John 6:22-34

04/26/09
John 6:22-34
Hudson UMC

Though last week’s sermon was based on the story of Jesus walking on the water, this week’s passage is part of the follow up to the feeding of the five thousand. Though the miracle of the loaves and fish appears in each of the four gospels, only John tells us what the crowd does after the fact. To me, it is incredibly interesting. After all, it is not only important that we realize that Jesus worked miracles among the people, we also need to look at how the people respond so that we can either do what they do, if it was a good response, or carefully avoid what they do, if it is bad. We begin to realize that their response might not have been as good as it could have been.

The people realize that the disciples left without Jesus and that all of them were gone. We read that they got themselves into a bunch of boats and went off to try and find Jesus. They show up at the city of Capernaum and run into Jesus and His disciples. They say to Him, “Rabbi, when did you come here?” Now, we might not realize this, but this is a kind of slap in Jesus’ face. At first glance, we might not notice it because Rabbi means “teacher” and was a title of respect among the people. How is this a problem? Because this is the same crowd of people who, just a little bit ago, the day before, had called Him prophet and king. They were so convinced that He was a king that they were going to take Him by force and make Him be their king. It might be a wonderful thing to be a teacher, but they had clearly lost some of their respect for Him.

What does Jesus say in response to this? “Very truly, I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.” Think about what He has just said. “You didn’t come because you think that I am the Son of God and the source of salvation both in this age and in the age to come. You only came because I fed you.” He seems to be saying that, in spite of the crowds that He was teaching and reaching out to, the people had not really been affected. I don’t know about you, but if I had five thousand people come and listen to me give a message and teach them, I would feel pretty good about myself, I would think that God has blessed my ministry and that lives must be changing, especially if they followed after me. You might not relate to that image since you are not all preachers, but what if, all of a sudden, we had five thousand people in church on Sunday mornings? I think we would all be pretty excited about that. And yet, in spite of the fact that Jesus seems to be incredibly successful, He says that the people are not seeing Him for the right reasons. They did not come to be spiritually formed or brought into discipleship; they had come to eat.

Jesus does not simply admonish the people, He gives them some good advice and takes advantage of this teachable moment. “Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For it is on him that God the Father has set his seal.” This makes sense, doesn’t it? Jesus is saying that if there are two things that we can seek, something that will last and something that won’t last, we should seek after the stuff that lasts, that will endure. If you think about it, this seems to be remarkably similar advice to what He said to the woman at the well. “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” Just as Jesus used water, the topic at hand, when He was speaking to the woman at the well, He uses bread, the topic at hand, when He speaks to the five thousand He has just miraculously fed.

“Then they said to him, ‘What must we do to perform the works of God?’” I don’t know for sure, but it seems to me that the people are misunderstanding what Jesus is telling them. It seems that they think that they can still get more bread from Jesus, but now they think that they need to do something to earn it. They got the first hit for free, now they need to pay for it. It doesn’t seem like they finally understood what Jesus was saying. We should not be surprised. After all, if they understood what Jesus was saying to them the first time around, they would be the only ones. Everyone else in the Gospel accounts misunderstands Jesus the first time around, why shouldn’t they? I don’t think that, when Jesus told them to search for the food that endures for eternal life, they understood that He was talking about spiritual things. They still want real bread, even if they have to work for it.

What do the people need to do in order to perform the works of God? This is a good question, because it impacts us as well. Whatever it takes for them to perform the works of God will be the same as it is for us. Jesus’ response is startling. “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” He didn’t say, “Go to church every Sunday,” or “Do more good than bad,” or, “Be better than the average person,” or, “Be better than your neighbors,” but “believe in him whom he has sent.” This doesn’t sound like much, does it? Just believe? He doesn’t want us to be moral examples first? He doesn’t want us to live the godly life first? It doesn’t even sound that hard to do. Surely this has to be easier than what the people were expecting.

And yet, they don’t seem to want to do it. I think they are better theologians than we sometimes are. They realize that to believe in the one that God has sent is not simply a matter of saying the words, “I am a Christian.” It was not just a matter of filling out a religious preference on the census report. They realized that when Jesus said “believe,” He meant, “Put your whole trust in me. No longer trust in your own ability to get things done; do not trust in your family, or your job, or your government, or your intelligence, or your hard work, or anything else. Trust in nothing but me. Trust me enough to give me complete control of your life. Do not only expect this bread that leads to eternal life, expect me to tell you how to live your life, what to do, what to say, how to feel. Give me the authority to make decisions about how you should spend your money, how you should treat other people, and how you should spend your time.” They realized, far better than many Americans do, that believing in Jesus was not something that can be done lightly.

So, because they realized how difficult it would be for them to believe, to put their trust in Jesus, they ask a question. “What sign are you going to give us then, that we may see it and believe you?” There is a sense that the people are saying, “Alright, we need to believe in you, but what are you going to do? If you are going to ask us to do things, what are you going to do to show us that we should listen to you in the first place?” What is amazing is that, in their questioning, they do exactly the same kind of thing that the woman at the well did back in chapter four. If you remember, she compared Jesus with Jacob, one of the key people in the history of Israel, trying to show that she is going to judge Jesus in light of the great human leaders of the past. The people now compare Jesus to Moses. They continue by saying, “What work are you performing? Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread to eat.’”

