John 6:35-51
“Living Bread”
August 8, 2021 – Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost
Our grandson loves The Hungry Little Caterpillar. He is much like the hero of that story. Here’s Susan’s report of what 9- month-old John ate on Wednesday: Lots of oatmeal for breakfast, an entire banana for lunch, minced lamb and peaches for dinner, while still nursing pretty much all through the day and night. Of course, we’re delighted to hear this because it means our grandson is healthy and happy and growing.
We’d be worried about John if he suddenly lost interest in eating. We’d worry about that for almost anyone. A reasonable appetite is a good sign of health. That’s true spiritually as well. In the verse we ended with last week, verse 35, Jesus said He would satisfy hunger and quench thirst. Those who come and believe in Him will not be hungry or thirsty. But that’s because He offered Himself as the Bread of Life, as spiritual food. He wanted to direct the human appetite toward Him.
Yet those listening to Jesus have an unhealthy lack of spiritual appetite. Jesus said so in verse 36. Even though the people there around Capernaum came looking for Jesus, they weren’t looking for Him because of who He is, but because His miracles produced physical food. They’ve seen Him and what He can do, but they don’t believe.
You could say faith, belief, is an appetite for Jesus. Belief is a key theme in John. Near the end of the Gospel, chapter 20 verse 30, John says he could have written down many more miracles Jesus did, but he wrote these so his readers could believe. But some people had a hard time believing.
We have those in our time who have a hard time believing something as simple as the truth about COVID-19 and vaccines to prevent it. I’ve read one or two articles now which counsel going easy on such people. There’s a psychological effect of hardening a person’s opinion by challenging it too directly and too much. Instead, it’s suggested, try offering a listening ear, ask questions, seek to understand why they believe COVID-19 vaccinations are harmful. But that’s not what Jesus did with those who refused to believe in Him. He explained the benefits which accrue to those who believe. They will not hunger.
So verse 37 turns to how people come to Jesus and believe in Him. He said, “Everything that the Father gives me will come to me, and anyone who comes to me I will never drive away.” Now as then, not everyone is willing to accept the truth when it’s put before them. One standard complaint about Christianity is that it’s exclusive, that it’s based on placing some people on the inside and some on the outside. But Jesus said, “anyone who comes to me I will never drive away.” There is no inside and outside with God the Father of Jesus Christ. Anyone can be included. Anyone can come and receive the Bread of Life. Jesus welcomes all who want to come to Him.
Verses 38 to 40 are about the Father’s will. Jesus shows that the welcome and inclusion begin at the highest level. His will is His Father’s will, He says in verse 38. In verse 39, He explained just what that will is: “that I shall lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up at the last day.” God does not wish to lose anything or anyone. Let us think about that as we worry about our losses.
Some of those who refuse to wear masks or be vaccinated are worried about losing freedom. They fear a conspiracy to control their lives and take away their liberty. We lamented at a worship service earlier this year the genuine losses many of experienced in the pandemic: vacations, school, personal interaction. We lost business, lost friends, and lost family. Loss is terrifying. It can cause people, cause us, to wrap up in ourselves and try to prevent more loss, even by refusing measures that are only aimed to help us. Jesus comes to us here in verse 39 saying that it is His Father’s will “that I shall lose none of all that he has given me.” Whatever we have lost, Jesus will not lose us.
The goal of it all, Jesus says, is there in both verse 39 and verse 40, so that He can “raise them up at the last day.” In all our worries and fears, let us not lose sight of the fact that our hope is to be raised up, like Jesus was raised up. Vaccines and masks and some distance could very well save us from COVID-19. We should all make use of them and encourage others to do the same. But we will all die one day. Only Jesus can save us then. Only Jesus can raise us up.
That was all too much for the skeptics in Capernaum. In verse 41 they grumbled about His claim to be spiritual food, to be “the bread that came down from heaven.” In verse 42 they complain that know where He came from. He was from the little town of Nazareth, twenty miles away. “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I came down from heaven?’”
I will pause and note this is the first time in John’s Gospel where it uses the term, “the Jews” in a negative way. It’s “the Jews” who grumble here. It’s “the Jews” in John who ultimately arrest Jesus and get the Romans to kill Him. Those words have caused all sorts of ugly misunderstanding, including the horror of the Holocaust. John is not impugning all Jewish people. Jesus is a Jew. His disciples were Jews. The very first followers of Jesus were Jewish. John here is talking about a small group of Jewish authorities, not the whole nation, not all the people descended from them.
Jesus said He would lose none of those the Father gave Him. That surely includes the Jewish people. He went to them first. So did His followers like the Apostle Paul. Jesus is not some loser who cannot even save His own people. Jesus is the Savior for all who will come to Him. The Bible shows that can and will include Jewish people. Along with other hatred, anti-Semitism is on the rise again, as if we learned nothing from the Holocaust. But there is absolutely no room for anti-Semitism in Christian hearts and minds. Anti-Semites don’t really know or love Jesus.
Neither did those Jewish authorities really know Jesus, although they thought they did. He told them to quit grumbling in verse 43 and in verse 44 said, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them;” then that promise again, “and I will raise that person up on the last day.” Then He quoted Isaiah in verse 45, “they shall all be taught by God.” Believing in Jesus means being instructed by and listening to the Father. “Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me.” It’s how spiritual hunger is satisfied. If you are hungry for God, then you come to Jesus to be fed.
It can be as hard to swallow now as it was then. Jesus Christ is the only meal God is serving. To think you can come to God without coming to Jesus is like trying to go to Hole in the Wall and order something besides barbecue. It’s like going to the Noodle and Café Chinese place down the street and asking for lasagna. It’s as if you went to Newman’s Fish Company to buy blueberries. There’s only one sort of cuisine in each of those places. You’d be foolish to try to get something else. So the only food on God’s Table is the life, death and resurrection of His Son Jesus. There’s only one choice.
But we like our choices. Applebee’s has made a big comeback this year, partly because they got mentioned in a Walker Hayes song. He sang about their Bourbon Street steak and Oreo shake. They’ve cut back their menu but you can still order an Asian salad or buffalo wings or some fettucine Alfredo with chicken or shrimp. We like to have lots of options.
So we get the idea Jesus is one of many options, suitable for some tastes, but not for others. We can believe in Jesus, someone else can believe in another god, or nothing at all, and it’s all just fine. The spiritual menu is large and you can choose whatever you like.
You might think that’s a new idea, but it was much the same in ancient times. Romans had a pluralistic religion. It didn’t matter much which god you wanted to worship, as long as you didn’t bother those who worshipped other gods, and as long as you were willing to say that Caesar, the ruler of Rome, was one of them, to say, “Caesar is lord.”
The problem for Christians in Rome is the same problem we have now. We insist on what Jesus said here. You can’t come to God, you can’t listen to God, without coming to Christ, without listening to Jesus. Christians wouldn’t say Caesar is Lord because they had only one Lord and His name was Jesus. So Romans called Christians atheists and made their religion illegal, took away their jobs, and sometimes tortured and killed them.
We may like all our options a little too much for our own good. We want everyone to get vaccinated, but we still want it to be a free choice. We want to stop the spread of COVID-19, but we let people opt out of basic public health concern. Lane County health officials are saying that people now are not cooperating with contact tracing when they test positive for COVID. They refuse to say where they might have got it or to whom they might have spread it. It’s a huge failure of public spirit based on the false belief, the false god of freedom of choice. That god lies and tells me that my choices only affect me.
In a recent published conversation, Stanley Hauerwas talked about thinking choice is the foundation of life, “People are encouraged to believe that the purpose of being born is to be free to self-construct your life as you please. Eventually, the burden of self-fabrication becomes unbearable. They find it impossible to choose their way into a life worth living.”[1] Freedom alone, just making free choices, is not going to save you, not from COVID-19 and not from spiritual death. You cannot just endlessly choose your way into eternal life.
Our love of choices may cause us to think Jesus didn’t really mean what He said, didn’t mean He is the only Bread, that only He is the way to God. That’s hard to square with verse 46. “Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father.” Jesus is the only one who came down from heaven. He’s the only one who sees God, knows God, ultimately is God. Jesus is the only food for eternal life.
To our modern ears, a word like “only” sounds harsh and exclusive. It limits choice. It takes away freedom. But it actually does the opposite. To realize Jesus is the one true Bread of Life is to find freedom to live. The good news of Jesus is the gift of life, an everlasting life. Jesus said in verse 47, “Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life.” Believing in Jesus extends life beyond death. That’s why He repeats that wonderful claim in verse 48, “I am the bread of life,” and continues in verse 49, “Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died.” And verse 50, “This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die.”
True Christians do not try to convert others for our own glory and power. That happens, but it’s not the Spirit of Jesus, it’s not real Christianity. D. T. Niles from Sri Lanka had it right when he took an image from the impoverished streets of India and said that sharing our faith is “one beggar telling another beggar where he just found bread.”
Telling people about Jesus and asking them to believe in Him is not arrogance and intolerance. It’s happy sharing of the Bread of Life. It’s one shopper showing another where a bargain is to be found. It’s one mother passing along the number of a great babysitter. It’s a fisherman telling another fisherman what fly the trout are taking. It’s personal, practical, real good news.
