John 6:35-51

05/03/09
John 6:35-51
Hudson UMC

Last week, we began talking about the conversation that Jesus had with the five thousand people that He fed with the five loaves and two fish. We realized that, though the people had seen an undoubted miracle, the people were not so interested in the fact that God was in their midst as they were that they found a source of free food. We learned that Jesus referred to Himself as the bread of God which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world. The people misunderstood Him, thinking He was talking about physical bread.

As we continue through this passage, I am amazed at the patience that God has for us. Even when we clearly don’t understand the first thing about what Jesus is saying to us, even when our motives are corrupt and we do not even really understand why we are following Jesus, He does not get mad, He does not drive us away, but continues to explain. As we will see, a little bit this week and a lot more next week, the teaching of Christ can get somewhat uncomfortable and even awkward, but we are received by God as long as we are willing to listen to Him.

Jesus begins this passage by repeating Himself, only a little more clearly. “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” How great is our God? He is not a God who is far away from us, who does not like us and does not want to be found by us or known by us, but one who offers us bread of life. Jesus is saying to us today, “Feed on me. I am the source of true strength. Do not fill yourself with the junk food of the world’s self-help culture. In spite of the miracles of modern science and medicine, I am still the only source of peace, of strength in the midst of trials, of joy.”

I think that it is important that we think about how significant it is that Jesus talks about Himself as bread. We live in a world where we hardly ever eat just plain bread. We have pre-packaged breakfast cereals, we have TV dinners, we have more dietary options than the people of the Bible could ever have imagined. For many people, the only time bread is consumed is on their sandwiches. For centuries, people would survive on nothing but bread. In fact, most of the monastic orders throughout the ages have imposed a strict diet of only bread. Surely it would have given Dr. Atkins an ulcer, but it was a hearty way to live. Though our modern dieticians would be appalled at a diet consisting only of bread, it is surely a more healthy way to live than our sugar-coated, overly-processed, chemically altered high fructose corn syrup (which seems to be in everything), trans fat, and high sodium world going about its business.

We do not live in a world that relies on bread to survive. Though we can surely see some benefits to this, we miss the fullness of the images that Jesus has been using. We have a million options for what to eat; we have the same for what to drink. After church, even, we will have coffee and a kind of juice at the very least. Sometimes, we have tea, sometimes we have lemonade. In our culture, to say that Jesus is the living water and the bread of life, we say, “Oh, we hardly know what that means because we don’t really eat bread or drink water anymore.” But to the people at the time, bread and water were really all they had. There were a few exceptions, but bread and water were not things they had some of the time, but it was the foundation of their entire diet.

This is what we are called to be as Christians, people who feast on Jesus, who feast on the Word of God. We are called to ruminate on the words of the Lord, to chew them slowly and get every bit of flavor and nutrition out of them. We are called to go back to the Bible over and over again, as our sole source of sustenance. We are called to quench our thirst with the living water, with the example of Jesus, with the person of the Holy Spirit. We should become the kind of people that if we spend even a single day without the living water, we begin to be extremely dehydrated and crave that water of life more than anything else.

Last week, Mollie shared this image with the youth. When we have candy or overly processed food, or what we would call “junk food,” it never really satisfies us. We always want more, but the more never makes us really happy, it just makes us sick to our stomach and gives us cavities and messes with our sleep pattern. This is what we often do in our spiritual lives. We cram ourselves full of shallow conversation, of gossip, of television, and of familiar routines, as well as many other things that do not really satisfy. But do we finish the day feeling really good about life and about the world around us? Most of the time we don’t. We feel empty, wondering what can get us through. The fact is, we all too often allow our spiritual diet to get off base. We stop praying, we stop reading our Bibles, we stop talking to others about what God is doing in our lives today and our spiritual metabolism goes down the drain and our spiritual waistline begins to expand.

So, let us be people who depend on the Son of God to sustain us, to give us strength. You might not feel confident to go before God and that is understandable. I want to remind you of what Jesus says. “Everything that the Father gives me will come to me, and anyone who comes to me I will never drive away; for I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me. And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day.” Jesus is telling us about how He relates to us. Take heart that, if God has given you to the Son, which He has, if you have any interest in Christ at all, you will not be driven away. God does not say to us, “Come and feast. Fill yourselves up with my promises and good news,” only to turn us away. No, God’s invitation is sincere; we need only accept it.

If you notice, Jesus talks about His Father a lot in this passage, and indeed, a lot throughout the entire Gospel of John. I have heard, at various points in my life, people try to separate the Father from the Son. Some people really like the idea of God, but don’t like the idea of following Jesus to the point of making Him the Lord over their lives. Other people have a great deal of respect for Jesus, who believe that He had a lot of really good things to say and to teach us, but don’t want to follow God. If this is you this morning, I have some bad news. You simply cannot have one without the other. There is no God other than the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. The only God that exists is the one that has been fully revealed in Christ. We cannot get rid of one or the other.

The people in our passage, like the Jewish leaders in the last chapter, don’t like that Jesus is calling Himself the Son of God. “They were saying, ‘Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, “I have come down from heaven”?’” They did not like the idea that this fellow human being could tell them what to do. And yet, what we are reading is that Jesus is continually binding His ministry up with that of the Father. Jesus is claiming that He never does things on His own, but does only what is the Father’s will. “This is indeed the will of my Father, that all who see the Son and believe in him may have eternal life; and I will raise them up on the last day.”

This should be exciting for us. This means that what we see in Jesus is not finally different than what God is like. We do not need to guess what God’s will is for our lives. God’s will is that we see the Son and believe in Him and have eternal life and be raised up on the last day. This is indeed good news. We do not need to be in doubt about where we stand in relation to God. God wants us to know Him, wants us to believe that He will raise us up and give us new life. And we know this because this is the constant message of Jesus and the two cannot be separated.

Jesus says, “I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” Jesus is giving us a clue here. More and more He is pointing to the fact that the work that God is doing in their midst is greater than that which God did when He liberated the people of Israel from Egypt with mighty works of power. Sure, the people ate bread from heaven, but they died. The bread that Jesus is offering will bring new life and that new life will never die. It will not simply feed the body, but feed the soul.

Jesus finally says, “The bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” This conversation has just taken a turn for the awkward. It will get more so in the passage we will consider next week. He has finally given us a concrete hint that He is not talking about bread as the people usually consider it. He is asking them to eat His body, the body that was going to be offered up on behalf of the entire world. The bread of life does not come to us without a price. We do not have eternal life somewhere deep down inside of ourselves simply because we’re good people. Eternal life is fundamentally a gift of God and it cost Jesus His life.

In a moment, we are going to celebrate Holy Communion, a time when we remember, not only that Christ died on our behalf, but that we are participating in His obedience today and that He will one day return and transform the world. Jesus is the bread of life. Today, we fill ourselves with communion with the Triune God. Though the church has argued for centuries about what it means that Christ is present in this meal, the church is united that Christ is indeed here. Here is an opportunity to lay hold of the promises that God has made to us, a chance to fill ourselves with real food, with the bread from heaven. Let us come and feast. Let us pray.

AMEN