This is My Body

A sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on April 17, 2025 by Revd Dr Sam Wells

Reading for address: Mark 14: 12-25

Carol Shields’ 1997 novel Larry’s Party tells of Larry Weller, a florist from Winnipeg in Canada who develops an interest in garden mazes. The novel describes how he marries Dorrie, but how his obsession with mazes makes him hard to live with. Dorrie leaves him and he moves to Chicago and marries Beth, having become a world leader in maze design. Beth too leaves him, and Larry falls into a coma for three weeks. When he recovers, he decides to host a party. The party becomes at the same time the crossroads of his life, where significant people from his past all meet one another and where the motif of the maze epitomises how their lives both draw near to his and stay apart in tangled and intriguing ways.

The Last Supper plays the role in Mark’s gospel that Larry’s party represents in Carol Shields’ novel. The various strands in the narrative converge around this defining moment. The grand backdrop is a land occupied by the Romans, looking back 1500 years to the time when the Hebrews escaped Egyptian slavery, and, in the Passover ritual, recalling how the sacrifice of a lamb provided a way for them to escape death. The immediate context is the hubbub of the festival in Jerusalem, of fervid hopes and brutal realities, of heightened tension and diverse passions. Jesus’ disciples, always a mixture of hardcore zealots, wavering tax collectors, rugged fishermen and plotting Judas, represent in the upper room the different commitments, fears, longings and weaknesses of the whole people. The meal is necessary sustenance, intimate solidarity, and time-honoured liturgy all at the same time. Like Larry’s party, everything in Jesus’ past and the disciples’ heritage and the intensity of their shared present clusters together.

And at this moment Jesus says the words at the centre of Christian sustenance, solidarity and liturgy ever since: ‘This is my body.’ I want to look at these words carefully. ‘This.’ What is ‘this’? ‘This’ is bread – because unleavened bread was integral to the Passover tradition, and Jesus is saying, ‘I am the new Passover by which you are set free.’ But ‘this’ also means these 13 people gathered around the table – the faithful, the fond, the formidable, along with the foolish, feckless and fragile. This table includes Peter, who promises and fails; it includes James and John, who beat their chests but fall asleep in the garden; it includes the other eight, who flee as soon as the soldiers show up; and it includes Judas, who somehow thinks it serves some purpose to lead the soldiers into the garden. In other words, all of humanity is at this table. But so is Jesus – who in the incarnation became part of this humanity. ‘This is my body’ is Jesus saying, ‘In my incarnation I have become part of the glory and shame of what it is to be human.’ It is also Jesus saying, ‘I have given up any ability to disengage myself from how humankind really is.’ ‘This is my body’ – and thus I can no more detach myself from it than a head can detach from a torso. Jesus isn’t just telling the disciples he’ll be present with them henceforth when they break bread in his name. He’s recognising something as he’s saying it – this is the reality he’s committed himself to. He’s realising, ‘I have no destiny that’s not tied up with these people in front of me and the whole of humanity they represent. I’m as bonded to them as a head is to a torso. I have no identity detached from these people. They are my body.’

Once we’ve realised the full dimensions of the word ‘this’ we can appreciate the power of the word ‘is.’ ‘This is my body.’ Not, ‘This is a symbol of my body’ or ‘This represents my body’; ‘This’ – that’s to say, ‘This gathering in solidarity, for sustenance, and in prayer – this is dwelling in my body.’ And it’s not, ‘This was my body,’ two thousand years ago, for those who knew and hung out with me, at a particular time and place; nor is it ‘This will be my body,’ one day in the future, at the heavenly banquet – although it is both those things. But fundamentally it’s, ‘This is my body’ – now, every time you do this, the Holy Spirit making me present and making those gathering in solidarity, for sustenance, and in prayer my body. The word ‘is’ means this is always so. And yes, some of the people around the table will be flawed and fallible – in fact that’s always been so. And yes, some of the people will be sleepy, ignorant, ungrateful, clumsy, conniving, untrustworthy – that was the case at the Last Supper, so don’t imagine things are any different tonight. But feel the encouragement of that word ‘is.’ We’re not failures because we’re not in Jerusalem in 33 AD. We’re not second best because we’re not at a time of rapid church growth and expansion. We’re not half-hearted because we’re not sweaty with passionate engagement like disciples treading the dust of protest or shaking with the deprivations of imprisonment. This is my body. Jesus is here. Jesus keeps his promise.

Then the word ‘my.’ We’re in a period of controversy over the human body. What if we’re born female but truly believe we’re male? How can a prime minister not be able to define what a woman is? How can it be just for a person to live in pain and despair and not be able to end their life? What right does the law have to tell a woman she can’t terminate a pregnancy? These are all passionate debates about the human body. A lot of people on each of these issues argue furiously for their view. But we can only arrive at certainty on these things by closing our eyes and ears to things that are also true. The point is not to get the right answer but to dwell together in mutual respect and honouring in a society where people will never entirely agree on such things. And at the Last Supper Jesus makes an illuminating intervention. He says, ‘This is my body.’ The notion of property rights is so inlaid in our culture, we tend to assume we can apply it to our own bodies. Our body is our possession. It seems obvious. But we didn’t create ourselves, we didn’t patent the design, and we won’t be able to preserve ourselves beyond aging and death. Jesus is saying, ‘What you think of as your own is actually my body. Let go of your determination to fulfil every temporal wish in your body because your body isn’t a project or a possession: it’s part of my body and will be fulfilled through my body. The Father in creation has become utterly aligned with all created things in an eternal purpose to be with them whatever befall. The Son in his incarnation has ensured his body and our bodies are utterly connected so enduringly that here at the Last Supper Jesus says your body is my body and my body is your body. The Spirit achieves the mystery and miracle that we are and always will be intimately joined with the Son through the incarnation yet with our own separateness and integrity from him and from one another. All this is needed to make sense of what Jesus is saying when he says at the Last Supper, ‘This is my body.’

And finally, there’s the word ‘body.’ Jesus says, ‘This is my body.’ This isn’t an idea or a promise or a vision; this is as physical as flesh and blood. Imagine a soldier preparing for battle. That soldier is probably young, has a whole life to look forward to, has loved ones, has a life beyond the military. But wisely or unwisely, bravely and selflessly, that soldier has said to the nation, ‘This is my body, given for you.’ Think of a person getting married. They may know their partner well, they may be yearning for a lifetime together, they may have nothing inside them that longs for anything other than to be together always. But surely they feel as they face each other at the altar, or later that day, a shiver of apprehension as they realise what they’re saying is, ‘This is my body, given for you.’ Think of an expectant mother, labouring in pregnancy, realising the costs as well as the hopes of allowing her life to be taken over by a new person, writhing in birth, screaming in bringing into the world, in some cases risking her mortality, and pondering the reality of those words, ‘This is my body, given for you.’ Jesus is saying, sitting at the table with his twelve disciples, this is how much God has invested in the world, in humankind, in you sitting before me, in each one of us here tonight. God has skin in the game. This is God’s body. It’s for you. Given to be with you.

Somehow we’ve allowed the Eucharist to be shrunk down to simply receiving a wafer and a sip, like medicine for salvation. But the reality of the Last Supper is like a party that draws together every element of God’s story and a maze through which we find ourselves drawn to God’s heart. Our celebration of the Lord’s Supper is the moment when we look at the world, at the church, at one another and at ourselves and, in wonder, bewilderment, penitence and finally joy, recall Jesus’ simple, faithful, indelible words, ‘This is my body.’