John 6: 24-35
Tenth Sunday after
Pentecost/ 5th August 2012
Let’s
set the scene here. Put the text in
context. What we have here is Jesus’ well-known affirmation, “I am the bread of
life.” The occasion for this lesson is
Jesus’ sign or miracle of feeding the five thousand, which we find earlier in
the chapter. So impressed with this miracle, with his authority and power, the
crowd presses in on him, ready to seize and “make him king,” (John 6:15), but
Jesus withdrew to the mountains by himself.
The disciples took to the water, got into a boat, and sailed for
Capernaum. A strong windstorm appeared
out of nowhere. They were terrified.
And if they weren’t terrified enough, they see Jesus walking on water
toward them. Jesus says, “It is I; do
not be afraid” (John 6:20). By the time they offer to take Jesus into the boat,
they approach the shoreline. The crowd well
fed back in Tiberias soon realizes that the disciples and Jesus had left and
that Jesus did not sail with the twelve because one of their boats behind. So
they sail to Capernaum to find Jesus and say, “Rabbi, when did you come
here?” In other words, how did you get
here? Jesus replies, “Very truly, I tell
you – honestly – I’ll tell you what you’re looking for.”
Now, listen to the way Eugene
Peterson captures the rest of the scene in his translation, picking up with
verse 24:
Jesus answered, “You’ve come looking
for me not because you saw God in my actions but because I fed you, filled your
stomachs – and for free.
“Don’t waste
your energy striving for perishable food like that. Work for the food that sticks with you, food
that nourishes your lasting life, food the Son of Man provides. He and what he does are guaranteed by God the
Father to last.”
To that they said, “Well, what do we
do then to get in on God’s works?”
Jesus said, “Throw your lot in with
the One that God has sent. That kind of
a commitment gets you in on God’s works.”
They waffled: “Why don’t you give us a clue about who you
are, just a hint of what’s going on? When we see what’s up, we’ll commit
ourselves. Show us what you can do. Moses fed our ancestors with bread in the
desert. It says so in the Scriptures:
‘he gave them bread from heaven to eat.’”
Jesus responded, “The real
significance of that Scripture is not that Moses gave you bread from heaven but
that my Father is right now offering you bread from heaven, the real
bread. The Bread of God came down out of
heaven and is giving life to the world.”
They jumped at that: “Master, give us this bread, now and
forever!”
Jesus said, “I
am the Bread of life. The person who
aligns with me hungers no more and thirsts no more, ever.”[1]
I share Peterson’s translation here
from The Message because he helps us
get to the heart of this text: human
hunger. The chapter begins with our
hunger for food and ends with our hunger for God. One leads to the other. Jesus, the wise teacher, takes advantage of
this teachable moment, of hungry, starving people, to help people realize there
is a deeper hunger that we crave. That
Jesus has to use this occasion to make this point, because it’s not immediately
evident, tells us something about the human condition that generally functions
with a surface level of meaning and fails to go into the depths.
When Jesus plays with this metaphor,
referring to himself as the “bread of life” you would think the hearers would
make that shift, that they would realize he’s not talking literally about
loaves and fish. But they don’t get it.
They see Jesus and hear Jesus, but do they really see Jesus and hear
Jesus? Then the religious leaders begin
to complain when he says, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” John tells us that they muttered amongst
themselves, “is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we
know? How can he now say” these things?" (John 6:42). They don’t get it.
So Jesus continues to teach
them. “Very truly, I tell you, whoever
believes has eternal life. I am the
bread of life. Your ancestors ate the
manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from
heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die.
I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever;
and the bread that I will give for this life of the world is my flesh” (John 6:
47-5). John tells us, “The Jews then
disputed among themselves, saying, ‘How can this man give us his flesh to
eat?’” (John 6:52). And so the conversation goes….
Jesus is comfortable in the world of
metaphor, symbol, analogy; they’re stuck in a concrete, literal, material world
that can’t hear or even see the spiritual dimension of what Jesus is trying to
get them to “see,” metaphorically speaking.
Later on, his disciples say, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept
it?” (John 6:60). And so it goes and so
it goes.
There are many directions we can go
with this text, but it’s this exploration of human hunger that resonates so profoundly in our age. The multitudes are fed, their bellies full,
do they crave for more? Is that why
they’re following Jesus? Because he
fills their bellies – for free? Is that
why they listen to his teaching, because in the end they know they’re going to
get fed? Having something to eat, of
course, is essential, especially if you’re among the peasant class and you
worry where the next meal is going to come from. Still, are they only interested in Jesus for
what they will get out of him? Because
he’s “useful” to them, because he satisfies a want? Are they really interested in who he is and
what he’s trying to give them? Give us?
And what about us? In Dorothy Boulton’s sermon last week she
explored the larger question of when is enough, enough? How much is enough? While it’s true that the vast majority of
people in American society do not have to worry about when the next meal will
come, it is not true that we have
resolved the hunger problem, because it seems at times that our cravings are
insatiable.[2] We want more and more. Have you ever considered just how large
supermarkets have become – Wegmans, Whole Foods, Giant, Safeway – with aisles
and aisles of food, of options, of choices.
Last year, my good friend, Lee
Hinson-Hasty, who works in the Presbyterian Center in Louisville, lived in
Debrecen, Hungary for a semester. His
wife, a theologian, received a Fulbright Fellowship to study and teach there. Their entire family lived in Debrecen for the semester. Soon after he returned he posted a photograph on facebook. He
went shopping at his local Target and was a little stunned by the
experience. He took a photo of just one
aisle at theTarget, with shelves and shelves selling deodorant. Really? He was overwhelmed by it all.
