Sermon by Rev Sydney Maitland for Sunday 11 August 2024.
• First Reading: 2 Samuel 18: 5-9, 15: 31-33 (David’s orders to Joab: spare Absalom)
• Epistle: Ephesians 4: 25 – 5: 2 (Christian conduct. Do not grieve the Holy Spirit. Walk in the way of love)
• Gospel: John 6: 35, 41-51 (I am the Bread of Life. The bread is My flesh, which I give for the life of the world)
Some of our most treasured institutions are founded on belief and trust. If that confidence is there then they are accepted as being generally valid and reliable.
So most of our money is expressed in the form of Ones and Zeros in a data centre. It certainly is not bags of gold coins, laboriously moved around the land as need dictates. But because we have confidence in our central bank, the Bank of England then our currency is stable within the borders of the United Kingdom. What happens to it on the international markets is a different matter as the events of 2022 show.
But yes, we trust our financial institutions to maintain the value and credibility of our savings, and to honour our payments, even those made digitally.
It is a kind of faith in action.
Another is our respect for the law of the land. We may complain about how many laws there are and the pathological need of some politicians to write more and more of them, but law and its application is generally respected, if not always honoured.
So then we come to Jesus, a wandering teacher and miracle maker who fell foul of the authorities. For some He was a persuasive teacher of morals and social relations. Maybe they liked His challenges to the self-importance of the religious authorities who were collaborators with Rome, even if reluctant ones.
It is not just that He taught love for God and neighbour, the dangers of greed and the abhorrence of violence. Many social and moral teachers have done that.
But Jesus went a lot further in claiming the authority of God in what He was doing and teaching. He was certainly not shy of expressing Himself in terms of the I AM of God. The One who was and is and always will be. The One who is eternal and beyond whom there is none other.
The God who created all things and who is the judge of all things, before whom all will appear and give an account of themselves. Before whom all our generous and unselfish actions are still less than polluted rags, filthy and falling apart. Before whom even the best of us has already come short of His holiness and is fit only for condemnation. Like a candle in the sun.
And yet with all this, Jesus still persists in offering Himself as the One who can and will reconcile us with God. A reconciliation founded on who and what He is and not on what we may have achieved.
This is all a salvation by faith in Jesus and in which we are vesting all that we are, and could yet be and do in Him and not in those achievements of our lives that we have selected and valued and presented to Him for approval.
For that takes no account of the betrayals and deceits which we have inflicted on others, which we prefer to forget, but which God will also take into account in weighing up the value of our lives and so their prospects in eternity.
To embark on such a moral journey is a fool’s errand of self-deceit which can only be fatal for us.
And so Jesus insists that He and He alone is the One who through whom our acceptance before God comes.
It is His agenda and His priorities, founded on His life and being and sealed with His blood shed on the cross.
And that brings us back to the Bread of Life. In Him and Him alone, will we find the means to know favour with God. In Him is that which feeds us and gives us strength; it fortifies and sustains us, it fits us for the journey through life that is before us.
All of this is set before us as Jesus says, I AM the Bread of Life. His bread that sustains and His life given on the cross that atones for us in all aspects of life.
And no there is none other who offers this kind of acceptance.
I started by speaking about faith in our institutions: our money and our laws.
But there is one area of faith that must be challenged: for I do not believe that Jesus came in order to found a church or even the church. Emphatically not.
Rather, He came so that the whole of humanity might be reconciled with God. Take that central aim away and all we have is a functioning institution devoid of life, and aiming only for its own self-preservation.
But put Jesus’ work of salvation first, centred on His atoning death on the cross, and then it all comes together.
Those who by personal faith receive His life as He gives it – those who receive the Bread of Life as He offers it – are accepted already.
And it is their fellowship and common life that forms the church.
And so for us, if we stand at all, then it is on the ground that Jesus has already won and on the foundations that He has already established.
It is by receiving Him in faith that our lives have a meaning and a direction.
It is by letting Him set the priorities of life that we live – and that means receiving the Bread of Life as He gives it.
For it comes only from Him: there is none other to give it.
• Photo by Ales Krivec on Unsplash