Sermon: The Bread of Life

Delivered at Monaghan United Methodist Church in Greenville, South Carolina on August 5, 2018

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The Bread of Life

Audio Version

When the crowd saw that neither Jesus nor his disciples were there, they got into the boats and came to Capernaum looking for Jesus.  When they found him on the other side of the lake, they asked him, “Rabbi, when did you get here?”

Jesus replied, “I assure you that you are looking for me not because you saw miraculous signs but because you ate all the food you wanted.  Don’t work for the food that doesn’t last but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Human One will give you.  God the Father has confirmed him as his agent to give life.”

They asked, “What must we do in order to accomplish what God requires?”

Jesus replied, “This is what God requires, that you believe in him whom God sent.”

They asked, “What miraculous sign will you do, that we can see and believe you?  What will you do?  Our ancestors ate manna in the wilderness, just as it is written, He gave them bread from heaven to eat.”

Jesus told them, “I assure you, it wasn’t Moses who gave the bread from heaven to you, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven.  The bread of God is the one who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”

They said, “Sir, give us this bread all the time!”

Jesus replied, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

John 6:24-35 (CEB)

I felt it first when I was younger

A strange connection to the light

I tried to satisfy the hunger

I never got it right

From “Your Love” by  Brandon Heath

When President Calvin Coolidge announced in 1927 that he would not seek reelection, the secretary of commerce Herbert Hoover quickly became the front-runner to receive the Republican nomination.  The next year, Hoover became the Republican presidential candidate and ran against the Democratic candidate Alfred E. Smith.  Campaign literature from the GOP suggested that, because Herbert Hoover was a brilliant businessman, his administration would bring such economic prosperity that there would be “a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage.”  This promise of prosperity evidently appealed to the masses, for Hoover won the presidential election in a landslide victory.¹

Nearly eight months after Hoover took office, on October 29, 1929, a day that is remembered as “Black Tuesday,” the stock market crashed, and the nation was thrown into what has been dubbed the Great Depression.  The American voters' hopes for economic prosperity were rewarded with economic hardship, and President Hoover received the lion's share of the blame.  Shack towns built during the Depression became known as “Hoovervilles,” and empty out-turned pockets became known as “Hoover flags.”²

I highly doubt that Herbert Hoover deserved the full blame for the Great Depression, for such matters are rarely ever so simple.  Still, I think that this history lesson reminds us that that we should not invest too much of our hope in political leaders.  Perhaps it can also serve as a reminder that, at the end of the day, “a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage” is not all we need in life.

---

One day, Jesus and the Disciples cross the Sea of Galilee and climb a mountain so that they can spend some time to themselves.  A large crowd of about five thousand people follows them to the other side of the lake, and when Jesus sees the crowd approaching, He asks Philip, one of the Disciples, how they are going to feed so many people.  Philip remarks that, if they spent half a year's wages on food, they would not have enough for everyone to eat just a couple of bites.  Andrew, another Disciple, finds a boy who has five loaves of bread and two fish, but he notes that these provisions would not go very far in such a large crowd.  Jesus takes the loaves, gives thanks, breaks the loaves, and starts distributing the bread to the people in the crowd, and He does the same with the fish.  Miraculously everybody in the crowd has enough food to eat, and somehow the Disciples gather twelve baskets of leftovers.³

If you have read the four Gospels, then you've probably noticed that the Gospel of John is very different from the others.  The fourth Gospel presents a different sequence of events, and Jesus says many things in it that He does not say in the other three.  The reason that the Gospel of John is so different is, I think, that the writer often cares more about who Jesus is than what Jesus did.  A case in point is that John refers to Jesus' miracles as “signs,” implying that they are meant to point beyond themselves.  For example, Jesus restores sight to the blind in all of the Gospels, but, to John, Jesus' giving sight to a blind man is a sign that Jesus is “the light of the world” and that “whoever follows [Him] won't walk in darkness but will have the light of life.”⁴  Jesus raises the dead in all of the Gospels, but, to John, Jesus' raising Lazarus from the dead is a sign that Jesus is “the resurrection and the life” and that “whoever believes in [Him] will live, even though they die.”⁵

Likewise, the story of Jesus' feeding the multitude is found in all four of the Gospels, but John offers us some details that we do not read in the other three, because he wants to dive deeper into the spiritual implications of the miracle and to explore what the miracle tells us about who Jesus is.  For some reason, John is the only writer who tells us that it is a boy who shares his provisions with Jesus and the Disciples.  More striking is the fact that John also happens to be the only writer who tells us that the people whom Jesus feeds want to make Him king.

