Sunday Reflection with Fr Robin Gibbons - 9 August 2015
19th Sunday of Ordinary Time
The bread of life sayings in John's Gospel often trouble people who wonder just what Jesus actually meant, it is complicated because we come to the scriptures with a whole load of pre-conceptions and of course our own life of faith. So, for those Christians who have a high doctrine of the Eucharist the link between bread of life, the abiding presence of Jesus and food for immortality is there in our doctrine.
And yet we always need to make doctrine and the Scriptures part of who we are, something that nourishes us on a faith level each day. We all encounter life in real time, in our own and others person, in places that matter to us and with all kinds of local and global issues that impinge on our daily existence. The bread of life is somehow meant to feed us on many levels.
It's taken me all my life up to this point, to really understand what the Eucharist is. How being one raised in the Catholic tradition and now serving as a priest in part of its eastern family an ancient richness has been given me one which shows me, if nobody else, that even in the ways we approach belief in the Eucharist and the holy elements can vary.
What do I mean? Simply that there are so many aspects to our encounter with God in Christ. I've just finished four weeks of directing one of our Oxford University International Summer Schools, tough work, for four weeks I have had to adjust to nearly 320 very different peoples demands, We have to agree on some basic boundaries and ways of getting on, very much as Paul writes to the Ephesians, always trying to be friends no matter what! It also means continually adjusting ways in which we approach to the 'other' according to their personality, understanding and of course cultural expectations.
Isn't that like the approach of God through Jesus to us with the bread of life? There is no one way of defining it because it is about 'communion', the deep entering into relationship with Christ that goes on all our life and yet will only be fully understood in the Kingdom. Jesus gives us real food that intimately connects us to him; he offers us friendship with him, but above all the hope and promise of the resurrection to eternal life!