The Parish Church of St John-at-Hampstead

Dining at the high table of an Oxford or Cambridge college can be a daunting experience; processing past the curious eyes of the students sitting at the low tables; manoeuvring to find a place next to someone you might just be able to talk to without feeling out of your depth; standing for the grace in Latin, which can be so brief that by the time the students have all noisily stood up, the high table has sat down again and no-one really knows what has been said; it could just as well have been ‘Benedictine, Benny Goodman’ as ‘Benedictus benidicat’ – and some times is; and then you have to remember which shoulder you will served over and how to crack the surface of the crème brulee without scattering pieces of burnt sugar over your neighbours; if you are lucky it will have been a pleasant social and ceremonious experience; if you find yourself sitting next to a taciturn Croatian economist on one side and, on the other, the English don who has for the whole meal remained deep in conversation with his guest – a famous novelist – you may well wish you had eaten fish and chips in your room.
There is at least one Oxford College in which all this happens with its back to an altar. On one side of a high medieval panelled wall there is the high table of the dining hall; on the other side of that wall there is the high altar of the chapel, so that it is possible to go straight from receiving communion on one side of the wall, to being served cauliflower and stilton soup on the other. On each side of the wall certain signs, customs, costumes and set words are observed. On one side vestments like these, on the other side academic gowns; on one side the words of the liturgy on the other an obscure Latin grace and more or less observed codes of conversation; on one side servers, on the other the formally dressed college staff. The dining hall with its numerous pictures of former wardens looking down on the present body of students and dons, is the setting for patterns of behaviour, signs and tokens of corporate membership and shared tradition. In the eyes of an outsider it would give the college a particular identity; and if such an observer learnt to read the signs it might tell him a lot more about the place than its residents were conscious of.
That is one of the functions of ritual and symbolism – to encapsulate meaning in a concentrated form – to express all in one go what it would take pages to describe in words. So we might ask what is encapsulated in what happens on the altar side of that college wall? What is encapsulated here this morning? The two sides of that medieval wall have at least one thing in common – a meal. What the high table meal symbolises may be dying – a form of corporate academic life which sits inappropriately in the modern world. What is symbolised at our altar has moved rather far from the meal it represents – perhaps too far. This Eucharist recalls a whole history of dining; the Passover meals eaten by Hebrew slaves the night they escape from Egypt to the promised land; the meal they gather in the wilderness, whose name ‘Manna’ is derived in Hebrew from the question they ask, ‘What is it?’ Then there are all the meals which Jesus ate both with friends, enemies and social outcasts; there is the feeding of the multitude with bread and fish in the wilderness; and so finally all these meals are drawn together in the symbolism of the last supper. So the first thing to say about this Eucharist is that its meaning cannot be summed up in an abstract statement of faith or doctrine, as, for example, the doctrine of transubstantiation which has caused so much argument and division between Christians.
The meaning of this Eucharist starts to be found in a succession of stories about significant meals. The Passover meal consists of food prepared and eaten in haste, food for a journey to freedom. The manna in the wilderness is both common and mysterious. It is like the dried drops of a sweet substance exuded by tamarisk trees in the Sinai peninsula. And yet in the story it comes in daily and abundant quantities at the time it is most needed. It looks familiar but it forces people to wonder what it is really. It straddles the boundary between the other and the given. The meals Jesus takes with all kinds of people are somewhat similar in that Jesus is the homeless, stranger, the person about whose identity people remain uncertain, ‘Who is he? What manner of man is this?’ And yet he eats with them; he doesn’t observe rules about clean plates or clean hands, and tells surprising stories about familiar things. He takes old stories and applies them to himself. He calls himself, ‘The bread of life which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world’. He leads people towards a new way of life emerging from the story of Israel and yet based on a new sign of healing and fellowship – the sign of the Last Supper. In this supper the beloved son of God hands himself over to the risk of rejection and death – ‘This is my body, this is my blood, given for you.’ And through this life giving self commitment by God’s son, a new community comes into being which is committed to perpetuating this solidarity of giving and receiving; He blessed the bread broke it and gave it to them and they did eat and were satisfied.
So as we receive bread and wine this morning we participate for ourselves in all these stories. We receive food for a journey away from ways of life which trap or enslave us into a new experience of freedom and transformation. We receive something very ordinary which brings us to the threshold of the awesome otherness of divine glory. We sit down in the wilderness of the world and find nourishment and companionship. We are incorporated into the body of Christ; we belong to the community of those who are committed to finding more and more ways of giving and receiving; we are a community dedicated to more truthful, loving, hopeful, healing and faithful ways of life lived in God.
And just as that Oxford dining hall contained portraits of former wardens looking down on the diners, so pictures of Jesus and his saints look down on us from the stained glass above us. And remembering the etiquette of that high table, we might remember that just as courteous diners should be careful to communicate with those sitting on their right and left, so as we communicate together at this altar rail we ought at least to know all the people who ever kneel on our left or right hand for that is the courtesy of the kingdom of God. Amen