Bread of Life
1991 (Year B), 7 April /
Easter 1
St Peter de Beauvoir Town
Religion seems to have taken a bit of a bashing just lately in the papers, who just love conflict and controversy. According to them, religion and things religious have come under attack by scientific discoveries, published this week. Religious thinkers have also have come off second best in a great debate with scientists. Nothing ever changes, in reality the same things were happening centuries ago as the church was feeling threatened by Galileo.
But this week scientists seem to have confirmed the origins of creation through an amazing discovery in space. We’ve known about the ‘Big Bang’ for years, that was at the start of creation. The great mystery was not how it all began. The problem apparently was what happened that fractional part of the second just after the bang. Now we know, or at least we can theorise. I don’t pretend to understand it at all, but some people do. It has to do with valleys and hills. Ripples and gravity.
The discussion, between scientists and theologians, which has been going on over the last few days has been portrayed by the press as if a great Goliath, science, who holds all the power and all the knowledge, has taken on an outdated and second rate David. The debate is being portrayed as if science if finally going to show religion up for what it really is, an out of date, redundant set of beliefs. Beliefs which have no relevance for life today.
Up to now ‘Our Side’ has not been doing tremendously well. But the fact is that it’s not as simple as the press would have us believe. The reality is that they have created conflict where none exists. There are limits to rational explanation and many scientists are humble enough to recognise this. Presumably this is why Einstein and Newton, for all their creative scientific work still felt able to accept God at the heart of creation.
The fact is that whilst science and the church are clearly concerned about the truth of nature of creation, science ceases to be interested when it has explained how it all happened. The church must be informed about this. It must know what science has discovered and rejoice in the fact that these external signs are being understood. For us however, something else is more important. We have to penetrate the inward meaning.
St John, in his gospel, says that Jesus himself was a clear example of this. Time and time again people stopped short at the outward presence of the man. They saw either a potential King or a mad blasphemer. They never got further than the immediate surface event and its impact on them. And so, ‘He was in the world … and the world knew him not. He came unto his own, and his own received him not.’
We have to be able to see that God is far bigger than ever we imagined. Bigger than any explanation of creation. And we have to be prepared to make a journey. We have to go beyond what we first see, in order to discover him present in creation. In the past we’ve tried to contain the divine in stories and theories about creation. They have limited our vision and we have missed seeing God.
The gospel is full of missed encounters and lost opportunities. It is heavy with the dullness of men and women who do not or will not see wide enough, or deep enough, even in their midst. We are so concerned with our needs, so absorbed by our own struggles, so intent upon our own designs that they fail to see the one who stands before us and offers us our heart’s desire.
And so, as we gaze on the world, we stop short at it, obsessed with the production of bread, rarely do we think about him whose gift it is. John’s Gospel, shows Jesus providing vast quantities of earthly bread for the hungry. They see only the bread. They miss the point entirely. ‘You seek me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves’.
God knows that we need bread, and he uses our need of earthly bread as a parable for something far more important. Our undeniable need for food which perishes is used by him as a way of drawing our attention to deeper needs – which the food of the earth can never satisfy. And our deepest need is to be united to the fount of all life, the source of all creation. Through the death and resurrection of Jesus that need has been met. Thanks be to God. AMEN