John 6:22-35
“Real Food”
August 5, 2012 - Tenth Sunday after Pentecost

         “You won’t be able to tell the difference!” That’s what my friend Jay and I told my wife. When we first got married, Beth had a drinking problem. It wasn’t alcohol. It was Hershey’s Syrup. In times of stress, she would get the open can of Hershey’s from the refrigerator, pour herself a dose in a spoon and then take it straight. Then one day at the grocery store I bought a can of generic chocolate syrup to save a few cents. I figured it would be no big deal, but it was. Beth pointed out the ingredients, especially that carob was a major component of the no-name stuff, while there was only cocoa in the Hershey’s.

         Having grown up with the Pepsi challenge, Jay and I figured we could do the same thing with chocolate syrup. We’d just pour a little of each in a spoon without her seeing which was which, then let her try to tell them apart. We knew we were in trouble, when the generic stuff poured out with a distinctly lighter color than the Hershey’s. We ended up having to blindfold Beth for our little test.

         She could tell the difference. It was no contest. Beth would 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, and 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 across the north end of the Sea of Galilee. Before the feeding of the five thousand, they ran along the shore 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. But obviously over ten thousand people did not climb into those boats from Tiberias to chase Jesus. No, either what was left of the larger crowd, or a delegation set off to look for Him. They were first century paparazzi, dogging Jesus in order to see some new miracles.

         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. But now He’s just “rabbi,” “teacher,” and they’re about to argue with Him about His teaching.

         Jesus has them pegged when He refuses to answer their question. Verse 22 says they didn’t seem Him get into the boat with the disciples. He could have told them how He walked across the water to get in the boat and arrive there, but Jesus knew didn’t need more miracles. They didn’t comprehend the miracle they had seen. As Jesus says in verse 26, “you are looking for me, not because you saw miracles, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.”

         Like armies do, this crowd traveled on its stomach. They didn’t care about or understand the miracle, they just wanted to keep the bread coming. Jesus wanted them to give them faith in Him more than full bellies. He had something better than bread to offer, but they weren’t looking for real food.

         Verse 27 tell 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 His compassion to feed thousands who would have gone hungry. 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 most of what you and I buy at Fred Meyer or Albertsons. Eggs didn’t come with stamps telling you to use them by a certain day and bread wasn’t packaged in plastic bags with a little tag bearing a sell-by date. But everyone still knew that bread grows stale and eggs get rotten and milk goes sour. So Jesus jogged them out of their focus on everyday eating by urging them to work for food that “endures for eternal life.”

         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. Butt Jesus did not expect a lab to produce everlasting food. He expected to offer it Himself, saying, “which the Son of Man will give you. For it is on him that God the Father has set his seal.”

         “The Son of Man” was Jesus’ favorite way to refer to Himself. Both Mark’s Gospel and John’s Gospel were written to show us that Jesus is the Son of God, but Jesus also wanted us to know that He is both, Son of God and Son of Man, divine and human.

         With verse 28, the crowd zeroes in on Jesus’ suggestion that they work for eternal bread and they ask, “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, 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. But they thought He was talking about an endless food supply. The loaves and fishes were pretty much a one-time event. Jesus repeated the miracle once, but that’s it. What these folks wanted was 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 lox and bagels, fish and bread, food to satisfy their physical hunger.

         Did you feed your children Kraft macaroni and cheese? You know, the stuff that costs so little and is so easy to fix. Kids love it. But then did you ever go to all the trouble of cooking them real homemade macaroni and cheese, with regular size macaroni pasta, and milk, and good sharp cheddar cheese, and an egg, and butter, and some chopped onion, some paprika, and then a crusty topping of bread crumbs all baked until golden brown in the oven? And what did they do? They wouldn’t eat it, would they? They asked for the stuff out of the box, didn’t they? That’s exactly how this crowd reacted to Jesus. They didn’t want the good food, the real food from God. They didn’t really want Jesus. They wanted Jesus in a box, feeding them what they thought they liked.

         Jesus got even more direct with them. First , He corrected their misapprehension about manna and Moses in verse 32. They wanted Jesus to be another Moses and give 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.” The manna came from God, not from Moses. And the 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. The way relative pronouns work in Greek. There’s no clear distinction between reference to a person, where we would say “he” and reference to an object where we would say, “that” or “it.” So what the crowd heard is 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.” That’s why 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…” In verse 35, Jesus puts it to them absolutely plain, “I am the bread of life.” Jesus says “I am…” seven times in the Gospel of John. This is the first time, “I am the bread of life.” Jesus began the process of explaining who He is and what He’s come 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 people need food and drink. He Himself cried out for something to quench his thirst on the Cross. 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 that you have to chew for an hour.

         “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. It’s about eternal life, the life of the world to come, that Jesus spoke. It’s not physical hunger pangs or thirst. It’s an emptiness and dehydration of the soul that Jesus came to address. For that kind of hunger, there is only one real food: Jesus Himself.

         You and I can be like children turning up our noses at real food, real macaroni and cheese. We know that loving Jesus, studying His life, obeying His teaching, accepting His grace is the real food, but we let ourselves try to get all that out of a small box. We confine Jesus to Sunday mornings or emergency moments of prayer. We work 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 accept the one and only nourishment that endures.

         That’s why Jesus gave us the sacrament we are celebrating this morning, to help us get it straight. Before Jesus died and rose again, He 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 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 © 2012 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj