BREAD OF LIFE—Part 2
(John 6:30-69)
August 26, 2018
Mike Fargo
Today we finish the 6th chapter of John’s gospel—often referred to as Jesus’ “discourse on the bread of life.” If you remember, the chapter began with Jesus feeding the 5,000 on the east bank of the Sea of Galilee. It was a remarkable miracle that made the crowds want to install Jesus as their ruler, thinking that he would perpetually provide food for them, much like Moses had done in the wilderness with the daily supply of manna. Knowing their intentions, Jesus secretly returned to Capernaum with his disciples, but after considerable effort the crowd eventually tracked him down.
And so as he taught in the synagogue in Capernaum, he confronts this group with the futility of all their efforts in verse 26, when he tells them,
“Very truly I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw the signs I performed, but because you ate the loaves and had your fill. Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For on him God the Father has placed his seal of approval.”
Unfortunately, the crowd still thinks he’s referring to a material kind of food, so they ask him, “Okay, so what is it we have to do to get this food?” And the answer Jesus gave, which is where we left off last week, was simple (and I quote): “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.” And it’s right at this point that the whole conversation between Jesus and the crowd takes a radical turn in a whole new direction, to a much deeper and more profound direction. These people need to stop focusing on food and instead focus on Christ. But in doing this, Jesus opens himself up to a question the crowd now asks in verse 30:
[30-31] So they asked him, “What sign then will you give that we may see it and believe you? What will you do? Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written: ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’ ”
Jesus had essentially told them they don’t have to “do” anything to get this food that endures forever, but simply put their trust in Jesus himself. And so, in essence they are saying, “Okay, Jesus, you claim you’re the focus we should have. So demonstrate why you’re worthy of our trust. And by the way Jesus, Moses earned our fathers’ trust by giving them manna to eat in the desert. He brought down food from heaven. So, what do you do?” Do you see what’s happening? They’re still trying to bend the whole conversation back to what they really want—material food. Their mistake, however, is the claim that Moses had given them food from “heaven.” And so Jesus uses their own words against them in verse 32.
[32-33] Jesus said to them, “Very truly I tell you, it is not Moses who has given you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is the bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”
Yes, God provides us with our daily bread. In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus even taught us to pray for our daily bread. But that kind of food has a very superficial impact on the quality of our lives. When Jesus says the bread he offers gives “life to the world,” he is using that word “life” with a capital L. But the crowd is still stuck on some kind of material food, and so they reply in verse 34:
[34] “Sir,” they said, “always give us this bread.”
I can just see them suddenly looking at each other, nodding their heads and thinking, “Hey, now we are getting somewhere! This is what we’ve been asking for all along. So give us this bread, Jesus!” Now it could be they were being intentionally obtuse, but the fact remains they still are still stuck on something physical. And so Jesus finally has to make himself unmistakably clear:
[35] Then Jesus declared, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”
And right here we come to the central point of this whole chapter. Jesus is claiming that he is, in himself, the bread of life—that it’s only by our somehow “feeding” on him that we discover real, true life. And this “feeding” is initially described as “whoever comes to me and whoever believes in me.” This is the key to understanding this whole chapter. In our growth as followers of Christ, we need to move beyond a Christ who is merely “out there”—yes, who loves us and provides for us (which he certainly does), to the Christ who is up close and personal, who we desperately need in us for our very survival. In particular, notice that he claims, “Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” Jesus is claiming that to truly know him, to be deeply connected to him, is to have the deepest hungers of our hearts satisfied.
And what are the things we most hunger and thirst for? Money? A fast car and an attractive spouse? Those things, like physical food, can offer a very shallow satisfaction. But what really makes life livable are things like meaning and purpose, connecting with reality—with truth and not a fantasy—to experience from deep within the transforming life of God, both his forgiveness and renewal in the Holy Spirit. Without these things you can have all the food you want and still be utterly miserable. This claim Jesus makes in verse 35 is the first of seven “I am” sayings in John’s gospel: I am the bread of life, I am the light of the world, I am the good shepherd, I am the way, the truth, and life, and so forth. Jesus is all of this and more. Only in Christ do we discover who we are, why we are here, how we should live, and most important of all, we discover that we can know and be known by God, we can love and be loved by our creator in a way that is more intimate than any human love.
I love how Jesus expressed it in the upper room in the 14th chapter of John: “He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love him and disclose myself to him. …My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.” Imagine that, the Creator of the whole universe disclosing himself to us and making his home with us.
