Twelfth Sunday after Trinity 2024

In one of his most creative sermons, James uses the cultural lens of the zombie to explore what it means to be truly alive — and how Jesus offers not mere existence but resurrection life, a life that begins now and cannot be extinguished.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

So, Heavenly Father, come by your Holy Spirit and reveal to us the living word made flesh. In Jesus' name. Amen. We are in the middle of a five-week mini-series in John's Gospel, chapter six. This isn't dreamed up by us, this is what the lectionary does. The lectionary is a set of readings that a large proportion of the global church follows. And for reasons that we'll discover over this series, the people who designed the lectionary decided when they got to John's Gospel, they were going to focus strongly on John's Gospel, chapter six, and spend five weeks looking at what is essentially the same theme. The theme is this Jesus is the bread of life. And so each week we have been looking at this theme from different angles and considering its various implications. This is often how John's Gospel does things. You might find if you're reading a chapter of John's Gospel, you feel this is very circular. This kind of goes round the same idea again and again, and you get lots of repeated words and phrases. But with each repetition comes development and expansion. It's maybe not so much a circle as it is a spiral. But let me catch us up to where we've been so far in John's Gospel. We started in week one, in the first section of chapter six, with the feeding of the 5,000. Jesus does this miracle where he takes bread and fishes and feeds thousands and thousands of people with it. And then in the second week, we turned and asked ourselves the question: what is a sign? What is the point of a sign and what's its relationship between the sign and what it signifies? Because Jesus turns around and says, It's not about the food, guys. It's not about the fact that I've just fed 5,000 people. I'm trying to teach you something about what sustains your life. Look beyond the sign to the thing that signifies it. He points out in that passage that the bread that fed the 5,000 is perishing. But he wants to offer us something better than perishing bread. So last week we heard Jesus say this I am the bread of life. There are seven I am sayings in the Gospel of John. I am is an important phrase because in Israel's tradition, their God was called Yahweh. I am that I am. And so when Jesus stands up and says, I am, he is declaring himself to be God. And then he uses that phrase to describe the sort of God he is. So these phrases are quite familiar to us. I am the gate, I am the good shepherd. And in this passage, I am the bread of life. Jesus is God, and he is the God who can be consumed. So in this week, we have a very strange passage where Jesus stands before the Jewish people and says, Eat me, eat me. Let me read verse 51 again. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever, and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh. So that's what we're going to reflect on this week. Jesus telling us to eat him. Two things to note. Firstly, Jesus describes himself as the living bread. And this is in deliberate contrast, direct contrast, with three other types of bread available that he might be talking about. Firstly, the bread that he gave earlier in the passage to 5,000 people. He says, that's an amazing miracle. And you might be tempted to make me king because of that miracle, but that's perishing bread. Every single one of those people, the very next day, was hungry. Similarly, the bread in the wilderness that was given to the people of Israel for 40 years, God fed them with manna in the wilderness. They received this incredible miracle day after day. But you know what? That bread was perishing. It didn't last, it couldn't sustain for more than 24 hours. And any bread available to you or I. I don't know what kind of restaurants you enjoy going to. Maybe you're a cheeky Nando's kind of person. Maybe you're interested in some fine dining. Let me tell you something. This is going to be a news news flash for some of you. It doesn't matter how much money you spend on the meal, the day after, you will still be hungry. There is not a restaurant in this world that can feed you the sort of food that will satisfy you forever. The only bread available to us is perishing bread. Bread that cannot satisfy our appetite, cannot sate us. And of course, we're not just talking about physical bread, are we? With metaphorical bread as well. Anything in this world that you might hope would sustain you, that you might rely on for sustenance, will not last. Your friends, your family, your job, your position in society, your legacy, all of these things are equally perishing and therefore unable to satisfy us, certainly not satisfy us eternally. And in contrast with all of that perishing bread, Jesus stands up and says, I am the living bread, the bread that flourishes, the infinite, the insatiable bread, the bread that when you eat it will give you eternal life, and you will be satisfied. So that's the first thing I think Jesus is saying in this passage. And then secondly, he says this the bread that Jesus will give us so that the world may live is none other than his flesh. There's no getting around the fact that this is a very strange thing to say. It's strange for us to hear it in the 21st century, and it was strange for those people in the first century. We read in our passage that there was a dispute among the people who heard it, saying this. Did you misspeak, Jesus? And no, he doubles down. He doubles down in this passage and says, Whoever eats me will live because of me. Now, if