"I Am The Bread Of Life" Series

Biblical commentator Ravi Zacharis writes:

Jesus’ words were intended to lift the listeners from their barren, food-dominated existence to the recognition and acknowledgment of the supreme hunger of life that can only be filled with a different bread. Food and power blind the mind to the need for nourishment and strength of soul. Unfortunately, many fail to pause here long enough to really hear what Jesus is teaching and understand the life-transforming power contained in this truth.”

It would be easy for us, I think, to judge and ridicule this crowd of people following Jesus in John 6 for their near-sightedness. But we must be careful to examine ourselves to see if their illness might not be contagious, and determine whether we ourselves have not caught it.

St. Augustine rightly observed that every single person has a God-shaped vacuum in his soul. We can attempt to fill that cavity with a host of other things, but finally nothing satiates thirst for our redemption and our hunger for significance except Jesus and His gospel. You are all familiar with the old saw:

Money can buy you a house, but not a home; money can buy you an education, but not wisdom; money can buy you a bed, but not restful sleep; money can buy you influence, but not respect; it can buy you medicine, but not health; a spouse, but not love; quiet, but not tranquility.

Despite the failure of money, power, pleasure, drink, drugs, or the host of other glittering distractions that promise peace and fulfillment but cannot deliver, we still scramble and claw to find our meaning in everything except our maker and His destiny and purpose for us.

Why have we as a nation had roughly 37 years of young people on drugs, sexually immoral, and violent? Because we’ve had roughly 37 years of our public square emptied of the transcendent. Russian sociologists have written recently that some of the contributing failures of Soviet communism were widespread despair and alcoholism among the Russian people. Replacing God with the state and illusory hopes of a utopian worker’s paradise cannot ever satisfy the human heart. We fill are garages with more expensive cars, our mantels with tokens of our success, and our houses with “things.” But none of those things can ever give us an ounce of meaning or tranquility, or will mean anything after our bodies are lowered in the ground and covered with dirt. We look for the wrong things in the wrong places.

Following the crowds misunderstanding, and Jesus’ correction, the crowd moves to the asking. Verse 34:

Then they said to Him, “Lord, give us this bread always”

It becomes blatantly apparent later on in the chapter that despite this request by the crowd, they still don’t quite grasp the import of the Lord’s revelation that He is Himself the Bread of Life. He doesn’t give it. He is it. And to have it, one must have Him. The crowds, in the last dozen verses of chapter 6, grumble, and finally leave off following Jesus, because He offered them what they actually needed and not what they thought they wanted. Author Jeanne Zornes writes: