Hello and welcome to Monday’s podcast. My name is Alan, I am on the staff team here at STC and it is my pleasure to take on from Mick, this next stage of the journey through John’s gospel.

REFLECTION:

Today’s reading is from John 6:25-59. I am going to focus on v 53,

Jesus said to them, “Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.”

Sometimes I hate the Bible! Well maybe not ‘hate,’ it’s maybe too strong a word, but the Bible gets under my skin, it upsets me, it causes me stress and discomfort. I don’t know if it is the same for you?

You see, I have a good thing going on. I have a wonderful wife, great kids, a nice home and I’ve got a great job at a great church… all is ticking along nicely, I’m doing ok… and then I go and pick up the Bible and it upsets my flow. I am brought face to face with Jesus. He loves me… oh how he loves me… I know that there’s nothing I can do to earn that love of his. It’s unconditional and enduring. But Jesus has no desire to affirm my brokenness and dysfunction. He wants me to grow, he wants me to mature, he wants me to be the ‘me’ that I was created to be. He wants me to forgive, to keep short accounts, he want me to respond to hurt with love, he wants to change the way I think, what I believe about myself and others, he wants me to be generous and hospitable, to go the extra mile. So when I pick up the Bible I am aware of the gap… The yawning chasm between the life I have now, and the overflowing, abundant, beautiful and vibrant life that Jesus is ever so slowly fashioning in me.

Jesus said… “very truly…” meaning ‘listen up, what comes next is really important’ or ‘get your pens out and write this down.’

“I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.”

So, I hear you say, this is about taking communion right!? This is about the Eucharist, the last supper. When we go to the front of church, get a small square of fresh bread if we are lucky and a sip of strange tasting wine and we get Jesus’ life in us. Job done… move on!

Well… er… not entirely. Don’t get me wrong, the sacraments… baptism, communion and other church traditions are important and have their basis in the Bible but they can all too easily descend into empty religious practices – see years of decline in the church as proof there must be a little more to it!

So if it’s not just about eating bread at the front of church, and we are to eat or devour the flesh of Jesus… how do we do that? How do we consume him?

At the start of John’s gospel he writes, ‘the word became flesh and dwelt among us.’ Elsewhere it’s written, ‘man shall not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’

We eat Jesus’ flesh by consuming the word of God… by picking up our Bibles – the written word, discovering Jesus through its pages – the living word, and eating our fill.

So we read the Bible!?

Well, there is a saying, ‘you are what you eat.’ (If that’s the case, I am curry with rice from somewhere exotic like Vietnam or Thailand and quite spicy!) Somehow, the good stuff from the food that we have eaten since we were tiny babies has been absorbed by our bodies and become bones, organs, muscles and flesh.

But if we simply eat and eat and eat and never move, our muscles don’t develop, we remain weak and will inevitably get fat. If we don’t use our bodies the food we consume, the potential we have, goes to waste.

This was brought home to me when my daughter was little. Her sight is not great but I learnt that our human eyes continue to develop for 6 or 7 years after we are born. There were things we could do to help develop what little sight she was born with. As we use our bodies they grow and develop, they become strong and fit for purpose… our eyes, our muscles, our brains and nervous system… All develop through ...