It is important to realize that, when Jesus miraculously feeds the five thousand, they are reminded of another instance in which many people were miraculously provided bread in the wilderness.  In the Book of Exodus, we read that, after the Israelites were liberated from slavery in Egypt, they began to fear that they wouldn't be able to find sustenance in the desert.  They were so afraid of starving to death that they actually started feeling nostalgic about their time in Egypt.  God said to their leader Moses, “I'm going to make bread rain down from the sky for you.”  In the morning, there was a layer of dew on the ground, and, when the dew evaporated, the Israelites saw thin white flakes on the ground.  They named this substance manna, a Hebrew word meaning What is it?  One theologian suggests that manna was like “cereal snowflakes.”⁶  Every morning, the Israelites were able to gather enough manna to eat for the day – no more and no less – and this “bread from heaven” sustained them for the forty years they were in the wilderness.⁷

When the Israelites neared the end of their journey through the wilderness, Moses said, “The Lord your God will raise up a prophet like me from your community, from your fellow Israelites.  He's the one you must listen to.”⁸  Moses' words were sometimes understood to be a prophecy about the Messiah, a leader like Moses who would once again deliver the Jewish people from their oppressors.  John tells us that when Jesus feeds the multitude, the people begin saying among themselves, “This is truly the prophet who is coming into the world.”  In other words, they begin to think that Jesus is the Messiah.  They are so excited that they want to make Jesus their king right then and there.  Apparently they are ready to take on Herod, the current king of the Jews, and even the Roman Empire, who is currently occupying the land.  Jesus has no interest in what the crowd wants to do, so He withdraws from them and goes back up the mountain.⁹

The crowd waits for Jesus to come back down the mountain.  At one point, they watch His disciples board a boat and head back across the Sea of Galilee, but they do not see Him board the boat with them.¹⁰  Eventually they realize that Jesus is nowhere nearby, so they head across the lake to look for Him.  When they find Him on the other side, they ask Him, “Rabbi, when did you get here?”  What they do not know is that Jesus decided to cross the sea on foot.¹¹

Jesus says to the crowd, “I assure you that you are looking for me not because you saw miraculous signs but because you ate all the food you wanted.”  In other words, the people are so caught up in the fact that Jesus miraculously provided them a feast in the wilderness, that they cannot see that the miracle is merely a sign.  They care less about who Jesus is and more about what He could do for them.  Like their ancestors, who also demanded a king, they want a worldly ruler with a worldly agenda.¹²  The crowd wants a new Moses who will liberate them from their oppressors, a new Joshua who will reclaim the land from Roman Empire, and a new David who will reign amid a new golden age of peace and prosperity.  One might say that they want a leader who will make Israel great again, a ruler who will make sure that there is a loaf of bread in every basket.

Jesus is indeed a King, but He is not the kind of king the crowd wants Him to be.  He tries to direct them to greater truths, saying, “Don't work for the food that doesn't last but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Human One will give you.  God the Father has confirmed him as his agent to give life.”  The people then ask Jesus what God wants them to do, and Jesus replies, “This is what God requires, that you believe in him whom God sent.”

When Jesus suggests to the crowd that He was sent by God and that God wants them to believe in Him, they take His words as a claim that He is indeed the Messiah.  They want Jesus to substantiate His claim, so they say to Him, “What miraculous sign will you do, that we can see and believe you?  What will you do?  Our ancestors ate manna in the wilderness, just as it is written, He gave them bread from heaven to eat.”  Providing manna in the wilderness was considered Moses' greatest miracle, and it was a common belief that the Messiah would not only replicate this miracle but even surpass it.¹³

Once again, Jesus tries to get the crowd to see the bigger picture.  He says, “I assure you, it wasn’t Moses who gave the bread from heaven to you, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven.  The bread of God is the one who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”  God has once again sent a hungry people in the wilderness bread from heaven, but what they do not realize is that this bread from heaven is God's own Son.

“I am the bread of life,” Jesus says to the crowd.  “Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

---

There is a hunger within us that has nothing to do with our stomachs, a hunger that cannot be satisfied with literal bread.  This hunger is, I think, a longing for transcendence.  In other words, we want more than what this life has to offer.  We long for what Jesus calls “eternal life” or  “abundant life,” a life that is, in the words of one writer, characterized by “the experience of deep joy, boundless love, and indestructible peace.”¹⁴  This, I think, is the hunger of which Jesus speaks.

