The text this morning is from the Gospel of John, the sixth chapter:
Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst. But I said to you that you have seen me and yet do not believe. All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out. 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. For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.” So the Jews grumbled about him, because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” They said, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How does he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” Jesus answered them, “Do not grumble among yourselves. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day. It is written in the Prophets, ‘And they will all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me— not that anyone has seen the Father except he who is from God; he has seen the Father. Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your fathers 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. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”Thus far the text.
My dear friends in Christ,
Our Gospel reading today begins with the last verse of our reading last week. I am the bread of life whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst. You’d think that this was of some importance then, yes? And it is. It is the key to understand everything Jesus says here. I am the bread of life.
I guess if you think of it, it’s kind of an interesting thing, right? Bread of life. All bread, by it’s nature, is life giving. We eat the food, it’s converted to energy to feed our bodies, we make food, we eat, it’s energy, and repeat. That’s all food, all drink. It works to keep us alive. But, to get there is work, is it not?
Today, we’re separated from the work that’s required for that which we eat. I remember visiting a college friend’s home in Michigan. I was astounded by what I saw. He didn’t live on a farm, it was just a home in the middle of a small town, but he had a huge garden, a big chicken coop, and a large reddish-brown stump in the middle of the yard. He showed me his axe, and as soon as I saw it, he proceeded to tell me all about the delicious chicken he had inside in the freezer, a chicken he had killed and plucked yesterday. When we sat down to eat, he looked at me in horror as I put salt and pepper on my vegetables. He said it was a huge insult to the farmer to season the veggies before even tasting them, even after.
He was a man who was connected to his food, yet he still went to the grocery store every week to get the other supplies that he needed. Imagine living a hundred years ago, two hundred years ago. You would have to be almost self-reliant. You’d eat out of your garden, you’d raise and slaughter your animals, you’d cultivate grains and wheat, and, if you didn’t have what you needed, you traded with a neighbor to get it, but you still had to grind it, shuck it, kill it. You were connected to the food you ate, and if you didn’t do what was required, or, if you had a very lean or famine-type year, you’d starve and die.
Today, we work for money which goes to buy the food we eat, food which has been ground and shucked and killed. And that’s not a bad thing; I’m thankful for it, myself. But, we miss, I think, the idea that food isn’t always easy to come by. The work required is hard, backbreaking, tiresome, repetitive.
Imagine then, food which never runs out. We’ve seen, in the Scriptures, times where this is the case: Elijah and the miracle of the flour that never runs out, Elisha and the oil that never runs out. Except, of course, for when the time is done. Eventually, the flour in the jar wasn’t needed. The oil in the jug ran dry. But today, Jesus promises us food that never runs out; in fact, it’s food that never runs out and we don’t even have to work for it. He promises us the bread of life.
All bread is life-giving, but not all bread gives life forever. The biggest loaf of bread you’ve seen still eventually molds, dries out, becomes stale, or runs out. But what Jesus is promising will do none of those things. His bread will never mold, dry out, become stale, or run out. That’s because His bread, as we’ll hear next week, is His flesh. And His flesh, broken for you, is inexhaustible. His death, accomplished for you, is inexhaustible. There’s always more that enough; there’s a feast.
The Jews hearing Him this day grumbled among themselves. They had already received bread from His hand, but it wasn’t enough. The ate, they went to sleep, they woke up hungry the next morning. When Jesus promised the bread of life, they thought they got the short end of the stick, they thought He was holding something back. And then, on top of that, they looked at Jesus, really looked at Him, and saw this man who was once a boy, who they knew apprenticed under His father, Joseph, who was born of Mary. The incredible things He was claiming for Himself, that He could give this bread, that He had come down from heaven, that He was sent by the Father, that He will raise people on the last day, these were unbelievable.
They couldn’t believe it; they wouldn’t believe it. And Jesus knew that. He knew they would not be able to accept the truths He was giving to them, and that’s because they were not seeking Him, but seeking the filling of their bellies. When Paul wrote to the Corinthians in his first letter, he lambasts them because, not only are the rich acting superior to the poor, but they’re feasting on the bread and getting drunk on the wine, filling their bellies, even to the detriment of others. This is the danger of treating the Lord too lightly. We take His gifts and abuse them for our own purposes.
