lord’s Supper. But more fundamentally, that eternal food and drink is Jesus himself. It is he who brings us to new birth, to the new life of grace. And it is he who feeds us in the course of this new life and enables us to grow and to flourish.
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There is one last piece to add. The salvation offered to us in Jesus Christ is a team effort.
When, twenty years later, Brian Wren came to revise the hymn with which we began, he turned his spotlight on the Holy Spirit and the work of the Spirit. Now he wrote:
We are your people, Spirit of grace,
you dare to make us to all our neighbours
Christ’s living voice, hands and face.
Joined in community, treasured and fed,
may we discover gifts in each other,
willing to lead and be led. [3]
The Father sends the Son into the world to be the Word made flesh, showing us and telling us of God’s love. But the Father also sends the Spirit into our hearts, flooding them with love, to allow us to hear God’s word and be transformed by God’s grace.
In any congregation, some of us may be leaders and some of us may be led, and many of us at one time or another may be both. But it is Christ who does the heavy lifting, and it is the Spirit of God who points us in the right direction and helps us to get there. If we listen for God’s word and follow the leading of God’s Spirit, then as Christians and as a congregation we cannot go too far wrong.
Ask, therefore, what God should give you!
[1] Brian Wren, Faith Looking Forward (Oxford: OUP, 1984)
[2] Raymond E Brown, Christ in the Gospels of the Liturgical Year (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2008), 301. See his whole section “Brief Reflections on John 3 and John 6”, pp 297-302.
[3] Brian Wren, Faith Renewed (Carol Stream, IL: Hope Publishing Co, 1995).