We feel this hunger deeply, so we try to fill our lives with things like materialism, romance, careers, hobbies, and entertainment.  Such things might make our lives seem full for a while, but they do not truly satisfy our deep hunger because they do not last.  The stuff we buy wears out and breaks; our relationships cool down; our careers take downturns; our hobbies become boring; and our favorite television shows are inevitably canceled.¹⁵  Such things give us only a fleeting sense of satisfaction, in the same way that literal bread leaves us feeling hungry again within only a few hours.  They do not stick to our ribs, in a spiritual sense.  Perhaps this is why Jesus says, “Don’t work for the food that doesn’t last but for the food that endures for eternal life.”

Great Christian thinkers have been contemplating this ineffable longing for nearly two thousand years.  C.S. Lewis, in his sermon “The Weight of Glory,” speaks of “a desire which no natural happiness will satisfy.”  It is, he suggests, a desire for something outside of our earthly experience, a desire for something infinite and eternal.  Since the object of our desire is something we do not truly know or understand, we naturally try to fix our desire on things that are actually familiar to us, things that are, at most, merely symbolic of the true object of our desire.¹⁶  That said, it is totally understandable that we would attempt to satisfy our deep longing with things that give us no lasting satisfaction.  The good news, Lewis claims, is that the very fact that we experience this hunger means that this hunger can somehow be satisfied.¹⁷

In Bruce Marshall's novel The World, the Flesh, and Father Smith, the titular character gets into an argument with an author over clerical celibacy.  When the author suggests that “religion is only a substitute for sex,” the priest replies, “I still prefer to believe that sex is a substitute for religion and that the young man who rings the bell at the brothel is unconsciously looking for God.”¹⁸  Perhaps, beneath all of our longings and all of our efforts to satisfy those longings, no matter how misguided, is a longing for God.

The seventeenth century French theologian Blaise Pascal suggests in his work Pensées, that the motive behind every action of every person, be it constructive or destructive, is the desire for happiness.  He goes so far as to say that “the will never takes the least step but to this object.”  Despite our best efforts, the happiness we seek seems to remain hopelessly out of reach.  Pascal asserts that true happiness is something we cannot attain without faith, for “the infinite abyss,” which some have named the “God-shaped hole,” “can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, only by God Himself.”¹⁹  Perhaps St. Augustine best expressed this thought over one thousand years earlier in his Confessions, in which he prays, “Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.”²⁰

Jesus tells the crowd that He is the “bread of life” who “gives life to the world.”  Why would Jesus compare Himself to bread?  What is it about bread that makes it life-giving?  And how exactly is Jesus like bread?

Prominent Methodist pastor Adam Hamilton once asked a master baker about the history of bread, and the baker made the following comment:
Bread has always been the center of meals throughout history.  It's something that I don't think anything could take the place of.  It's a food source, it's a nutrient, but I think in a larger sense that it is a way to bring the community together.  I guess in a way that other foods aren't shared, bread is usually something that is broken and shared.²¹
Basically, bread is life-giving because it sustains us and brings us together.

In the other Gospels, we read that, on the evening before Jesus was betrayed and arrested, He took a loaf of bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave it to the Disciples, saying, “This is my body, which is given for you.  Do this in remembrance of me.”²²  For nearly two thousand years, Christians have remembered this act by participating in the sacrament we call Holy Communion.

It has been said that we are what we eat.  In other words, if we eat nutritious foods, we will become healthy and strong, but, if we eat food with no nutritional value besides empty calories, we will become unhealthy and weak.  We come to the Communion table and partake of the body and blood of Christ, represented in the bread and the wine, because we are what we eat.  Consider the prayer that pastors pray over the Communion elements: “Pour out your Holy Spirit on us gathered here, and on these gifts of bread and wine.  Make them be for us the body and blood of Christ, that we may be for the world the body of Christ, redeemed by his blood.”²³  We pray that the bread and the wine become the body and blood of Christ and then take the bread and wine into ourselves so that we may become like Jesus and do the kinds of things He did.

