A sermon for the Third Sunday of Easter, recorded in the dining room of Sherborne Vicarage by Canon Eric Woods, 26 April 2020.

There is a rubric in the Book of Common Prayer, today more honoured in the breach than in the observance, which declares, quite uncompromisingly, ‘And note, that every Parishioner shall communicate at the least three times in the year, of which Easter to be one.’ We Anglicans tend not to go in for what our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters call ‘Holy Days of Obligation’, but we do have one, and that is Easter Day, when to make your communion is part of your sacred duty as a member of the Church. This year it has been painful to so many of us not to be able to make our communion in our parish church.

But is that rubric just a hangover from the centralising days of the Tudor monarchy, or does it go back to medieval times, or even earlier? When did the first Easter Communion take place? Well, the answer is that the first Easter Communion, or something remarkably like it, took place at a little village called Emmaus on the day of our Lord’s resurrection, when he shared an evening meal with two of his followers and ‘was known to them in the breaking of bread.’ Those two people were obscure, unknown disciples – just ordinary Christians like ourselves. The place was a humble village home. There it was that Jesus ‘took bread and said the blessing, broke the bread and offered it to them.’ [Luke 24:30], and in the breaking of the bread their eyes were opened and they knew the risen Lord.

To Jesus, bread was always an important symbol. He knew that without bread people go hungry, and to feed the hungry was important to him. Five loaves and two small fish were the material, so to speak, of that dramatic miracle of the feeding of the five thousand, and one of the most moving of his resurrection appearances was that fish picnic on the shore of Lake Tiberias. Fish and bread again, and the tired and hungry fishermen fed. To Jesus there was no great divide between physical hunger and spiritual hunger, which is why I so often quote the Russian Orthodox theologian Nicholas Berdyaev, who said ‘Bread for myself is a material problem; bread for other people is a spiritual problem.’ Feeding the hungry in our Link Provinces of Sudan and South Sudan, as in so many drought-stricken or war-torn parts of the world and even in our own land and our own town, is for the Christian a spiritual matter, a spiritual duty.

And so it was that, when he came to write his Gospel, the Apostle John remembered how Jesus used to refer to himself as the ‘Bread of Life’. John himself is the only Gospel writer to give us no account of the Last Supper on that first Maundy Thursday, but that is perhaps because for John the whole of Jesus’ life and the whole of his teaching was a demonstration of the truth that he is indeed the Bread of Life. It is Jesus Christ who sustains us spiritually, and without him our souls starve. Look around at all the well-fed people you know, well-housed and well-clothed. Can you not see their starving, emaciated souls? For them, if they did but know it, Jesus is the Bread of Life. And so it was hardly surprising when in the Upper Room, as the other three Evangelists recall, Jesus took bread and gave it to his disciples with the words ‘Take, eat, this is my body which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ The wafer of bread I will consecrate this morning symbolises Christ’s gift of himself to you, Christ the Bread of Life. The bread speaks of the living Lord, just as it did on that first Easter Day at Emmaus.