Today is a yet another Sunday when we are reading and hearing about bread. It all has been building up from feeding lots of people, parallels with Moses and the manna, Jesus’ followers quizzing him about his motives and purposes. Today this narrative culminates in the direct statement: ‘I am the bread of life <…> whoever eats of this bread will live forever. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh’. This is where this business of eating bread is beginning to have more explicitly eucharistic undertones. By this point we are shown that bread is physical food, spiritual food and now also the body of Christ to keep those eating it in eternal life. This is why we are gathered here on Sundays – to eat the bread and drink the wine to be nourished in body and in soul. In a few moments we will indeed be receiving a sip of wine and a wafer.
At the ordination of priests this year, which was the day before mine, the preacher, Shemil Mathew, remarked on a contrast between the amazing feast Jesus is offering and the measly little wafer we are actually getting in the church on a Sunday. Where is the generosity of Christ reflected in our churches? Where is the taste of the heavenly banquet or even just some manna? He did have a very good point, but in this sermon I would like to defend the measly little wafer and what it means to eat it. Let’s start with some physical parameters and especially the idea of being fed.
The main reason any of us would eat anything is to get energy from it, including the bread Jesus gives. The Eucharistic liturgy states this explicitly: the bread – the wafer – is there to feed us. In our Gospel reading last week Jesus rebuked his followers saying that they were only looking for him because they’d had their fill when he fed them with loaves and fishes and not because of the miracles he performed. But having our food is important and everything we consume adds to our health and wellbeing. You all will have heard that the recommended energy intake for adults is around 2000kcal per day, give or take. There is a bit of a debate around precise energy value of a communion wafer but a calculation which looks quite reasonable reveals that 0.88 calories per wafer is about right. This means that to have your fill and be properly fed with wafers we would need to eat just under 2.5 million of them, which of course is not feasible.
The other thing stated in the liturgy is that we are eating the body of Christ. Someone rather fascinating I have found online has calculated how many wafers one has to eat to have consumed an equivalent of the body of Christ, assuming that Jesus weighed around 100 pounds of which 10 pounds is the weight of his blood which we of course drink separately. The result is 180,000 wafers, and if we were to receive communion daily, consuming the whole body would apparently take over 492 years. Not quite realistic either.
So it looks like the tiny little wafer falls short of our expectations in two very important aspects: it does not quite feed us and it is not quite the body of Christ. Shemil, the preacher, is right: this is extremely underwhelming.
Except perhaps the fact that the wafer is small and insignificant is rather the point. Something unimportant from which great power flows is a strong Biblical motif: look at the shepherd David who defeated Goliath, Moses who wasn’t a good public speaker and became a great prophet, Rahab, a prostitute, who helped Israel settle in the Promised Land, young Mary who accepted her calling to become the God-bearer, virtually every person who follows Jesus and, having been a sinner, becomes a saint. Finally, the multiplication of loaves and fishes we heard about two weeks ago and the parable of the mustard seed point us in the same direction: that which was almost nothing becomes everything.
If the kingdom of God can be contained in a mustard seed why can’t the glory of Christ be contained in a wafer? If God can be enclosed in Mary’s womb why can’t Christ’s whole body be enclosed in a wafer?
The wafer is like a divine Tardis, and as well as being bigger on the inside then it seems at first glance, it also has many other benefits.
Firstly, even the fact that each of us receives one small piece out of however many millions are produced and distributed to thousands of churches is such a good symbol of Christian unity. Just as each wafer is one of many small pieces of Christ’s flesh so we all are many small parts of one body, a beautiful Pauline image!
Secondly, being able to gratefully receive so little is a sign of humility. In the age where we can choose from so many things and buy volumes of stuff this is a big deal. As someone who is regularly flustered by a simple experience of shopping for clothes, I find such comfort in just taking what I am given. But on a societal level, this experience is probably unique: where else would we not have the power to choose what we want? I cannot think of anything other than the act of receiving the wafer into our hands stretched out in humility. This is also a direct fulfilment of what we ask God in the Lord’s prayer – simply give us our daily bread and we will be grateful to receive.
The fact that we are given exactly the same wafer is a powerful statement of equality. You and I are parts of the same body, with different roles and functions, but we are fundamentally the same. Through this, the Eucharist is the greatest celebration of both diversity and equality! And where else would we see this unfold so profoundly but in any church on a Sunday? As Ruth was saying to us last week, it is difficult to remain yourself under the social pressure to conform and become someone else, but being here today an eating this bread is exactly what helps us do this.
I think the tiny wafer with its profound contents parallels human smallness, which is filled with a divine core and purpose. Like the wafer that has within it that which we cannot comprehend, the fragility and brevity of human existence contains in it might and eternity. By receiving the little wafer we mirror its significance. We who share Christ’s body live his risen life, as one of the post-communion prayers says. In our small weak bodies, something greater than us is sustained. And acknowledging this allows us to find the power and purpose in our smallness and to take the step from ‘Who am I to make a difference?’ to the great biblical ‘Here I am. Send me’.
And I think the same can be said about our communities. In the age of globalisation and in the face of helplessness against big agendas and worldwide problems, we have started to rediscover a sense of purpose in our smallness, locality, community and belonging – to shop locally, to grow our own, to be a neighbourhood. We don’t know how much of a difference we may make in the greater scheme of things, but we are learning to be content with doing what we can. Something still needs addressing though. While for years we have been daily concerned with and shocked by the events from around the whole world, – wars, famine and global warming – we seem to have missed the tensions on our own doorstep and in the recent days have seen hatred and destruction poured out onto the streets in the neighbouring towns and cities. I wonder if this is a wake-up call for us to be more committed to where we live and to each other. Here in Barnard Castle we may not have dramatic divisions over faith or ethnicity, but we do have our differences – every community does. While we are doing a good job learning to be mindful of economy and ecology on a local level, we now ought to be even more mindful of the people around us. The reading from the Ephesians very helpfully teaches us precisely how to be a good community, how to live together well, how to be useful, forgiving, generous, kind, compassionate. It is so simple, so small and unambitious, but because of it – so real and so profound. I frequently torture myself by thinking of what is becoming of the world, get very invested in the news about the places I have never been to and people I have never met but before I go mad obsessing over the problems of the world, I should really start here, in Barnard Castle, where I am called to live and to serve. And I think that through the example of the tiny wafer which contains and reveals God’s glory, we all are called to discover the profound purposes of God in familiar places and ordinary people, in our local community. After all, if we see Christ in this little wafer, of course we will be able to see Christ in each other. Amen.
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