The Experience and the Meaning
Maundy Thursday homily
1 Corinthians 11.23-26
Do this in remembrance of me 1 Cor 11.24.
They say you either love it or hate – Marmite that is. Well, I love it. Its black gooeyness and saltiness on warm buttered toast takes me straight back to tea-time at dusk in my Gran’s coal-fired, warm parlour.
Or Camp Chicory and Coffee essence – the smell of it puts me back at the Printing Works with my mum. As the youngest employee she had to make the morning coffee for the whole staff. As a school kid I would sometimes go and help her. The smell of Camp Coffee stirs in me the smell of printers ink, coated paper, and book glue – the years roll back and I’m there again; standing on the concrete floor watching the paper zoom through the litho press.
Somebody mentioned to me the other day Nestlé’s condensed milk. We talked about how its best served and agreed that the thing to do is to open the tin and then leave it for a day or two in the fridge to evaporate a bit. Not a healthy thing to do with a tin can, I expect, but as a teenager that was a real treat. The condensed milk goes like semi-liquid toffee. Magical stuff! At the time I did a lot of quite heavy manual work in a small market garden and that was a sticky sweet delight to keep me going. Just the thought of it conjures up the heavy air of tomato filled greenhouses, the strange warmth of well-tilled soil on a summer’s evening, and the scent of roses, chrysanths, and runner beans.
I’m sure that you can tell a similar tale. Foods carry with them so much more than mere nutrition. Common things bear uncommon meanings. The taste, the texture, the smell, the consistency, the colour, and the eating tells of other things – other textures, times, and experiences. This is always the way with people. We understand and experience one kind of thing in the light of another kind of thing. Indeed, that’s how we think; how we construct our world. One thing leans, as it were, on another. Our thoughts, our very vision of what it is to be alive in this world depends on a web of significance that we weave, but most of the time we don’t even notice it.
Jesus said, ‘Do this in remembrance of me.’ In doing something, in sharing something, in eating something – you will be there, not just in the habitual things done in church but standing next to Jesus. A tiny bit of un-yeasted bread and a sip of wine will be enough – in those things you will taste something else; in those things the years will roll back (no matter how long); in those things what you do now will speak to your heart and mind of other things done; in those things the company you now keep will be but a fragment of a larger community of faithful eaters and drinkers across the centuries.
Not Marmite, or Camp Coffee, or condensed milk – or whatever taste connects in your experience – but the very bread of heaven and the heady wine of God’s new kingdom.
Bishop John Robinson summed it up years ago in this way:
"The Holy Communion is the point at which the common, the communal becomes the carrier of the unconditional as the Christ makes himself known in the breaking and sharing of bread. Holy Communion is communion, community-life, in depth at the level at which we are not merely in human fellowship but 'in Christ' ..."
(Honest to God, 1963)
They say you either love it or hate – Marmite that is. Well, I love it. Its black gooeyness and saltiness on warm buttered toast takes me straight back to tea-time at dusk in my Gran’s coal-fired, warm parlour.
Or Camp Chicory and Coffee essence – the smell of it puts me back at the Printing Works with my mum. As the youngest employee she had to make the morning coffee for the whole staff. As a school kid I would sometimes go and help her. The smell of Camp Coffee stirs in me the smell of printers ink, coated paper, and book glue – the years roll back and I’m there again; standing on the concrete floor watching the paper zoom through the litho press.
Somebody mentioned to me the other day Nestlé’s condensed milk. We talked about how its best served and agreed that the thing to do is to open the tin and then leave it for a day or two in the fridge to evaporate a bit. Not a healthy thing to do with a tin can, I expect, but as a teenager that was a real treat. The condensed milk goes like semi-liquid toffee. Magical stuff! At the time I did a lot of quite heavy manual work in a small market garden and that was a sticky sweet delight to keep me going. Just the thought of it conjures up the heavy air of tomato filled greenhouses, the strange warmth of well-tilled soil on a summer’s evening, and the scent of roses, chrysanths, and runner beans.
I’m sure that you can tell a similar tale. Foods carry with them so much more than mere nutrition. Common things bear uncommon meanings. The taste, the texture, the smell, the consistency, the colour, and the eating tells of other things – other textures, times, and experiences. This is always the way with people. We understand and experience one kind of thing in the light of another kind of thing. Indeed, that’s how we think; how we construct our world. One thing leans, as it were, on another. Our thoughts, our very vision of what it is to be alive in this world depends on a web of significance that we weave, but most of the time we don’t even notice it.
Jesus said, ‘Do this in remembrance of me.’ In doing something, in sharing something, in eating something – you will be there, not just in the habitual things done in church but standing next to Jesus. A tiny bit of un-yeasted bread and a sip of wine will be enough – in those things you will taste something else; in those things the years will roll back (no matter how long); in those things what you do now will speak to your heart and mind of other things done; in those things the company you now keep will be but a fragment of a larger community of faithful eaters and drinkers across the centuries.
Not Marmite, or Camp Coffee, or condensed milk – or whatever taste connects in your experience – but the very bread of heaven and the heady wine of God’s new kingdom.
Bishop John Robinson summed it up years ago in this way:
"The Holy Communion is the point at which the common, the communal becomes the carrier of the unconditional as the Christ makes himself known in the breaking and sharing of bread. Holy Communion is communion, community-life, in depth at the level at which we are not merely in human fellowship but 'in Christ' ..."
(Honest to God, 1963)