Not a Symbol - Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost
Author: Pastor Scott Schul
August 11, 2024
Our world is awash in symbols. Not “cymbals” like drummers smash and
crash. I’m talking about symbols with an
“s,” things that represent other things. Symbols are such a common communication tool
that we rarely give them much thought. But
we do know them when we see them.
For example, when you’re driving, you
know you can’t park in a space marked with an illustration of a person in a
wheelchair unless you have special authorization to do so. Another example: the Olympics. It’s full of symbols. Each nation’s athletes wear their country’s
colors. And as they receive their
medals, we see the flags and hear the national anthems. It’s all more than just colors, fabric, and
pretty songs. These are symbols which
represent that nation’s character, values, and accomplishments.
Symbols are also a crucial part of our
faith. In the earliest days of the
Christian movement, not long after Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection,
Christians began using the symbol of a fish to secretly signal where
they would meet and worship, because it was a time when Christians were being
hunted down and killed. Why a fish? Because the letters that spelled “fish” in
Greek formed the first letter of the phrase “Jesus Christ Son of God Savior.” Even today people still use that symbol in
bumper stickers and jewelry to tell the world that they are followers of Jesus.
Jesus himself frequently used symbols
in his teaching. One example is the lamb. Sometimes he symbolically portrayed himself as the lamb, to highlight that he would become a sacrifice that would destroy
sin, just as lambs were offered as sin sacrifices in the temple. At other times he used lambs as symbols for us:
vulnerable, defenseless, and desperately needing our Jesus, who would act like
another powerful Biblical symbol: our Good Shepherd. Symbols representing the lamb and the
shepherd’s crook are right here in our sanctuary today, on that banner.
Our church and especially our
sanctuary are full of symbols. The most
prominent and important one is of course the cross. Geometrically, it’s a simple design of two
lines intersecting at a 90-degree angle. But as a theological symbol, it is richly complex. The cross tells the story of Jesus’s
sacrificial love, a love so deep and so rich that he would willingly give
himself up to the most humiliating and painful death of his era, so that we,
who deserve so little, might gain eternal victory over sin and death, and
receive the gift of eternal life. One
could persuasively argue that all of God’s Word in the Bible is summed up in that
single powerful symbol.
Grace’s sanctuary is saturated with
other Christian symbols too. Here on the
pulpit you see the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, Alpha and
Omega. In the Book of Revelation Jesus
identifies himself with those letters to express his divine totality,
sovereignty, and timelessness, and his reassuring promise that he is our
beginning and our end.1 And look
at our altar. Three steps lead to
the top, and the table itself has three legs. Things in threes symbolize the Holy Trinity:
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Our sanctuary is full of nature
references too: the Tree of Life, the Sound Clouds, and the 118 sound portals
of our pipe organ, which remind me of a beehive. These symbols remind us, as St. Paul and so
many of the early Church’s theologians taught, that God is revealed to us
through the created world.2 And don’t overlook the three windows along the courtyard wall of the
sanctuary, which are teeming with symbols telling our Triune God’s story. It’s well worth your time to pause and ponder
at those colorful windows. They
masterfully teach our faith through symbols.
And so in a church building full of
symbols, and in a religion that relies so heavily on symbols to teach and tell
its story, it’s tempting to conclude that everything about Christianity
is merely symbolic. But the birth of
Jesus is not a symbol. On Christmas Eve
we give thanks for a real baby of flesh and blood, born to Mary. On Good Friday, we don’t just philosophize
about the meaning of death. We solemnly
mark the crucifixion of a real man of flesh and blood. On Easter Sunday, we don’t celebrate a generic
symbol of rebirth and new life. We
celebrate that a real flesh-and-blood man rose from death, and with new
breath in his lungs, breathed new life into a movement the Romans could not
kill, a movement that quickly swept across the globe and which has gathered us
here today. Yes, symbols may tell and
teach Jesus’s story, but he is no symbol. He was a real man who, as we say in our
liturgy, died, rose, and will come again.
But there is one more thing that
draws us together here, and that is Holy Communion. Our Catholic friends refer to communion as
the “source and summit” of the faith, a view we Lutherans largely share. It’s an important topic for us to consider,
because we are in the midst of five consecutive Sundays where our Gospel lesson
comes from the 6th chapter of John’s Gospel, which addresses Holy
Communion with more theological depth than any other book of the Bible.
So, what’s so important about Holy
Communion? Well, recall that last Sunday
I preached about how unsettling life can be because we often only see little
pieces of life’s overall puzzle. But
Jesus sees it all, and so I encouraged you to strengthen your trust in Jesus by
finding simple ways to be present with him. And I mentioned that Christ is especially with you when you come to this communion rail. Why is that?
It's because, as John 6 spends many
pages teaching us, in Holy Communion the bread and wine are not symbols. I’ll repeat that because it may
be the most important thing you hear today: The bread and wine of Holy
Communion are not symbols. They
are Jesus… Not a memorial of Jesus, not a reminder of
Jesus, and not something that represents Jesus. We take our Lord at his word in Holy
Scripture that what you receive in Holy Communion is quite literally Jesus. One of the pillars of our faith as Lutherans
is the Augsburg Confession, and it states it quite plainly: “the true body and
blood of Christ are really present in the Supper of our Lord under the form of
bread and wine and are there distributed and received.”3
Because it’s in the form of
bread and wine, it looks and tastes like bread and wine. But make no mistake: we believe that this
is Christ’s body and blood and not just a symbol of it. As you can imagine, this scandalized and
divided the people of Jesus’s day, and nearly destroyed his entire
movement. After all, the crowd that day
knew Jesus and his family. Their own
eyes told them that Jesus wasn’t any different or better than
them. And yet here he was using highly provocative
language to unambiguously claim that in
addition to being a man of flesh and blood, he was also fully divine,
and that those who believe in him and feed on him can receive the
treasure of eternal life. He had
multiple opportunities to back down from that claim and he never did,
even when it drove his followers away.
How can bread and wine be flesh and
blood? It defies explanation, which is
why Jesus’s claim continues to scandalize and divide people even today. The whole concept is beyond the comprehension
of our rational minds. So can we just
trust that Jesus is telling the truth? As the Small Catechism reminds us, in Holy Communion we receive
forgiveness, life, and salvation.4 You can’t get those things from a mere symbol. This is as personal and intimate and real as anything in this world that you can touch or taste, because as
you come forward for communion you will hear a simple yet profound truth: this
IS the body of Christ, given for YOU, and the blood of Christ, shed for YOU. It’s no symbol. Thanks be to God. Amen.
Citations
1 Revelation
1:8, 21:6, 21:13, and 22:13
2 Romans
1:20. Augustine taught that God wrote two books: the Bible and the “book of
nature.”
3 Augsburg
Confession, Article X.
4 Luther’s Small Catechism, The Sacrament of the Altar.
Copyright Rev. Scott E. Schul, 2024 All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission.
Gospel
Text: John 6:35, 41-51
35Jesus
said to [the crowd,] “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me
will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”
41Then
some people began to complain about him because he said, “I am the bread that
came down from heaven.” 42They were saying, “Is not this Jesus,
the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I have
come down from heaven’?” 43Jesus answered them, “Do not
complain among yourselves. 44No one can come to me unless drawn
by the Father who sent me; and I will raise that person up on the last
day. 45It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be
taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to
me. 46Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is
from God; he has seen the Father. 47Very truly, I tell you,
whoever believes has eternal life. 48I am the bread of
life. 49Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and
they died. 50This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so
that one may eat of it and not die. 51I am the living bread
that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and
the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
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