But even as he says this, Jesus is a realist and knows these people are not getting what he’s saying. Their hearts are not open to these things, because for them Jesus is merely a means to some other end that they want, and not an end in himself. And so he tells them:
[36-40] “But as I told you, you have seen me and still you do not believe. All those the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away. For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me. And this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all those he has given me but raise them up at the last day. For my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day.”
Jesus knows he has hit a brick wall with this crowd, and so rather than get into an argument with them over his teaching on the bread of the life, he confronts them with their unbelief. He also confronts them with the fact that their unbelief is not a failure on Jesus’ part, since he knows that those who are truly seeking God will come to him. I love the way he puts it in the very next chapter of John with an equally skeptical crowd: “If anyone desires to do God’s will, he will know whether my teaching is from God or whether I speak on my own.” Such a statement, obviously, isn’t going to carry much weight with this crowd, and so they respond:
[41-12] At this the Jews there began to grumble about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” They said, “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I came down from heaven’?”
Since they don’t like what he has to say, they set about justifying their unbelief. And the easiest way to do that, of course, is to point out what an ordinary background Jesus has. In essence they are saying, “You’re no big deal, Jesus. You come from working class people, just like us. We know your whole family, and they’re nothing special. Where do you get off telling us that you, in yourself, are the bread of life? How absurd!” But Jesus isn’t deterred. He goes right back to his basic point that if they really cared about God, then everything Jesus taught would resonate with them, for he speaks the words of God, as we hear in verse 43:
[43-45] “Stop grumbling among yourselves,” Jesus answered. “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them, and I will raise them up at the last day. It is written in the Prophets: ‘They will all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard the Father and learned from him comes to me.”
In other words, we’ve all been taught by God. The reality of God presses in on all of us from a thousand different directions. Those who are attentive to these intrusions of God, and who try to follow the thread, invariably come to Jesus, for his words match reality. And why is Jesus uniquely qualified to teach about God? He continues in verse 46:
[46-50] “No one has seen the Father except the one who is from God; only he has seen the Father. Very truly I tell you, the one who believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, yet they died. But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which anyone may eat and not die.”
Back in verse 35 Jesus claimed that he is the bread of life that satisfies all our deepest hunger. Here he is the bread of life in another sense, in that he enables us to live forever. By analogy, physical food does both things but only to a very limited extent. It can satisfy us in the sense that when you are really, really hungry, and then you eat, you experience a sense of fullness and satisfaction. What’s more, by eating you are also prolonging your life. If we did not eat at all, we would not only feel hunger pains, but we would quickly die. Well, back in verse 35 Jesus claimed to satisfy in a way material food can’t, and here he claims he can also keep us alive forever, which material food can’t. And how does he do that? He tells them next:
[51] “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.”
Here Jesus moves way beyond the simple message of the feeding of the 5,000—that he can adequately provide for our needs. He has even moved beyond the truth that he is the bread of life who can make our lives meaningful on the deepest and most important levels possible. Here he moves into the arena of the cross, where he gives us eternal life by dying for us, by literally giving himself over to death so that we might not have to die. Remember how this gospel opens in chapter one when John the Baptist twice sees Jesus and proclaims, “Behold the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” Through his atoning, sacrificial death in our place, Jesus literally “gives life to the world” by removing the guilt of our sin and reconciling us to God. Or to use the words of the apostle Paul, “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself. He who knew no sin, became sin on our behalf, that we might become the righteousness of God in him.”
But to appropriate this bread, Jesus says, we have to eat it, not just treat it like a mere doctrine that we can intellectualize. It’s a truth that we must embrace with our whole being, something that must be chewed on and ingested until it becomes a living reality in us. But by using such graphic language, Jesus intentionally exposes their unbelief even more.
[52-56] Then the Jews began to argue sharply among themselves, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” Jesus said to them, “Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them.”
This is where things shift into high gear. Up to this point, the verb “to eat” in the Greek text has been a very generic word. But from verse 54 on a word is used three times that actually means “to chew on, to gnaw at.” On the one hand, Jesus is intentionally being offensive in order to expose their unbelief. But in another sense, he is also graphically describing how we appropriate Jesus as our bread of life—that it’s not some casual, inspirational admiration of Jesus, but to “feed” on Jesus is to “devour him” like a starving man who has suddenly found food. It means letting him invade our life, to put our whole well-being completely into his hands, to totally lean on him and let him shape how we actually think and live. And this requires learning to depend on him every moment of every day for his wisdom, strength, and endurance to do the right thing and make the tough choices.
