for the Life of the world
This week marks the last of our marathon reading of John chapter 6 -- John's version of Jesus describing himself as food for the world. 'I am the bread of Life.'
The only additional reflection I'd have this week is to ask what the Life is to which Jesus points, which he incarnates, and into which he constantly invites us. Rather than an intellectualized assertion about identity ('I am bread') inherited via the matrix of later Christian eucharistic theologies, I find myself asking: what is this Life? And, how is Jesus it?
To what does he point us?
The sacrament must point beyond itself, otherwise it is simple idolatry -- as, indeed, it has been from time to time in Christian usage.
As one of the hymns we sing tomorrow puts it, 'So, Lord, at length, when sacraments shall cease...' It looks to that point in the God-time-future-continuum when all comes fully into Being.
That's what a sacrament does - eucharist and baptism, both, as well as other acts of the community. The meal is fully present among and for and within us all, and also points further out, to the place and time where All-Is-Sacrament.
As it already is. I am the Bread of Life so that you may break me open, and learn to eat this Life now, and see all created things as brimming with this Life, now.
This seeing-and-eating is the constant source of our renewal, for the sake of all things. This table's bounty can not be exhausted. The 'sacrament' is both fully-full-itself and always pointing beyond our gathering to God's ever-more-fullness drawing us in.
And this Bread is Life, for the Life of the World, he adds.
We are this Body, as well -- both fully so and also always becoming more so, opening ourselves to this presence that offers itself to us, again and again.
We are this Body, baptized into death-and-resurrection, broken open for the Life of the World.
Jesus forms and schools us to learn to be a sacrament - a sign, a means of grace and transformation for the world - pointing beyond ourselves.
Feed others, and be fed.