by the Revd Terrie Robinson
Corpus Christi Eucharist
On Corpus Christi, as the Church remembers with thanksgiving the institution of Holy Communion, it's a good time to remind ourselves that within our Christian vocation there is a call to community, a sharing of one bread, one cup, and to see how that fits with the world as it is. That call to community, that call to sharing at the deepest level, seems to stand in stark contrast to a world that is fractured and fragmented. A world that finds it difficult to share. It seems to be a phenomenon of our time and our place, for example, that whilst our hearts may bleed for people who, through no decision-making of their own, become caught up in war or state-sponsored brutality, by the time even just a fraction of these same people come to our shores seeking sanctuary, they seem to metamorphose in our minds into freeloaders and scroungers who threaten our very existence. Something somewhere along the line of how we process information goes wrong. Somehow, somewhere along that line of communication which extends from a broken situation at one end to where it impacts directly on our lives, the passion and the compassion are lost. Communication fails, community fails.
John's Gospel is full of miscommunications. It's a feature of John's Gospel that people have difficulty communicating. Jesus has difficulty in communicating with the people around him; he offers his truths through stories and metaphors, but by the time they reach his listeners, the depth and the meaning have been lost on the way. When Jesus says "Destroy this temple and I will raise it again in three days" he's talking about his body, not a building. He's talking about the pain and the suffering of the Cross and then the rebuilding, the new life of the resurrection - all of which was to come. But Jesus' words are lost on his hearers who wonder what on earth he's on about because, after all, it took 46 years to build the temple - if it were destroyed, how could Jesus possibly build it up again in three days? The poetry and the pain and the ultimate joy of Jesus' meaning are lost. They don't find a home in his hearers' consciousness.
Elsewhere in John's Gospel, Jesus uses a metaphor about entering a sheepfold and he leaves his listeners baffled - "they did not understand what he was telling them," writes John. When Nicodemus visits Jesus at night and Jesus talks about being reborn in order to see the kingdom of God, Nicodemus wants to take him literally, "surely a man couldn't enter his mother's womb for a second time to be born!". The meaning of Jesus' message is lost. The communication fails. In fact, the whole of John's Gospel revolves around a failed communication - John introduces it in the opening verses of chapter 1: "The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it."
It's almost as if Jesus speaks in an alien language, and the pain of it, the power of it, the passion of it, the ultimate joy of it, don't reach the ones with whom he is trying to communicate. Maybe God is speaking to us - with pain, with power, with passion, in the people who hope to find safety and sanctuary in our country, people running from danger, from killing, torture, rape. Last year the top five nationalities who visited the Refugee Council's 'One Stop' services around the country were from Iraq, Somalia, Iran, Turkey and Zimbabwe - all countries with difficult human rights records or widespread civil unrest. Maybe God is speaking to us in these people who turn to us, but it's so much easier to believe the tabloid headlines and assume they're all bogus. So the communication fails. Community fails.
This week is Refugee Week and once again the organisations which promote this week are spending a great deal of energy trying to overturn some of the myths and misinformation which surround the whole issue of refugees and asylum-seeking in this country. Our work is to listen to them, to understand what we're hearing and make some effort to discern the truth. Because the trouble is, if God is speaking to us and we're not hearing him; if God is speaking to us through families torn apart and set on the run by civil conflict, or through the hundreds of unaccompanied refugee children who reach our shores, or through the desperate young men who hide in container lorries out of a deep desire to survive and flourish, if God is speaking through the running and the scared and we're not understanding his meaning; if communication fails and the pain and the passion and the holding out of possibilities are lost on us, then nothing changes and the world just remains fragmented. If we accept to live with the miscommunication, then we accept to live with the brokenness. Community fails.
But that's not our Christian vocation. As Christian people, we're not called to accept and live with brokenness. We share one bread, we share one cup. John's Gospel may well be full of miscommunications and misunderstood metaphors, and people who are puzzled and baffled by what Jesus is trying to communicate, but it's also a Gospel of great faith, faith in Jesus Christ as revealer of God, a God who calls us into a community which recognises the pain and feels the passion, a community which moves forward with the possibilities that God holds out to us.