We don’t realize the extent of our
excess as a nation. And the level of our
greed. We’re reluctant to talk about it.
At the General Assembly last month in Pittsburgh there was even
reluctance for the church to name greed as a moral sin. Our needs are dissociated from our wants. As Dorothy said last week, “We are residents
of a society that encourages us to consume more and more, we are victims of the
insatiability that advertisers gleefully know and exploit.”
We want and want and want because
we’re taught at a very young age to be consumers – it drives me nuts (to be
personal here) to see supermarkets with child-sized push carts with little
flags on them that say, “Consumers in Training.” It’s cute, I know, but consider what that’s
saying. We want more and more and more. We want to make more and more so that we can
have more and more. And this hunger, this ravenous desire is driving us more
than we like to admit. To the point
that it looks like as a society, looking at our society from the outside, that
that’s all we were created to do and to be, to shop ‘til we drop. For some, sadly, that’s all there is in their
lives. Even religion and faith can get
caught up in this web of misplaced desire, when faith and belief are something
you “have” or “want” because it will make one’s life better, or because you
think God wants you to have all that bling and God wants you to be happy. The prosperity gospel – which is not gospel (!) – is not far away.
The way out of this mess—and it is a
mess—is not to condemn materialism or
try to become more spiritual or make one feel guilty for all our desires and
wants and wishes or vow never to walk into a Target or Wegmans again. Jesus doesn’t do this. Desire isn’t bad, per se. If you notice, Jesus
doesn’t judge them for their desire. Desire is good. A lot of good comes from desire. We are all the offspring of desire! Olympic medals are won by desire, hunger, and
passion. We saw this all week long at
the Olympics in London. You can see it on
the faces of Nathan Adrian or Gabby Douglas and Michael Phelps (although some
say Michael’s desire to win was not as strong as it was four years ago in
Beijing).
What Jesus warns against is misplaced desire. Jesus doesn’t condemn hunger. Our insatiable
hunger for food, our insatiable hunger for anything, you can fill in the blank
– you know what they are – are really misplaced hungers for something
deeper. They are poor substitutes for
what we really crave. They are desires
in need of redemption. The object of our unhealthy desires and cravings –
things, people, substances, ideas – are all signs, symbols, expressions of our
inability to connect, to have, to feed on what our souls are really looking for and that is God. Our other hungers are misplaced hunger for
God. They are substitutes for what our
souls really crave. But when you’re lost
in the world of materialism and consumerism, lost in the world of false hungers
and poor substitutes, it’s difficult for us to remember or even know what our
souls crave and what real food tastes, real bread tastes like.
One of the most famous and
insightful sentences in Christian history comes on the first page of St.
Augustine’s (354-430) classic work, Confessions.
Augustine’s memoir describes his journey of faith, of eventually coming to
faith in Christ. But before he gets
there he described experience after experience of unfulfilled desire, including
sexual desire. And his conclusion, found on the first page, was this: “Thou
has made us for Thyself, O God, and our hearts are restless until they find
their rest in Thee.”
If he’s right – and I believe he is
– then his insight can go a long way toward bringing us back to the heart of
Christianity, the heart of the Christian life, to what matters most: our relationship, our union with God. It can help to correct the distorted and
ultimately damaging assumption that the faith is all about laws and rules and God’s
judgment. What if we moved away from
thinking about sin in terms of disobedience? Too many think of sin as doing
something wrong, they of the Law, the Ten Commandments, of breaking a
commandment, an act of disobedience to be judged by God as judge. What if,
instead, we thought of sin not as disobedience, but sin as ceasing the hunger for God, of sin as not having a hunger for God.[3]
It seems to me, so much hinges on that hunger.
We are hungry creatures. Jesus
says, hunger for God and we’ll never hunger again. If our hunger for God isn’t satisfied by God,
then we’ll be fed by false gods.
Jesus comes and offers himself as
the object of our soul’s desire. Coming
from God, reflecting the glory of God, embodying the image of God, Jesus says,
feed on me, hunger for me, desire me and what you’ll find in me is a source of
life that continues to give and give and give and can never be depleted. He’s the bread of life, or better, he is the
bread that gives life. And the word for
“life” here means more than just breathing or functioning, but being alive,
with meaning, with purpose, with creativity, with generosity, all that ways
that God is alive and the source of life.
Jesus comes and says hunger after
me, not because he’s narcissistic or full of himself, he’s full of the life of
God and knows that’s what we really need.
It’s in love that he says, feed on me.
Feeding on God is the diet our hungry souls crave. We were made this way Jesus tells us; so
don’t be surprised if everything else in the end will only disappoint us.
What if we had an Olympic-sized
hunger for God? Just imagine how
different our lives would be, how different the world would be. What if we took
some of the hunger and desire and cravings we have in other parts of our lives
and directed them toward what our souls are really looking for? Just imagine the difference it would make in
the way we viewed the meaning and purpose of the Church, just imagine how it
would shape all that we do in this congregation. Just imagine the difference the church could
make in the world. Just imagine how this
could shape our lives. The deepest
cravings of our souls can only be satisfied in God.
Image: I am the Bread of Life by Kennedy A. Paizs
[1] Eugene Peterson, The Message (Colorado Springs: Navpress,
1993).
[2] See Robert Skidelsky
and Edward Skidelsky, How Much is Enough?
Money and the Good Life (Other Press, 2012).
[3] Angel F. Méndez-Montoya,
The Theology of Food: Eating and the
Eucharist (John Wiley & Sons,
2012), 88.
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