And over time, we discover, Jesus’ very life growing within ours, or as the apostle Paul wrote to the Colossians, “The mystery hidden from ages past, but now revealed—Christ in you, the hope of glory.” Or to the Galatians, “I am crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God.” This whole discourse on the bread of life has been slowly leading us to a point that Jesus will take up later in the “Upper Room Discourse,” where he talks about a lot about “Christ in me and I in Christ.”
Unfortunately, over the centuries these words have also been a source of great division among Christians. This passage has always reminded readers of the Christian sacrament of the Lord’s Table. I realize many Protestant commentators try to dismiss this connection by claiming this was not Jesus’ intent, but that’s very difficult to believe. Jesus’ very language here becomes the virtual formula that he later gives at the last supper. Yes, commentators claim that Jesus’ audience couldn’t possibly have made this connection at this early stage, but think of all the other things Jesus said that made no sense until after his resurrection.
What’s important to note is that John’s gospel is the only one that doesn’t mention the sacrament of the bread and the wine during the last supper, which is remarkable since we learn from the apostle Paul that within only a few years of the resurrection the Eucharist or the Lord’s Supper had become the central feature of the Christian’s weekly worship, and John’s gospel was written over thirty years after Paul.
But by recording Jesus’ words in John 6 that clearly allude to the sacrament, and yet never actually mentioning the Lord’s supper anywhere else in his gospel, John is clearly trying to get at the reality behind the sacrament. For every time we participate in the Lord’s Table, we are claiming to have “seen” what this crowd failed to see in the feeding of the 5,000. When we eat the bread and drink the wine, we are proclaiming both Christ’s sacrificial death for us, and our continual need for his life to enter us and feed us. We literally act out these shocking words about his flesh and blood when we come forward during communion and the server tells us, “This is the body of Christ, broken for you. This is the blood of Christ, shed for you. Take and eat.” We “sacramentally” feed on Christ as an expression of our faith and desire to feed on him in reality, every day of the week. Jesus captures this well next in John 6, v. 57:
[57-59] “Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your ancestors ate manna and died, but whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.” He said this while teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum.
Now this whole discourse has been a very deep and difficult teaching. How then did his own disciples react? The chapter closes with this concern:
[60-63] On hearing it, many of his disciples said, “This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?” Aware that his disciples were grumbling about this, Jesus said to them, “Does this offend you? Then what if you see the Son of Man ascend to where he was before! The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you—they are spirit and they are life.”
The scene suddenly shifts from the crowds to those who would call themselves his disciples, people who had identified with Jesus as their rabbi, their teacher. In his efforts to sift the crowds, Jesus has also disturbed those who were drawn to him. So he gives them an insight into what lay behind these shocking metaphors. He essentially warns them not to take his words as the crowds did. We do not physically eat Jesus in some magical way. His words are spiritual, he tells us, and thus they are meant to describe what is happening in the realm of the spirit, that central reality that actually defines who we are. Yet even this explanation would not be adequate for some of them, as Jesus makes clear in verse 64:
[64-66] “Yet there are some of you who do not believe.” For Jesus had known from the beginning which of them did not believe and who would betray him. He went on to say, “This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless the Father has enabled them.” From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.
Jesus has shaken the tree, and those who had reservations about him now had an excuse to leave. But there were others who had been equally disturbed by his words, but who were still convinced that Jesus was from God. They were equally conflicted, but they couldn’t bolt so easily. It’s to these Jesus speaks next in verse 67:
[67-69] “You don’t want to leave too, do you?” Jesus asked the Twelve. Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and to know that you are the Holy One of God.”
Does this mean the twelve understood more than those who left? No, very likely they did not. But they did understand that Jesus was from God, and that was enough to make them hang in there with him. After his death and resurrection, they would understand a great deal more, and after Pentecost, even more yet. This is what following Jesus looks like. If you insist on having everything nailed down up front, you will never get to first base. Jesus will remain a total enigma. But if you are willing to grab what you can understand and embrace it with all you have, over time more and more of his words will begin to make great sense too. And in the end, if you let him, Jesus will become for you the very bread of life itself. Amen