‘Holiness’ can mean nothing but the fullness of humanity with which Christ himself lived

Unlike the other evangelists, John does not narrate the institution of the eucharist. Instead, he offers in this long sixth chapter of his gospel, a sustained meditation on its meaning and, at the Last Supper itself – when Jesus washes his disciples’ feet and exhorts us to do the same for one another – its radical ramifications for the way we live our lives.

Many parts of this chapter have been the subject of disagreement. There was disagreement among the early Church Fathers about whether this so-called “Bread of Life Discourse” referred to the eucharist at all: Clement of Alexandria (150-215), for example, thought that the “Bread of Life” referred not to the eucharist but to God’s wisdom, as described in the first reading. Elements of this chapter also figured in the later eucharistic controversies of the sixteenth century, when it was used by some to argue for communion under both kinds; or by the Swiss Reformer, Huldrych Zwingli (1484-1531), to defend his view that the presence of Christ in the eucharist is in our hearts, not in the bread and wine.

All these disagreements were understandable. John makes it plain here as elsewhere in his gospel, especially in next week’s pericope, that what Jesus taught about this and much else provoked incomprehension and even revulsion among many of his contemporaries. Later, Pliny the Younger (61-113 AD) would speak of Christianity as a “superstition” and in the second century Celsus would refer to Jesus as a “sorcerer and magician”. Concerning the eucharist specifically, rumours of cannibalism circulated among cultured Romans.

But from a Jewish point of view, what Jesus taught seemed to undermine the very foundations of their national and religious identity; indeed, he seemed to be subverting religion itself – Jews considered him blasphemous, but Romans considered Christianity as impious and even atheistic. In both his teaching and his own person, Jesus seemed to be subverting the whole edifice of Jewish religious sensibility, symbolised by the Temple and the sanctuary in Jerusalem, the place where God was exclusively to be found. He himself, he implied, was the Temple and the sanctuary in a New Jerusalem since, contrary to every pious expectation, God had manifested himself outside the boundaries of conventional religion, thereby collapsing or at least reconfiguring the distinction between the sacred and the profane. God is present in a helpless, dependent child, in a homeless, refugee family. His presence is not bounded by or confined to designated holy places or conventionally “holy” people, no matter how venerable or exalted.

St Paul is at pains to make the same point in his speech at the Areopagus in Athens. “The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things.....” (Acts of the Apostles 17:24-25) On the contrary, as Hopkins has it: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God”.

For ourselves and the pattern after which our lives are lived, this implies a radical rethinking of what we might understand by “holiness”. It can no longer have any other meaning than the fullness of humanity with which Christ himself lived: that is, “living with the life of Christ”, living “in Christ”, living, in other words, as he lived. His human life in this world was the fullness of God in our midst and in Him we too have become sanctuaries where God makes his home. “Make your home in me, as I make mine in you”, Jesus says explicitly. (John 15:4).

His life and death are at work in us, as St Paul says, and therefore our lives too, with all their trivial detail and perplexing contradictions and confusions, and despite our inveterate sinfulness and debilitating failings and weaknesses, are where God is to be found. Holiness is God’s presence in his creation, not an assiduously cultivated adornment or spurious spiritual elitism.

...for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.

As Kingfishers Catch Fire, Gerard Manley Hopkins