John 6:22-35
“Real Food”
August 1, 2021 – Tenth Sunday after Pentecost
My wife has good taste. When we were first married, Beth always kept an open can of Hershey’s Syrup in the refrigerator in case of an emergency or time of stress. A spoonful taken straight could cure a lot for her. But one day I bought a can of generic chocolate syrup to save a few cents. I figured no big deal, but it was. Beth read the ingredients. Carob was a major component of the no-name stuff, while there was only cocoa in the Hershey’s.
I told my friend Jay the story. We grew up with the “Pepsi challenge.” He figured we could do the same. “You won’t be able to tell the difference!” we told her. Just pour a little of each in a spoon without her knowing which is which, then let her try to tell them apart. We knew we were in trouble when the generic stuff poured out distinctly lighter in color than the Hershey’s. We had to blindfold Beth for our little test.
She could tell the difference. It was no contest. Beth will tell you: carob is no substitute for chocolate. I think she could even smell the difference before putting the spoon in her mouth.
Many of us like to think we have discriminating palates. We can tell the difference between chocolate and carob, butter and margarine, Starbuck’s coffee and some store brand. The real thing is purer, richer, just plain tastes better. But our text today is about the fact that when it comes to what is of utmost importance, our taste may be deeply flawed. Like the crowds that hounded Jesus, we may not be able to appreciate real food.
That’s why crowds stalked Jesus, following Him back and forth around the shore of Galilee. Before the feeding of the five thousand, they ran while the disciples rowed Jesus across. This time, in verses 22 to 24, they couldn’t find Jesus or quite figure out where He’d gone, so they got into boats themselves to go look for Him.
In verse 25, after finding Jesus, they greeted Him with a question, “Rabbi, when did you come here?” They are clearly confused. In last week’s text they called Him a prophet and they wanted to make Him their king. Now He’s just “rabbi,” “teacher,” and they are just looking for another free lunch.
Jesus has them pegged. He refuses to answer their question. In verse 22 they didn’t see Him get into a boat. He could have told how He walked across the water to get there, but Jesus knew they weren’t paying attention, even to miracles. Verse 26 says, “you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.”
If it was an army, as I’ve suggested, this crowd definitely traveled on its stomach. They didn’t care about or understand the miracle, the “sign,” as John calls them. They just wanted to keep the bread coming. Jesus wanted to offer them something more substantial even than bread and fish, but they weren’t yet looking for real food.
You may have been, like me, or encountered the child who complains, “I’m hungry!” But when he’s offered carrot sticks or an orange or some other healthy food he’ll grumble, “I’m not hungry for that.” A whole crowd of childish people like that came to Jesus.
Verse 27 tells them and us, “Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life…” Jesus wasn’t callous about physical hunger. He proved that by showing compassion enough to feed thousands. He taught His disciples to share what they had and to give food or even a cup of cold water to those who were hungry and thirsty. But He knew that kind of food would not last.
In ancient Palestine, food didn’t have expiration dates like what you and I buy at Fred Meyer or Winco. Eggs didn’t come with stamps telling you a date to use them by. Bread wasn’t packaged in plastic bags with a tag bearing a sell-by date. But everyone still knew bread grows stale and eggs get rotten. Even that dried fish wouldn’t last forever. So Jesus jarred them out of fixating on regular food by urging them to work for food that “endures.”
It sounds like the holy grail of food science. Forget preservatives in bread and irradiated produce. If there is food that will stay good forever, then aim for that. Jesus did not expect a lab to produce everlasting food. He offered it Himself, saying, “which the Son of Man will give you. For it is on him that God the Father has set his seal.”
With verse 28, the crowd zeroed in on Jesus’ suggestion that they work for eternal bread, asking, “What must we do to perform the works of God?” Grant them this much spiritual perception: they understood Jesus was talking about gaining eternal bread by doing what God wanted. But they didn’t understand what God wanted. So Jesus told them in verse 29, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.”
As the apostle Paul later argued so clearly in Romans, eternal life, salvation, comes by faith, not by work. You can’t earn eternal bread by working for it like you do daily bread. Instead, the “work” God wants is belief, but not generic belief. As I’ve said before, Christian faith is not Hollywood faith, a belief that everything is going to turn out O.K. It’s not Mr McCawber’s faith in David Copperfield, a faith that no matter how bad things are, “something will turn up.”
No, faith that is the “work of God,” that earns eternal bread, is faith and trust in a person, specifically, “in him whom he has sent.” Surprisingly, the people seemed to get this. Jesus was asking them to believe in Him. But they couldn’t get that delicious bread out of their minds. So in verse 30 they asked Jesus what “sign,” what miracle He was going to do to prove Himself so they could believe in Him. In a cute little rhetorical turn around, after Jesus asked them to work, they asked Him what “work” He was going to do?
Fully focused on their stomachs again, they told Jesus in verse 31 what sort of miracle they would like. “Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’” They were quoting our Old Testament lesson from Exodus 16:4 and our psalm today, Psalm 78 verse 24. Nehemiah 9:15 repeats it. The manna God fed Israel in the wilderness was “bread from heaven.”
They thought they were tracking with Jesus. They wanted food that lasts forever, an endless food supply. Loaves and fishes were pretty much a one-time event. Jesus repeated the miracle once, but that’s it. These folks wanted something more like the manna, food that shows up every day, non-stop. “Do that,” they told Jesus, “and we’ll believe in you.”
It was still all about something to eat. No matter how much they might talk about doing God’s work or trusting in Jesus, it still all boiled down to fish and bread, lox and bagels, food to satisfy their physical hunger.
