So that nothing may be lost

Here is the reflection I shared in the lunchtime Eucharist for St Martin-in-the-Fields:

In my previous parish we used to begin our Evening Communion services with a call to worship from the Wild Goose Resource Group that began with 'Gather us in' and went on to describe the diversity of all those gathered in. It connects with our Gospel reading today (John 6.35-40) in that Jesus said the will of God the Father, who sent him into the world, is that Jesus should lose nothing of all that God the Father has given to him and raise it up on the last day.

Earlier in this same chapter we have been given an example of this in the feeding of the 5,000 where, at the end of the meal, all the fragments of bread were gathered up so that nothing may be lost. Jesus then gives this story of meeting basic needs a cosmic or eschatological twist when he later says it ‘is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day’.

These words come in the middle of Jesus’ teaching about being the Bread of Life, which followed the feeding of the 5,000. When Jesus gave thanks over the bread, the word used is ‘eucharistesas’, the word which gives us ‘Eucharist’. Jesus shared the bread around in communion, then, when everyone was satisfied, he instructed his disciples to pick up the fragments using that same phrase, ‘so that nothing may be lost.’ Just as none of this ‘eucharisticized’ bread was lost after the feeding, so, because ‘Jesus is the bread of life, [those who] see and believe in him … receive eternal life [and] become a fragment which he will gather up on the last day.’ (John, Richard Burridge, BRF 1998)

This is the reason why Christ came, which he revealed both here and in the parables he told about things that were lost; the lost sheep and coin. The shepherd and woman in those two stories are exactly the same; because of their concern for the sheep and coin which are lost, they will not give up searching until these have been found. The sheep and the coin are loved and this love is revealed or proved through the search.

The point of those parables is for us to know that we are similarly loved by God because he also searches for us until we are found. That search is the story told in the Gospels; that Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he laid down his own life for us becoming obedient to the point of death — even death on a cross – in order that all might be safely gathered in as those who are gathered in rise with him and return to God. Christ went on that search to seek and save those who are lost and thereby to ensure that none shall be lost and all shall be safely gathered in. We are loved by God so much that his Son left all he had in heaven to become a human being and die to gather us in. Jesus, the Good Shepherd, searches for all souls with God’s attentive love, looking and listening, finding and carrying; carrying us home, like a sheep on the shoulders, from the cliff edges of our lives.

Those who are lost almost universally consider themselves worthless but these parables and this story of the fragments gathered up specifically deny that assumption. What is lost is actually the most precious thing or person of all; the person or thing for which everything else will be given up or set aside. What is lost and found, discarded but then gathered up, is us. We are the ones for whom Christ searches at the expense of all that he has, including, in the end, his own life. We are the most precious lost person for whom he searches, the discarded fragment that will not be overlooked and will not be wasted. We are precious, we are loved.

Christ came to gather up and reconcile to God all the disparate fragments of our lives that none should be lost, even through death. This is why he speaks of the kingdom of God as being a banquet to which all, especially all who have experienced exclusion, are invited. It is why he states that there is room for all – many rooms - in his Father’s house and that he goes there to prepare places for us. He also calls us to respond in this same way to others and to the resources he provides for us in the world he created.

As a result, we have, I think, a basis for saying with the poet Walt Whitman that: ‘Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost, / No birth, identity, form — no object of the world, / Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing.’ And so we pray, ‘Gather us in, from corner or limelight, from mansion or campsite, from fears and obsession, from tears and depression, from untold excesses, from treasured successes, to meet, to eat, be given a seat, be joined to the vine, be offered new wine, become like the least, be found at the feast.’

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Steve Scott - The Resurrection Of The Body.