But, when we seek the Lord where He promises to be found, He shall fill us unto everlasting life. This is what the Corinthians should have been doing, this is what Paul even encourages the Ephesians in today’s reading to do, and this is what we should also do. When we seek Jesus where He’s promised to be found, we should go there, and we will find Him. Not only that, but He shall take care of all our temporal and eternal needs in that place.
Again, it’s not to say that you’ll always have food, it’s not to say you’ll always have shelter, but when you have Jesus, you’ll never know lack because it will never be on your mind. When you have something so good that it distracts you from everything else around you, you experience neither want nor need. And I’m not talking about some kind of ecstatic union with Jesus, where you “feel” His presence, or audibly hear His voice, or fall in love with Him likes He’s your boyfriend. I’m talking about something which goes beyond the ecstatic and moves into the tangible, the touchable, the sensible. I’m talking, of course, about the Lord’s Supper. When you have Him there, when you have His body and blood before you under the bread and the wine, you can sense Jesus in ways that the Jesus culture around us only dreams about. You taste the bread, you feel the wine going down your throat. You eat and drink Him, not in t a gross, cannibalistic way, where you’re taking a bite out of Him, but in a real presence kind of way. He is there because He’s promised to be there.
In the text today, our Lord begins to equate this idea, this real presence of Jesus, with the resurrection. He’ll say next week that whoever eats His flesh and drinks His blood has eternal life, He is the bread of life, after all. And He’ll point out that if you don’t eat and drink His flesh and blood, you have no life in you whatsoever. And what life would that be? The life of the resurrection. In fact, here Jesus tells us that if you don’t believe in His flesh and blood being given to you for the forgiveness of sins, you might as well not believe in the resurrection from the dead.
What a horrible thing! Can you imagine Christianity without the resurrection? Paul tells us that if the resurrection isn’t real, if it isn’t going to happen, then we are just idiots, believing nonsense to somehow make ourselves feel better. Jesus says the resurrection is real, and it’s tied to eating His flesh, the bread of life. If you have one, you will have the other, and if you have neither, then you shall have no life whatsoever.
It’s sad, isn’t it, to think that there are those who shall die in their sins because they reject the gift of the Lord that He gives us? But it’s true. I’m not saying that you should go and yell at your Pentecostal or Baptist brother or sister and tell them they’re going to hell (God even has mercy on those Christians who may not know what they are missing out on), but to warn them in a loving way by your witness, by your deep desire to feast at the Lord’s Supper, by your giving of money to support the church which brings it to you as often as we can, by your refusing to sacrifice and miss out on the gifts of Christ, this is loving. And it’s good for you, too.
Maybe another way to think about this is that if you believe in the resurrection, you’re going to be seeking after the bread of life, the flesh of Jesus, and you’ll have it. If you seek after the bread of life, the flesh of Jesus, you’ll be finding the resurrection from the dead. We don’t understand how the bread and wine bring us the body and blood of Christ, we only believe it because Christ promised it. We can grumble among ourselves, we can try to change our Lord’s words, we try to seek Him where He may not be found, we reject our Lord, plain and simple. But those who trust the Lord know that He brings to us the bread of life, bread which will never run out, never mold or grow stale, bread which we never have to work for ever again.
And this is true; you don’t earn the bread by your work in the church, by your giving, by your attendance. It’s given to you because you are seeking Jesus, because He’s given you faith to believe in Him, to see the plain words of Scripture, This is My body, This is My blood, given and shed for you for the forgiveness of sins. He’s given you the gifts and you can’t earn them, not ever. This bread is eternal life unworked for. You can’t earn it, but Jesus has for you. He has earned it all and He gives it to you freely, that you may life forever with Him in the resurrection which is to come. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Now may the peace of God which passes all human understanding guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, our Lord! Amen.
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