Ordinary XXXI: We All Share in the One Bread

In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

This week, we again have a parable that contrasts God’s economy with the world’s.

Last week, the Gospel told us about the pharisee and the tax collector.The pharisee elevates his virtues before God and the tax collector who acknowledges his own sinfulness.

God’s economy up-ends our expectations of who is or isn’t exalted; it is actually the penitent tax collector whom God lifts up.

This week, we have another story about a tax collector, Zaccaheus. And again, our expectations are up-ended.

It is perhaps true that Zaccheus, as a tax collector, supports a corrupt system. But Jesus insists on staying with him.

The people grumble that Jesus is staying with a sinner, but the encounter between Jesus and Zaccaheus leads to a conversion, salvation and transformation.

What both stories—the tax collector and Pharisee and Zaccheus and Jesus—share in common is the theme of self-righteousness: the privileging of a narrow morality over the potential for connexion and transformation.

In other words, these stories contrast our lack of generosity and our tendency to exalt our own virtues—and exclude others—with God’s abundant grace and inclusion.

Our tendency to overestimate or promote our own moral purity is contrasted with Jesus’ desire to connect and transform.

This isn’t to diminish the culpability of the tax collectors, who were often rightly regarded as collaborators with an oppressive regime.

It also isn’t to diminish the theme of the redistribution of wealth in the story.

Zacchaeus’ conversion and his giving to the poor—and offering restitution to people he has defrauded—are not separate things. Justice and conversion are two sides of the same coin.

But it is precisely because Zaccheus’ profession puts him outside the bounds of acceptable behaviour for pious Jews that Jesus’ yearning to receive hospitality under Zaccheus’ roof is so powerful. 

Today, I want to draw a parallel between these themes of self-righteousness and narrow moralism and some things that are occurring in our Anglican Church in Australia.

I also want to unpack how our Parish Council’s response to these events is underpinned by our belief in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. 

What do we mean by Real Presence and why does it require us, as a Real-Presence-believing parish, to be inclusive?

I believe the behaviour of some in the hierarchy of our Church is a clear reflection of Pharisee values, rather than Gospel values.

Recently, the Archbishop of Sydney, Glenn Davies, asked people whose views on marriage equality differed from his own to leave the Anglican Communion.

Soon afterwards, the Archdiocese of Melbourne passed two contentious motions: one that offered its support for a schismatic sect of Confessing Anglicans in New Zealand and one that expressed sorrow over the Diocese of Wangaratta’s decision to bless civil marriages.

Our Anglican tradition has a fraught history with inclusion. Often we have failed to live the Gospel that we hold in trust.

But our underlying values are ecumenical: unity in diversity, accommodating difference and being respectful of the order of Bishops that holds us together. 

These are not just political or pragmatic values. We believe they reflect the ethos of the Gospel, where God’s authority is proved by love that comprehends and embraces difference.

In the Gospels, it is often the religious authorities who are singled out as being spiritually hardened and lacking in love and charity.

It is the religious authorities in Jerusalem who refuse to acknowledge Jesus as King when he rides into Jerusalem.

It is the religious authorities who exalt their own moral and spiritual purity over less pious Jews, Gentiles and social outcasts.

It is the religious authorities who criticise Jesus and his disciples for healing the sick on the Sabbath.

It is the religious authorities who, in the parable of the Good Samaritan, decide to walk past a seriously wounded man whom a Samaritan—a despised outcast—later saves.

It is the religious authorities who ultimately collaborate with the Romans to crucify Jesus.

What has happened in our Diocese and the Diocese of Sydney has much the same flavour as these Gospel examples.

We have the privileging of a narrow and doctrinaire vision of the Church that sets greater store in ritual—or in this instance moral—purity over Grace.

We have the rhetoric of division, which significantly hinders connexion and transformational love within the Body of Christ.

We have an entirely cynical use of political dog-whistling, or the politics of gesture, to marginalise and wound the people of God in their diversity.

This brings us to the recent Parish Council motion.

The parish council of St Peter’s has affirmed inclusion for LGTBI parishioners and rejected the Pharisees’ perspective of the Melbourne Synod, while expressing its solidarity with the Diocese of Wangaratta.

