In the name of the father, of the son, and of the holy spirit. Amen. By no Now, the way we react to death is extremely important because it's more inevitable than birth by a long shot of belief. You wonder when you read the biological facts why a perception ever takes place. But once a person is conceived at his war, there's one thing she we all wind up of being eaten down in the aisle for the equivalent thereof.
Now, the way a person reacts to that being, how they react to life, you can't live without knowing it's going to end. That is this worldly life. You can't possibly do it. That You can obliterate it from your mind and say, oh, I have that people I won't think about that. Of course, you can do that.
Put your neck. I was gonna say playing the ostrich, but that's insulting the ostrich. For example, one of the greatest factors that Plato or Socrates wants the guardians of the city, how do they live in the face of death? How do they treat death? Thomas More, in his utopian, in his this imaginative city that he or the country or state that he imagined.
What is his great one of the most important conditions of his rulers is how do they view and accept death? Because, actually, the way you answer that question tells you how you would hope to live your life. Jesus Christ, and we all fed upon him. Now this text that I read this morning is almost repulsive to us. Can you think of how repulsive it was to the Jews who heard it?
Men and women who looked upon cannibalism as the worst crime possible? And we don't have to guess how they reacted. We know how they reacted. Because these very sensible men and women said, who in the world can give us his flesh to eat and his blood to drink? Who can believe that?
And they walked no longer with Jesus. They thanked him. Him. They were sensible people. And then our Lord turned to his own chosen disciples and said, are you two going to leave me?
Notice our blessed Lord, in spite of the of the severity, the the boldness, the revulsion of these words, did not in the slightest retract an iota limb. He didn't minimize. He didn't soften what he said in the slightest. What he did do was to repeat it. Repeat that.
He repeated it. And he was willing to let not only the crowd go, the hoi polloi, but he was willing even for his disciples to be. So if there's any misunderstanding of this text, you know whose fault it is, it's Christ's fault. He couldn't have been more expert. There's no question about the authenticity in this text, none whatsoever.
And if our Lord was speaking only figuratively metaphorically, then why didn't he correct that terribly false impression on the part of his hearer? And if he didn't, and he meant to speak metaphorically, then who's to blame? Blame? The other man. Supposing he was not speaking of metaphorically, supposing he was not speaking of language, which we have every reason to think, then where We understand.
We know that Jesus gave us himself in the sacrifice of the past and in the communion in which we share in it to be our bread and our sustenance. As our lord himself says very simply, to be our food. Food to sustain us in his life. That altar, father Lewis, by his power and the grief of god gave that bread of life to his worship. He also gave it by the words of the book.
He also gave it by the example of his daily living. By his faith, and above all, by his service. Martin senior Abel emphasized that last evening, he's right. I think that would be the main characteristic of senior Lewis that he was a faithful servant in the name of his savior, to his people, to his body.