you're familiar with the Christian story, and if you've been to church for a while, you might say, Ah, yes. Well, when Jesus talks of his flesh and giving of his flesh for the whole world, we know that that's a reference to his crucifixion, his death, and his resurrection. But still, I'm not sure that helps us get to the bottom of what's going on in this passage. We have to eat, Jesus is crucified and resurrected flesh. I'm not sure what that means. Jesus sustains us with the living bread as we feed on his death and resurrection. What could it mean to feed on Jesus? To unpack this a little bit, I'd like to go somewhere a bit strange, so please do bear with me. When I was at university, I became a big fan of zombie movies. There were a number of really excellent zombie movies that came out in the early 2000s. In 2002, there was a film called 28 Days Later, and in 2004, a movie called Dawn of the Dead. And I really enjoyed these movies because what I realized was that a good zombie movie isn't actually about the gore and the guts. There is a more subtle subtext at work here. Really, a good zombie movie is a commentary on the human condition. It asks us the question: what would our society be like if we were reduced to our base instincts? What would it be like to live in America or in England in the contemporary 21st century if all the niceties of society were removed and we were reduced to our animal base instincts? That is why Dawn of the Dead is set in a shopping center. They didn't just choose that location out of thin air, they chose it because it's one of the central places the society exists in modernity. Our society and our economy only functions when every member is to some degree producing and consuming. And in principle, that's all well and good. But there is a problem that arises when our society trains us and conditions us to behave in a particular way towards one another and the world around us. When we no longer see our fellow human beings as people made in the image of God, we end up seeing everything people, animals, the natural world, as nothing more than goods and services, resources ready for our consumption and available at a price. So we walk into the world expecting to find things that we can consume. It's because of the economy in which we live. Customers who are there to receive goods and services and to consume those goods and services for the good of the economy. Something happens when we don't get to consume what we want, when the customer service isn't as good as we've come to expect. So let me ask you, what happened the last time you received bad service in a restaurant or a coffee shop? Or you found yourself trying to phone a bank and you got through to a call center overseas, or you had to wait too long in the GP practice, or someone cut you up in traffic? Were you able to remember that the person in front of you is a child of God? Or did you find yourself lashing out, returning to some of those animal instincts? And literally, well, excuse me, not literally, but metaphorically, choosing to take a chunk out of that person. The subtext of a good zombie movie is this if we live long enough in an economy and society obsessed with consumerism, we end up consuming one another, biting chunks out of each other. It's a criticism of our society that says that our economy, which in principle is all well and good, has become inverted and a wasting disease is spreading across this planet, so that now almost any interaction can become zombified. We no longer see a person or a beautiful natural world, we see things that we can eat, and we hope that in doing that they will sustain us. Okay, with that rather stark image in your mind, let's return to the passage and see if it makes more sense. Jesus says, I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever, and the bread that I give for the life of the world is my flesh. Jesus is the living bread in contrast with all the other things in this world that we might desire, that we might consume, that we might hope will satisfy us. It is normal to feel the need to feel a need to be sustained. We are not self-sustaining creatures. We are finite, we are broken, we need support, we need nutrients. But everything in this world, anything that you can put your hand on, is perishing, just like us. And so our consumption of those things cannot satisfy. We build societies and economies based on production and consumption, and they fail us time and time again because they cannot sustain themselves and they cannot satisfy us. And Jesus knows this, and so he walks into the center of a horde of zombies and opens himself up and says, Feed on me. I am the only thing that can sustain and satisfy. I am the living bread, I am the only food that leads to eternal life. Now, in all zombie movies, we know what happens when someone gets bitten. The sickness is catching. The person is bitten, and it's only a matter of time before they start biting and consuming those around them. This is the process of our natural world. Sickness is catching. The good news this morning is that when Jesus invites zombies like you and I to eat him, they become more than human. The healing is catching. Do you remember the story of the person with leprosy? All of their life, everyone that they touch catches leprosy. And when Jesus touches them, they receive his healing. It is only when Jesus invites us to eat on him, to consume him, that we can return to our humanity. So that's the invitation this morning. Come to the table and feast on Jesus' death and resurrection and find your humanity restored. Come to the table, eat the bread of life, consume the living bread, and it will transform you. It will make you more human and it will set you free. Amen.