My favourite Christmas card of all time has a line drawing of the baby Jesus with his mother and the caption Behold the handmaid of the Lord.  The words are part of Mary’s response to the Angel Gabriel at the Annunciation when she agrees to become the Mother of our Lord – the one who was destined by God to be the Christ-bearer.  The Christmas card, therefore, has all the right meaning.  The thing that attracted me, however, was that the drawing shows Jesus in his cot and the Virgin Mary is hanging nappies on the line.  Hundreds, if not thousands, of artists have painted the Virgin Mary with her child – some of them great works of art, others simple acts of devotion – but very few have managed to capture what that simple line drawing by an unknown member of the religious order of the Poor Clares succeeded in doing.  She found a simple way of drawing people to the heart of the Christmas message that the Incarnation – the birth of Christ – was God’s way of becoming one with the human race and saving us from within.  To do this, he was born as an ordinary baby to an ordinary Jewish maiden who, in caring for her infant son did ordinary, motherly things like washing nappies – and yet this ordinary birth and babyhood was surrounded by something quite extraordinary – heaven had come to earth. Heaven was to be found in the ordinariness of human life.

Now, you may perhaps wonder why I have begun this sermon as if I were preaching on Christmas morning – maybe because next Saturday the Church keeps the Festival of the Blessed Virgin Mary – but actually, it isn’t  for that reason.  In today’s Gospel we are confronted with the same sort of thing – the same sort of ordinariness which cloaks something very extraordinary.  The text I have in mind is the words from today’s Gospel:

Is not this Jesus the son of Joseph, whose Father and mother we know?

The Jews who said this were responding to the claim Jesus made that he was the bread of life.

For some inexplicable reason, those who compiled our Lectionary miss out a few verses in which Jesus also claims to have come down from heaven to do the will of his Father. This whole section of St. John’s Gospel is bound up with Jesus’ claim to be the Son of God and it is this which sets the Jews complaining.  How can he be the bread that came down from heaven when they know him to be the son of Joseph the local carpenter and Mary whom they know well?  Like many who have encountered Jesus they see only with their eyes but not with their understanding.  Jesus to them was just an ordinary man who for years had lived an ordinary life amongst them and now, here he was, making fanciful claims about being someone who has come down from heaven and who, like God feeding the people in the wilderness during the Exodus with manna – the bread of heaven – claims to be a source of divine feeding himself.  The rest of our Lord’s reply makes it abundantly clear that he is from God but what they see is a local lad who is perhaps a bit deranged or at the very least, with ideas above his station.

Many, in history, have admired Jesus the Man – the human being who sought to live a perfect life in obedience and devotion to God – but they have stopped short of recognising his divinity – that He is Man who is also God.  The Muslims for example hold Jesus in high regard and with reverence but they see him as a Prophet rather than as a Divine figure.  Such a view accepts that Jesus was an extraordinary man who is to be admired and even imitated but it stops short of accepting him as God incarnate – as God in our midst.  Christians take the step further with our belief, expressed particularly in our Creed, that Jesus is both True Human and true God.  To take that step, however, is to see more than what is before our eyes.

There’s a story about Picasso who once met a vivacious girl at a party.  He was struck by her vitality and her beauty.  So he decided to paint her.  When he had finished it had the usual Picasso traits – one eye, two noses etc but what struck those who looked at it was the he painted her as a Nun.  Those who knew her just laughed at the ridiculousness of the notion.

Several year’s later the girl did in fact become a nun.  When Picasso was asked to comment on it , he said, “I did not paint what I saw, I painted what was there.”   

With extraordinary insight Picasso had done what we are to do about what we see in Jesus.  We have to see more than what is before our eyes.  With those eyes we see the ordinary son of a carpenter in Nazareth – but, with the eyes of faith we see  something different.  We don’t just see Jesus the man but through his humanity we see Jesus our God.  And, of course, when Jesus talks of being the bread of life – the living bread – with the same eyes of faith we can make the connection between Jesus and the Eucharist.

In the Eucharist, three very ordinary elements combine – bread, wine and water – and yet when these are prayed over – we claim something very extraordinary. We claim that ‘spiritually’ they are the body and blood of Christ.  This claim is possible because Jesus himself made it possible.

On the night before he was betrayed to death on a Cross, he sat at supper with his friends and he wanted to find a way of being with them forever – and, by extension, with those who would believe in him because of their witness.  We are in a long line of people stretching back through history who inherit this longing of Jesus to be with us in our midst.  The way He chose – for it must be remembered that this is no invention of the Church but a direct decision of Jesus – was to look around him across that table and take up two very ordinary substances – bread and wine – and make them extraordinary. This is my body  he says, taking hold of the bread. This is my blood, as he holds the wine cup.  And then – Do this – the direct command which the Church has obeyed ever since –

Do this, take the bread, take the wine, pray over it and I will be with you. I will be in your midst – I will come to your life and just as bread and wine (symbolising all food) feeds your body, so in the prayed over bread and wine, I will slip into your life and feed you. Feed you for your spiritual journey to eternal life.

Suddenly, around that Last Supper Table, Jesus has found a most extraordinary way of being with us and he does it through ordinary things. 

There is more.  For it is our own ordinary lives that he feeds.  The ordinary is touched by God and becomes extraordinary.  When God touches our ordinary lives, something extraordinary happens.  We are not the same.  We may look the same to the casual observer – just as Jesus was just the carpenter’s son to the Jews.  But inside we are different.  God is there in our lives.  On the surface we are made from the dust of the earth and, as the funeral service reminds us, to dust we shall return – but that is only one half of the picture- because God’s love for us is eternal and he makes sure our souls are fed so that we enter into our heavenly inheritance – then we may be dust but we are bound for glory.

There are two things then that I want to remind you of as a result of this: 

First – you are not as ordinary as you seem.  Because of God’s love – expressed through Jesus Christ in all that he did on earth, not least in dying for us, and because that love continues to be showered upon us – we are no ordinary people.  We are extraordinary. You are extraordinary!  It’s important to grasp that because it’s all too easy to have a low view of people.  If we recognise God in them then we cannot have a low view either of them or of ourselves – we are all living expressions of God’s glory in the world.

And the second point follows from this.  As we have seen, God used ordinary Mary to bring to birth Jesus and his love for us – and Jesus used ordinary Bread and Wine to feed us with Himself, the Bread of Life so that He is continually re-born within us because he loves us.  So, also, he uses our ordinary, but blessed, lives to be the instruments of that same love in the world today – a world which in so many places seems loveless and dark. But, whenever we try to love with God’s love, then the world is not quite so dark as it seems.

Already within it, God is turning the world towards the light of his love  - and he uses ordinary you and ordinary me to do it. Isn’t that extraordinary!