Do you see what they are doing? They are doing what many of us do all too often. They are basically saying, “Ok, Jesus. You want me to believe in you and follow you. What’s in it for me?” The implication is that, if I don’t think that I am going to come out ahead, I am not going to do it. If you can prove to me that doing things your way is better than doing things my way, I’ll listen to you. Of course, one of the problems with this is that, when we say things like this, we usually have already made up our minds that our way is best and that we only want to believe in Jesus is if we are allowed to make a deal with Him and stay in charge of our lives, but with a diving blessing on our selfish ways. Not to put too fine a point on it, it seems that they are giving Jesus an ultimatum. “Moses gave the Israelites manna from heaven. If you can do that, we might believe that God has sent you. If you can’t, forget it.”

Now, I want you to think about how ridiculous this really is. They are demanding a sign as if they had never seen a sign before. In spite of the fact that Jesus had not only just shown them a sign, an undoubted miracle, it was a miracle of exactly the kind they wanted. Moses had given them manna from heaven. Jesus had fed them miraculously. They wanted Jesus to give them bread to eat, forgetting that He already had given them bread to eat. How often are we just like this? We say, “Lord, Lord, bless us. Move in our midst.” If we listened, God would probably say, “I already am blessing you. I am moving in your midst. You just weren’t paying attention, so you thought that it was you who were getting everything done.”

Jesus responds like this. “Very truly I tell you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” When the woman at the well asked Jesus if He was greater than Jacob, He did not answer, but changed the subject. Here, He is a little more bold. He is saying that, though the people think that Moses was the source of the bread, he really wasn’t. In the end, it was God, not Moses, who brought the Manna and gave them bread to eat. It was the same God that Jesus calls Father. What He is saying is that, despite the fact that Moses was quite possibly the greatest prophet in the history of Israel, he was still simply a prophet, a man that spoke with God. Jesus is saying that He has not just spoken with God, He has come from God, He is related to God, He is the Son of God. The relationship between the one who is speaking to them now and God is far closer than the relationship between Moses and God.

In the very next verse, Jesus is going to come out and say, very directly, “I am the bread of life.” At this point, He alludes to it. “The bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” The people do not realize this yet, but Jesus is not talking about physical bread. Jesus is talking about Himself. He is the one that has come down from heaven and He is the one who gives life to the world. These two ideas have been themes all throughout the Gospel of John. The people respond, “Sir, give us this bread always.” The woman at the well had said, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.” She did not understand that Jesus was talking, not about water, but about Himself. The crowd of people in our passage for today are equally clueless.

In light of how the crowd has responded, what can we learn? I think that we can learn that true Christian discipleship is not about what we look like. Five thousand people flocked to Jesus, calling Him rabbi, and asked for advice. If there was ever a group of people who looked like they were sincere, it would have been them. And yet, Jesus explains that, though they look good, there are a lot of false motives. We learn that it is entirely possible to follow after Jesus and yet not really have a clue about who He really is and what He wants to do for us. I think we also learn a thing or two about what it really means to believe in Christ. This passage does not spell out what it means to be a disciple, but it shows us that believing in Jesus is harder than we sometimes think. If it were simple, if it were something we could just make up our mind about, the people would not have asked for a sign. As it is, faith is not something that is easy at all. It is unbelievably hard. In fact, it is so hard that we simply cannot believe unless God moves in our midst.

However, though we learn many things about ourselves and how we often have mixed motives, we also learn something about Jesus and therefore, about God. We learn that, though hypocrisy is one of the worst sins in the modern age and it tends to annoy us beyond measure, Jesus behaves in a different way. We like to point out hypocrisy and use it as a cover. If we can just show how someone else is a hypocrite, we can feel more secure in our own hypocrisy. We feel uncomfortable when we are judged, so we try to reassure ourselves that those who judge us are just as bad as we are so we can dismiss it out of court. However, Jesus doesn’t do this. Even though the people were hypocrites, people who wanted Him to be their king but refused to do what He said, Jesus does not turn them away. He does not meet hypocrisy with more hypocrisy, He meets it with truth and love. He allowed people who were very imperfect to speak with Him and to follow Him, not so He could make them feel bad that they have come up short, but so He could help them be made new.

Let us take joy that we serve such a merciful and loving God; a God who is patient with us when we are weak and stubborn, a God who overlooks our hypocrisy and sees in us beloved sons and daughters. We have all fallen short of the mark of God’s high calling, but we remember that God accepts even the people that we reject, even when we reject ourselves. Is it a hard road to be a disciple? Of course. We cannot be half-Christians, we must be ever surrendering our lives to our Lord and be ever filled with the Holy Spirit, united to Christ’s obedience and faith so that we might be pleasing to God. However, God knows that we cannot do that on our own and strengthens us for the journey. Let us ask the Lord to give us the bread of life always. Let us pray.

AMEN