So often, we Christians like to claim that God is all we need, but the truth is that we need each other as well.  Remember that it is God who first observed that it is not good for people to be alone.²⁴  Like bread, Christ gives us the spiritual nutrients to make us who we are meant to be, and, like bread, Christ brings us together.  Consider again, the prayer prayed by pastors during the Communion service: “By your Spirit make us one with Christ, one with each other, and one in ministry to all the world, until Christ comes in final victory and we feast at his heavenly banquet.”²⁵  It is the broken body of our Savior, represented by broken bread, that brings a broken people to the table together.

In Christ, we find the things that satisfy our spiritual hungers.  In Christ, we find our identity, for He teaches us that we too are beloved children of God.  In Christ, we find our destiny, for He shows us what we can become as human beings.  In Christ, we find our purpose, for He calls us to follow Him as His disciples.  In Christ, we find our community, for He gathers us together into this community called the Church.

So how do we, in Jesus' words, “work... for the food that endures for eternal life”?  How do we seek the Bread of Life so that we may experience the abundant life Jesus offers?

In another Gospel, Jesus announces, “Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.”²⁶  Bread is meant for the hungry, and the Bread of Life is meant for those who hunger for abundant life.  If we want the Bread of Life, then we must be hungry for it, for the ones who hunger are the ones who are filled.  If you don't feel spiritually hungry, then I would encourage you to consider fasting.  Abstaining from some of the things with which you try to fill your life might help you to get back in touch with your spiritual hunger.

If you want the Bread of Life, feel your spiritual hunger, and then offer that hunger to God.²⁷  When Jesus tells the crowd about the “true bread from heaven” that “gives life to the world,” they say to Him, “Sir, Give us this bread all the time!”  N.T. Wright suggests that, though the crowd does not truly understand what Jesus means when He speaks of the Bread of Life, they do set a good example for us when it comes to praying for it.²⁸

Jesus is indeed a king, but He is not the kind of king the crowd wants Him to be.  The crowd will soon find that He is not the great political leader who will drive the Romans out of the land and restore autonomy to Israel.  Some will find that Jesus is greater than that, for He reigns over a Kingdom not of this world, a Kingdom that has outlasted the Roman Empire.  The Roman Empire has crumbled, but Christ still reigns, and, in His Kingdom, people still find the nourishment they need.  Remember that, in the words of D.T. Niles, “Christianity is one beggar telling another beggar where he found bread.”

Thanks be to God.


Notes:

1. https://millercenter.org/president/hoover
2. ibid
3. John 6:1-13
4. John 8:12 (CEB)
5. John 11:25 (CEB)
6. Barbara Brown Taylor referenced by Jonathan Merritt.  Jesus Is Better than You Imagined.  2014, Faith Words.  p. 55
7. Exodus 16 (CEB)
8. Deuteronomy 18:15 (CEB)
9. John 6:14-15 (CEB)
10. John 6:22-23
11. John 6:16-21
12. N.T. Wright.  John for Everyone, Part 1.  2004, Westminster John Knox Press.  pp. 78-79
13. William Barclay.  The New Daily Study Bible: The Gospel of John, Volume One.  2001, Saint Andrew Press.  p. 251
14. Shane Hipps.  Selling Water by the River: A Book about the Life Jesus Promised and the Religion That Gets in the Way.  2012, Jericho Books.  p. 7
15. Hipps, pp. 3-4
16. C.S. Lewis.  “The Weight of Glory.”
17. ibid
18. Bruce Marshall.  The World, the Flesh, and Father Smith.  1945, Houghton Mifflin Company.  ch. 16
19. Blaise Pascal.  Pensées.  Translation by W.F. Trotter.  1958, E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc.  Section VII, #425
20. St. Augustine of Hippo.  Confessions.  Translated by Edward Bouverie Pusey.
21. Adam Hamilton.  John: The Gospel of Light and Life.  2015, Abingdon Press.  ch. 3
22. Luke 22:19 (NRSV)
23. https://www.umcdiscipleship.org/resources/a-service-of-word-and-table-i-and-introductions-to-the-other-forms
24. Genesis 2:18
25. https://www.umcdiscipleship.org/resources/a-service-of-word-and-table-i-and-introductions-to-the-other-forms
26. Luke 6:21a (NRSV)
27. Shane Hipps.  “Off Menu.”  Trinity Mennonite Church, 06/07/2009.
28. N.T. Wright, p. 81

The painting featured above was painted by Juan de Espinal in the mid 1700s.  The photograph of the sourdough bread was taken by Flickr user Steph and is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.  The photographer is in no way affiliated with this blog.