Beth grew up on and fed our daughters Kraft macaroni and cheese. It costs so little and is so easy to fix. Kids love it. Had we ever gone to all the trouble of cooking them real homemade macaroni and cheese, with regular size macaroni pasta, milk, good sharp cheddar cheese, egg, butter, chopped onion, paprika, and a crusty topping of bread crumbs all baked golden brown in the oven, I doubt they would have eaten it. They wanted the stuff from the box. That’s how this crowd reacted to Jesus. They didn’t want truly good food, real food from God. They didn’t even really want Jesus. They wanted Jesus-in-a-box, feeding them cheap and easy comfort food.
Jesus got more direct with them. First, He corrected their misapprehension about manna and Moses in verse 32. They wanted Jesus to be another Moses giving them manna, but Jesus says, “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.” Manna came from God, not from Moses. And God’s true bread is not manna at all. The bread from heaven, the eternal food, is something else.
There are two ways to translate what Jesus says next in verse 33. In the Greek, there’s no clear distinction between “he” or “that” in the sentence. So the crowd heard it the way it’s translated in the NRSV, “For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” So in verse 34 they still can’t get bread out of their heads. “Sir, give us this bread always.” They still imagine food floating down out of the sky.
But the other way to translate verse 33 is like the old NIV does, with a personal pronoun. “For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven…” Verse 35 makes it absolutely clear that’s what Jesus meant. Seven times in the Gospel of John, Jesus says “I am…” and adds some picture or quality to show who He is. He also just plain says, “I am” in chapter 8 verse 28. But this first time, in this first “I am,” He declares “I am the bread of life.” Jesus began the process of explaining who He is and what He came for, by relating His mission to the most basic human necessity, the need for food.
Jesus was fully human, the Son of Man. He never forgot that people need food and drink. He cried out for something to quench His own thirst on the Cross and ate some fish after rising from the dead. But as the fully divine Son of God, He won’t let us imagine that life is just about our physical needs. There is a food and a life that is truer, deeper and longer than anything a loaf of bread can produce, whether it’s the cheapest, processed white bread or all-natural whole grain stuff you have to really chew to swallow.
“Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” That’s obviously not about this life, this world. Jesus spoke of eternal life, the life of the world to come, not physical hunger pangs or thirst. He came to address an emptiness and dehydration of the soul. For that hunger, there is only one food: Jesus Himself.
Yet as I said last week about the feeding of the five thousand, while Jesus the Bread of Life is about more than merely physical eating, it cannot be about less than that. People who believe in Jesus still eat and drink regular food, and, if Jesus’ resurrection is any clue, will do so forever. That’s why when Christians celebrate Holy Communion, it’s real bread, real fruit of the vine, not just meditating on Jesus in our hearts or something like that.
I can’t endorse every part of the way she understands her life as a Christian, but Sara Miles tells a moving story of how she became one. In her book, Take this Bread, she wrote,
I walked into a church, ate a piece of bread, took a sip of wine. A routine Sunday activity for tens of millions of Americans—except that up until that moment I’d led a thoroughly secular life, at best indifferent to religion, more often appalled by its fundamentalist crusades. This was my first communion. It changed everything.
Eating Jesus, as I did that day to my great astonishment, led me against all my expectations to a faith I’d scorned and work I’d never imagined. The mysterious sacrament turned out to be not a symbolic wafer but actual food—indeed, the bread of life. In that shocking moment of communion, filled with a deep desire to reach for and become part of a body, I realized that what I’d been doing with my life all along was what I was meant to do: feed people.[1]
Miles went on to start collecting and piling huge donations of food at the altar in that church and then starting food banks all over San Francisco. She first understood what Paul was saying in our reading from Ephesians 4 today, that Jesus the Bread of Life connects us to His Body, which consists of all those who believe in Him. Then she grasped that receiving true spiritual food includes and necessitates the work of sharing true physical food.
That’s why part of our Communion Sunday observance is to remind each other to bring donations for the Food Bank in our own community. If we are being nourished by Jesus and growing up in Him, then part of that will be to do what He did: feed people.
Yet you and I can be like those children who turn up their noses at real macaroni and cheese, real food. We know that loving Jesus, accepting His grace, studying His life, and working at obeying His command to love others is the real food. But we want to get all that easily, from a little box. We confine Jesus to Sunday mornings or emergency moments of prayer. We keep our God in a box we call a church building. Then we work the rest of the time for car payments and health benefits and vacations to the coast, and yes, for food. But we don’t work very hard to know and love Jesus, to live as He lived, to be filled with the only nourishment that endures.
Jesus gave us the sacrament we are celebrating this morning to help us get it straight. Before He died and rose again, Jesus picked up a loaf of bread and said, “This is my body, broken for you.” Then He did what He did with the loaves by the lake. He gave thanks to God. John remembered and mentioned that more than once. We heard it in verse 23. The Greek word “thanks” is eucharisto, Eucharist, good gift, another name for Holy Communion.
Come to this Table today because you believe and trust in Jesus. Come because you want to grow together into His living Body and bring the bread of life to the world. Come because you trust His promise that the one who comes to Him will never be hungry or thirsty. Come because you realize that Jesus is the true food of life, the bread of heaven, the one who came down to raise you up to live with Him forever. Come and eat real food.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2021 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
[1] Take this Bread: The Spiritual Memoir of a Twenty-first Century Christian (New York: Random House, 2007), p. 54.