Saturday morning in Japan by our time, Peres Jepchirchir from Kenya won the women’s marathon in 2 hours and 27 minutes. Less than a minute behind her and another Kenyan, a surprise contender Molly Seidel from the U.S. crossed the line to win the bronze. You don’t run a race like that just on protein. You need bread. Serious runners among us know that marathoners load up on carbohydrate rich foods for a day or two before the race. They need fuel for the long haul.
Eternity is the longest race of all. We share Jesus Christ as food for life’s marathon, fuel for the greatest distance we will face. In The Lord of the Rings, the books, not the movie, special bread is made by the elves. Lembas are food elves take on long, hard journeys. They gave some to the Fellowship of the Ring, who found it delicious. Gimli the dwarf gobbled down a whole piece and was told he’d just eaten enough for a day’s journey.
We saw something like lembas in our Old Testament lesson this morning in I Kings 19. Elijah received a cake of bread and a jar of water from an angel. In verse 8 of that chapter we learn how, “He got up, ate and drank; then he went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights to Horeb the mount of God.”
Jesus Christ is food for the long journey, a food to last us all the way through life and into the life to come. Frodo and Sam in The Lord of the Rings discovered how lembas strengthened and gave them life beyond all expectation. Tolkien wrote, “The lembas had a virtue without which they would long ago have lain down to die.” Near the very end as Frodo and Sam climb the bleak and barren slope of Mt. Doom, feeling the loss of their strength and hope, they eat a little more lembas and Tolkien says,
And yet this waybread of the elves had a potency that increased as travelers relied on it alone and did not mingle it with other foods. It fed the will, and it gave strength to endure, and to master sinew and limb beyond the measure of mortal kind.[2]
Tolkien’s Christian faith shines out of those words. He acknowledged later in a private letter that lembas had spiritual significance. He was thinking of being nourished at the Table of the Lord, of living on, relying on, Christ alone for our help and strength. In another letter to his son, he wrote that “The only cure for sagging of fainting faith is Communion.”[3] He said this from his own experience of sagging faith in younger years.
The more we rely on Jesus Christ and don’t try to mix our belief in Him with other, contrary beliefs, the stronger we grow, the better able we are to carry on in hope and in joy. When we feed on Jesus without wanting to be wiser or better or holier than other people, when we share our faith, when we ask others to believe in Him and in Him alone as the Bread of Life, we receive that hope and joy for ourselves even as we want it for them.
In our last verse today, verse 51, we hear Jesus say just briefly what we will listen to Him expand and teach next week. Jesus is uniquely and only the living bread that came down from heaven, so that “Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” That word “flesh” is key.
Gary Anderson sent me a poem he wrote after last week’s sermon. It began:
Food is life.
What is dead
cannot be eaten—
It has no life.
I realized that the basic scientific truth is that all food comes from something living, whether animal or vegetable. We do not and cannot eat merely inorganic, purely chemical substances. We cannot consume coal or petroleum to fuel our bodies. We cannot mine for food. Food has to be grown or raised or hunted first as a living thing.
The same is true spiritually. Jesus said He is the “living bread,” the only kind which can truly give life. That’s what is on offer in the restaurant we call “the Church,” at the Table we call “the Lord’s,” living bread for eternal life.
When Jesus says, the bread for the world “is my flesh” we hear how tangible this is. It’s not just a nice metaphor for a game you play in your head, trying to relax or meditate or achieve some sort of inner peace thinking about Jesus. No, it’s God coming into our world and our lives in the flesh and letting Himself be hurt and broken and ultimately murdered so that we could receive His gift of life-giving food.
We have more to say about it next week. Jesus has much more to say about it. For now, please remember that Jesus is the Bread of Life because He let His living flesh be broken, like wheat is broken apart in threshing, like bread is broken in serving, so that you and I may receive eternal life. We receive it not just in our minds, not just in our hearts, but in our own flesh in all the ways that we live out and do as Jesus did and give ourselves to serve others.
Our reading from Ephesians 5:2 said, “Christ loved us and gave himself for us.” Jesus said He would give Himself for the life of the world. He gave Himself for you and for anyone who will receive Him. Keep chewing on His Bread, enjoying God’s love for you, being nourished by Jesus. The living bread will last the distance. Just keep on eating.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2021 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
[1] In a conversation with William Willimon printed in The Christian Century, July 27, 2021.
[2] The Return of the King (Ballantine Books: New York, 1971), p. 262.
[3] The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (Houghton Mifflin Company: Boston, 2000), p. 338.