Wher’er the Catholic sun doth shine,
There’s always food and good red wine -
At least, I’ve always found it so –
Benedicamus Domino.
Do you know those lines from Hillaire Belloc? I’ve
always found them to be rather true. It’s been true
here at St Faith’s. My first Sunday here began with
a meal – and next weekend we’ll have a bit of a knees up
as I go on my way. And along the way, there’ve been
Sunday lunches, Corpus Christi parties, barbecues,
catering at the Christmas Tree Festival, suppers with
Mirfield students at which a number of you have offered
hospitality, not to mention birthday cakes…the ministry
team said Morning Prayer together on Maundy Thursday then
shared breakfast, and just yesterday there was delicious
lemon drizzle cake as we polished and buffed the church to
within an inch of its life! I wore my jeans for the
work day yesterday and had to admit to them being a little
tighter than they were two years ago!
This is very fitting. We’ve been reflecting this
week on the sacramental nature of Catholic Christianity,
and how it translates into the mission of the God of
love. And, throughout scripture, it is in
meals that division is turned into friendship, slavery
into salvation, scarcity into plenty, sorrow into
joy. Think of the Passover, God’s deliverance of his
people from slavery to freedom; Levi the tax collector
holding a banquet for sinners and tax collectors; and the
feeding of the five thousand, where the economy of price
controls, of trade tariffs and not enough is turned into
God’s economy that satisfies the crowd and leaves twelve
baskets over.
And, of course, on Maundy Thursday, we recalled the Last
Supper, the Passover of the Lord – amidst the failure of
human love, amidst betrayal of trust, failure of
understanding, jockeying for power and position, and
failure to stay awake – Jesus gives us himself, relentless
love, and even amidst the ‘powers of darkness,’ there is a
foretaste of the heavenly banquet.
One writer has suggested that eating and drinking are so
much part of scripture that ‘Christ is a sort of book
inscribed in human flesh, and eating the body of Christ is
like eating a book.’ (Loughlin, Telling God’s Story quoted
in Wells, God’s Companions, p 27).
Well, today, the powers of darkness are comprehensively
overcome, and Christ gives us himself as the risen Lord,
the first fruits of the dead, as the Easter Anthems puts
it. Jesus shows his disheartened and discouraged
disciples that what they took to be disaster, failure and
scarcity – their loss of Jesus – was in fact God’s
glorious abundance.
The pattern of John’s Gospel echoes the pattern of Genesis
1 – the creation; on the first day, we encounter Jesus,
the light of the world; and just two weeks ago, on Passion
Sunday, Jesus restores Lazarus to life; and the breathing
of life into his humanity, like Ezekiel in the valley of
dry bones, prefigures today – the 8th day, the new
creation, the new humanity – that is why fonts are
octagonal, of course! We are once more in a garden – but
in this garden, even our tendency to undo ourselves is
itself undone And he does so not through political power
and might; not through self-righteousness or vindication;
but by gathering those who are exiled and suffering, who
are marginal and excluded, who are despised and rejected –
by taking on the groaning and travail of all creation in
exile on the Cross, and so bringing to birth a new
creation in the resurrection. Of course, it doesn’t
end here – though there is another meal beyond today’s
Gospel, a fried fish supper, in fact. For we now, as
the body of Christ the Church, rejoice with our risen Lord
for 50 days:
50 days for our delight for Christ is risen as all things
tell, good Christian, see ye rise as well.
And then, like the disciples – we are sent out – to Judea,
to Samaria – we might add, to Syria, to the Refugee
Village in Calais, to Brussels and Paris and Westminster,
to all the corridors of power, to Waterloo Sierra Leone,
to all places war- torn and war-weary, and we might add,
to Waterloo and Crosby too – to witness to the new
creation in which God has given us everything we need - to
be his friends, to sit and eat with him.