‘Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day;’

This is the phenomenal promise that God gives to us. I think one of the huge problems of this is, how can something so simple lead to such a great gift. Later in the service we will be invited to share in the bread and wine and all we have to do is get up and go forward and eat the piece of bread that we will be given and then take a sip of the wine and then return to your place. Because you do this then you will be raised to life on the last day. Sometimes people can make belief in God so complicated that it leaves us confused and wondering whether we will ever succeed as a Christian.

The simple truth is that God, in the person of Jesus has done all the hard work for us. He taught his disciples for about three years, was arrested, tried and was executed, and on the third day rose again. He then tasked those disciples with spreading the word to the ends of the earth. As his disciples we are continuing to spread the word about Jesus. The challenge that he laid before those first disciples remains the same throughout the ages.

We are called to invite people to join us in eating the bread and drinking the wine, thus receiving the body and blood of Jesus our Saviour. I hope all of us want to learn more about Jesus by studying the gospels that tell his story and to hear what some early Christians wrote about their faith to friends in different churches in the first century.

We also need to remember that Jesus was a Jew and that his Jewish faith was important to him and therefore we need to study the Old Testament of the Bible which tells us about the journey of Jewish believers from Abraham to Jesus.

But we must always return to the rock of our faith - in the words of one of our Eucharistic Prayers:

“as we do what you told us, we open our hearts to him, we remember how he died and rose again to live now in us. Together with him, we offer you these gifts; in them we give you ourselves.

Send your holy spirit on us and on this bread, and this wine that they may be the body and blood of Christ, and that, sharing your life, we may travel in your company to our journey's end.” Amen.

Andrew SSL