This sermon was never preached to a congregation. I wrote it for practice for the Tenth Sunday after Trinity 2021, and preached it on Zoom to my friend.

Image: ‘Adoration’ (Lino cut print) by the Rev’d Cécile

Gospel: John 6:35,41-51
Old Testament: I Kings 19:1-10

“The eucharist is not a prize for the perfect, but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the sick.” – Pope Francis (Evangelii Gaudium)

Elijah’s story in our Old Testament reading today begins with distress and ends with desolation.
It is between a dramatic demonstration of יהוה’s supremacy over Ba’al, and a story of intimate encounter, but has an altogether more human, more frail quality to it. It is the story of a scared, weak Elijah receiving bread from an angel, and tells us something about the way we receive Christ.

It begins with a מלאך, a messenger of Jezebel. They bring a threat of death to Elijah “this time tomorrow”. It prompts Elijah’s one-day flight into the midbar, where he lies under a broom tree and asks God that he might die. Then the Bible invites us into Elijah’s awakening: “Look at this, a מלאך struck him”. One day after Jezebel’s messenger threatens death in one day, and he prays for death, he is struck by a מלאך. What happened within Elijah as he woke up? Had he dreamed of Jezebel’s vengeance, or of his slow death from dehydration under the broom tree, or of nothing at all?
Did he wake pleased at the strike, one final moment of consciousness before his longed-for oblivion? Or had the sleep refreshed him, brought him up a little from the depth of depression so that his awakening was a panicking into his now regretful death?

As I said a few weeks ago, though. God will never leave you alone. God doesn’t abandon Elijah to his death, but rather sends his own מלאך to Elijah before any assassin reaches him. Elijah isn’t woken by the blow of death, but the nudge of awakening. “Get up. Eat.” Commands the angel. Twice this happens, until Elijah’s strength is restored enough to continue on his journey to חרב, the mountain called desolation.

The angel behaves like a good comforter and supporter, not trying to engage inappropriately with the affairs of the sufferer, but providing necessities and giving Elijah two small, completable tasks in the face of his overwhelming, painful, costly call.

It is noteworthy that the comfort sent when Elijah is at his lowest isn’t a sentence of affirmation “You’re not worse than your ancestors.” Or “You did the right thing.”, but rather the very physical concession of frailty and mortality that is simple nourishment.

Our gospel reading tells us the same thing. Jesus is the bread of life, and it isn’t in something ethereal like a magic spell or hearing his teaching that life is found, but in the very ingesting of his flesh.

This is the scandal of the eucharist: even the most symbolic reading of it must break down into something literal. Even if the bread and wine never become Jesus’ flesh and blood, they are broken down by the communicant’s digestive system and become the flesh and blood of a member of the body of Christ. It can’t just be symbolic of sustenance either, the carbohydrates are really broken down and really used by the body as real energy. The symbolic and the practical coincide in this sacrament.

It is also noteworthy that God doesn’t send food and drink to Elijah in the previous passage as a reward for defeating the priests of Ba’al, when Elijah is at his highest. God sends food and drink when Elijah is at his lowest.

This too, is the scandal of the eucharist: it is the feast to which tax collectors and sinners are invited; it is the royal banquet scorned by nobility and attended by beggars; it is not a prize for the perfect, but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the sick.

God has this strange habit of meeting with us when we’re at our worst. Elijah will travel from despair to desolation to hear that still, small voice. Jesus makes his first ἐγω εἰμι claim of divinity to a hungry, ignorant crowd that just wants bread. He associates with the worst in society, telling his critics that it is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.

The eucharist, this sacred mystery, is our restorative food for the journey. It is the small, completable, healthy task when we are at our lowest. It is our encounter with God at Jesus’ meal of desolation. It is not a prize for the perfect, but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the sick.