In these days and weeks when exam results seem to be flying at our young people from every direction, I would just like to say, that if I ever thought I would have to sit another exam, I would, in the immortal words of Steve Redgrave, give you permission to shoot me! I think I’d rather support the English Rugby team than do another exam!

I reckon, just in my time, that I have sat, I would say something like in the region of 700 to 800 exams, school and everything included. And that’s just me; that’s not anything as important as medical students and young doctors who seem to get into a spiral of exams! I often think of Maurice Stewart who was Vice-Principal of the Theological College and who then became Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, would often sigh in our lectures with him and quote some other great academic by saying, “I’ve taught you all I know, and you still know nothing”!

What a task our lecturers and teachers had! Tony Campolo, whom you know well, is a very passionate type of person about his faith and his subject as a lecturer, and Professor, at Eastern College, Pennsylvania. He once spent 55 minutes expounded the meaning of life the universe and everything, literally breaking sweat, pounding the floor at his quest for significance and truth, until at the end of all his intellectual searching and angst, some kid at the back of the class, put up his hand and said, “Do we have to know this for the exam?”

I love Barry Cryer’s reflections on his own education when he said a number of years ago, “My education was severely disrupted by the outbreak of World War 2. It had actually taken place sixteen years previously, but I was still very upset about it.”

I wonder, in all our intellectual ramblings and all our examinations, is that our ultimate goal, the quest for truth?

H.A. Williams is a Fellow and one time Dean of Trinity College, Cambridge and in a sermon on ‘Truth’ he distinguishes two kinds of truth; the outside kind and the inside. Academia (I’m going to call it) is concerned with the outside kind of truth, Williams says. What we study keeps its distance, and so we speak of the expert as somebody who has mastered the subject. There is no sense of risk or danger, the facts are his, and once they have been assimilated, he exercises dominion over them. But the inside kind of truth can never be mastered in this way; it’s inside because it doesn’t keep its distance from us. It has a life of its own and can therefore sweep in upon us in ways we can’t control. Take, for instance, something of superlative beauty – music, painting, what you will. We can indeed study and master its outside truth – how it is constructed and how it is related to what has gone before and so forth. But its reality eludes us altogether unless it penetrates us and evokes from us a response we can’t help giving. In this sense, far from being in control, we ourselves are mastered by what we see.

Have we allowed the truth of the Gospel to master us? Have we allowed the living bread that came down from heaven to be literally ingested within us? Is it any wonder that John 6 is nicknamed the Communion Chapter?

“I tell you the truth, unless you can eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life…for my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink”. You are literally making Him an inside truth; a reality.

These are words of John that he has thought over and prayed about for many years. Yet for him to record Jesus’ words of drinking his blood must have seemed quite extraordinary, especially to a Jewish audience. Indeed, even to us, if we took it out of context, it is really quite grotesque. But here is the inside truth. The blood stands for life and it is easy to understand why. As the blood flows from a severe wound, life ebbs away; and to the Jewish people, the blood belonged to God. That is why to this day, a Jewish person will never eat any meat which hasn’t been completely drained of blood – it states it in Genesis 9:4 (and Deuteronomy). Here Jesus is saying that you must take my very life into the centre of your being; the life that is God’s! The reality of Jesus eludes us if we allow him to be only an outside truth.

It’s all that important, this Communion, this Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper, the Mass, yet a reason we won’t come to our Communion Service is because it’s longer than the others! Yet do we not believe it to be a sacrament, one of the things “necessary to salvation”? It is Communion next week, and no doubt this will be a reason why many might not be here. (I hope we’ve got over the other main reason a long time ago, which we’ll not go into again now!)

Maybe when we truly appreciate the Communion for what it is, then perhaps we will make more of a point of being here when it is on. For the truth of the Gospel is supremely expressed here.

Will we see you all next Sunday!