I want to concentrate on Parish Council’s deliberate use of the concept “Real Presence of Christ” as an underlying principle for this motion.

What do we mean by Real Presence?

Real, in this context, doesn’t just mean factual—although we do affirm Christ’s presence in the Eucharist to be a fact.

We might understand Real Presence to be another way of saying total presence.

We believe Christ is totally present in the Eucharist.

That means, we believe his body is in the Eucharist, his blood is in the Eucharist, his soul is in the Eucharist and his divinity is in the Eucharist.

Although really inseparable from one another, these parts of Christ, if you will, come together in this one Sacrament as they were inextricably united his human body.

In the Mass, what appears to be bread and wine is transformed by the words of Christ at the Last Supper and the workings of the Holy Spirit into the totality of Christ.

But why do we say this offering of Christ at the altar is the basis of our inclusion ethos, as we recently did in our parish council motion?

Because Christ is present during the Eucharist in various ways other than just his Real Presence in the Sacrament.

He is present in the person of the priest who offers the Mass.

He is present in the scripture, since it is he himself who speaks when the holy scriptures are read in the Church.

He is also present in us, the assembled people of this community, who eat his flesh and drink his blood and then proceed out into the world.

The Real Presence of the Sacrament irradiates Christ’s being out beyond the altar to the world.

It confers dignity and equality on us, the members of Christ’s mystical body.

Real Presence is thus not only a theological or spiritual reality but a social one.

It says something powerful not only about the Blessed Sacrament, but about we who partake of it, and of our duty to the wider community as members of Christ’s mystical body.

That duty is to build up and reflect the love of Christ in the world. This is where inclusion comes in.

It is easy enough, in a secular context, to speak of inclusion.

Such an ideal would be based on a humanist perspective of our common identity as human beings, and thus our shared need for community, connexion and dignity.

As Christians, the foundation of this ethos of inclusion is not our common humanity but our common being in the mystical Body of Christ, created in the image of God.

This is symbolised and caused by our partaking of the Blessed Sacrament.

As we share in the one Bread, so we who are many are made one, achieving equality as one body within the Eucharist.

That is why we celebrate the Mass, why we adore the Eucharist, and why we process the Sacrament for Corpus Christi.

Not only does God ask this of us as Christian duty—we know there can be no social action, no meaningful inclusion or equality without this foundation.

Anglo-Catholic Bishop Frank Weston illustrates this connexion between the Sacrament, our unity as Christians and the necessity for inclusive social action in his famous speech from the 1923 Anglo-Catholic Congress.

He says:

If you are prepared to fight for the right of adoring Jesus in his Blessed Sacrament, then you have … to come out from before your Tabernacle and walk with Christ mystically present in you, out into the streets of this country, and find the same Jesus in the people of your cities and your village. You cannot claim to worship Jesus in the Tabernacle, if you do not pity Jesus in the slum ... go out into the highways and the hedges where not even the bishops will try to hinder you. Go out and look for Jesus in the ragged, in the naked, in the oppressed and sweated, in those who have lost hope, in those who are struggling to make good. Look for Jesus. And when you see him, gird yourselves with his towel and try to wash their feet

This is what we mean when we say that our belief in the Real Presence of Christ requires us not only strive for unity within the people of God, but also to make the world a Tabernacle where the Body of Christ can be housed.

This is why we must include and value those who are oppressed, rejected and marginalised.

This is why we must resist the rhetoric of division. 

To return to the story of Zaccheus, the tax collector, the Gospels show us two ways we can respond to the world around us as a community of the faithful.

We can take the Pharisees’ route of the grumbling crowd in the story of Zaccheus, or the self-righteous Pharisee who exalts his own virtues in the Temple.

We can refuse hospitality to the outsider and sideline people who are different to us so we can maintain our own spiritual or moral purity.

We can choose to love letter of the Law, as we understand it, rather than open ourselves up to God’s superabundant grace.

Or, we can be a community of Real-Presence-believing Christians, striving to fashion the world as a Tabernacle where all are included in the mystical Body of Christ.

Amen.