Finding God in a Crust of Bread

A homily for Corpus Christi - Thanksgiving for Holy Communion - First Sunday after Trinity, 7 June 2026


There is no bread in Eden. There, in the simplicity of their life-before-the-Fall, the happy couple gorge themselves on exotic fruits and have no need of more filling carbohydrates. Indeed, it is only in the wake ‘of man’s first disobedience’ that bread is mentioned. No longer entitled to the free lunches of Paradise, the accursed Adam must earn his bread through the sweat of his brow. So bread is contentious stuff, a reminder of our banishment, and of the great gulf between what should have been, and what now is.


But bread is also the gift and sign of God’s mercy, most obviously when presented as the Passover flat-bread eaten by the hurrying Hebrews before their escape from Egypt; and then en route, as God feeds them with the flaky bread of manna; which is fine, you will recall, until they gather more than they need, and it ‘breeds worms and becomes foul’. Hoarding God’s gifts is evidently not the way to lift the curse of Adam. It simply widens the gulf between what should be and what is.


The Passover, with its strong story-line of slavery and freedom, is a principal strand in the Church’s understanding of the Eucharist – Christianity’s sacred meal and memorial of Christ’s Passion; and the real and recognisable sign of the risen life he shares with us, first seen at the Supper at Emmaus.


This sacred meal carries other echoes too, notably the radical table-fellowship practised by Jesus, in which those who were placed beyond the pale of religious respectability were shockingly invited into the intimate circle of Jesus’ companionship. ‘Come, eat of my bread,’ he says; ‘and drink of the wine I have mixed.’ Whoever you are.


In the earliest days of the Church, this sacred meal was indeed a meal, a sit-down dinner shared by the whole household; the highest and wisest, together with the simple servant-girls. Sadly, not everyone was comfortable passing the cabbage to their own slaves; or drinking with them from the same loving-cup. So the pattern was subverted: and within a few generations, the remembrance of the Last Supper was decoupled from the shared meal: the sanctified and the quite ordinary were pulled apart; another gulf between what should be, and what is.


There were other problems. As early as St Paul’s day, in the middle of the first century, he had to berate some of the wealthier Corinthians for bringing to the common table their bulging hampers, and stuffing themselves with Fortnum’s finest while their poorer ‘brothers and sisters’ went hungry. This is the ‘eating and drinking to their own damnation’ to which he memorably refers. If hoarding manna brings rottenness, careless greed brings judgement.


And the curse of the Fall remains. The question of rich and poor equally sharing the world’s resources never goes away. As we celebrate our Holy Communion in affluent Oxfordshire, we know that other Christians across the world break bread in appalling conditions. At Corpus Christi we repeat loud and clear that everyone matters, everyone is welcome at the feast, the young and healthy, the dying and the unborn, the bombed-out citizens of the world’s war-zones.


It is too late to re-couple the meal and the memorial in our worship: two thousand years cannot be undone. But we can try hard to re-couple the mystery; acknowledge God’s presence in the ordinary, as well as in the holy things of life. We can try afresh (with St Benedict) to ‘welcome everyone as we would welcome Christ’, and to see his face in all the faces that we meet. We can look not just on the gifts at the altar, but on every slice of bread and glass of wine or water, as the holy and priceless gifts of God they are. This refreshed vision will renew our understanding and redirect our morality, helping us in turn to eradicate the gulf between what should be, and what is. It will reverse the curse placed on old Adam and, by slicing the loaf more evenly, turn all bread back into the blessing it should always have been.