John 6:35-6:51
Jesus is the Bread of Life
Let us pray:
Dear Heavenly Father, through the power of your Holy Spirit,
open our hearts and minds to the proclamation of your Word,
that we might be fed and nourished in faith.
Help us to appreciate the importance of Jesus your Son,
being the bread of life, who, through his life, death and resurrection,
nurtures and strengthens us in our relationship with You,
the Creator of the universe, and the Author of life.
This we ask in His holy name. Amen.
Biblical scholars refer to Chapter Six of John’s Gospel as the Bread of Life discourse.
The chapter began with Jesus miraculously feeding over five thousand people
with the meagre lunch of a young boy,
which consisted of just five barley loaves and two small fish.
Last Sunday, our Gospel reading told us that the people whom Jesus had fed that day, went in search of Him, finding him on the other side of the Sea of Galilee.
When the crowd approached Jesus,
He told them that they came seeking Him,
not because they saw the miracle as a sign that pointed to God’s presence among them, but because they ate their fill.
In other words, Jesus was asking the people
to see beyond his ability to feed their physical hunger,
to behold his ability to feed them spiritually.
The Old Testament last week was about the grumbling
by those who had survived the Exodus.
Moses told them, “He (God) humbled you by letting you hunger,
then by feeding you with manna,
with which neither you nor your ancestors were acquainted,
in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone,
but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.”
This, of course, is the passage that Jesus quoted to the devil when he tempted him,
when following His baptism, and fasting for forty days in the wilderness,
Jesus was challenged to turn stones into bread.
These and similar texts tell us that in the time
when Jesus conducted His ministry among the people,
the image or metaphor of comparing the Word of God with bread
was a common analogy.
As Gail Ramshaw points out in her commentary on our Gospel lesson for this morning, quote:
“Already in Jewish tradition, the Torah, the word and wisdom of God,
was described as if it were bread.
The devout believer consumed the teachings of the prophet;
the word of God filled human need.” End quote.
Ramshaw then goes on to indicate that the author of John’s Gospel
not only pictures Jesus expanding upon this metaphor,
that the Torah and the word of the prophets is the bread of life,
but that in His teachings, Jesus applies this image to Himself.
Jesus is saying not only that He speaks the Word of God,
but that He IS the Word of God incarnate.
In verses 1 and 42 of John 6 we read:
“Then the Jews (or the people in the crowd) began to complain about Him
because He said, ‘I am the bread that came down from heaven.’
They were saying, ‘Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph,
whose father and mother we know?
How can he now say, “I have come down from heaven”?”
It is obvious that the people whom Jesus engaged in conversation that day
had trouble seeing beyond physical reality.
That is true with many people we come in contact with today;
they will for the most part accept that Jesus existed,
and that He was a good man,
and a good example everybody should follow,
and possibly that He was a prophet,
but the Word of God incarnate,
the Bread of life,
that is too much for them to swallow.
The Jews in John 6 were from that region in Galilee.
It was not a very populous district, so they knew Joseph and Mary,
Jesus’ parents, his birth father and birth mother
as far as they were concerned.
Some may have known Him from His childhood,
and knew that He was raised to be a carpenter.
How could Jesus now say that He has come down from heaven?
He must be mad!
But Jesus wasn’t speaking in purely physical terms.
He was challenging the people to look beyond what they could see with their eyes
or put into their stomachs.
It was as if Jesus was saying to the people,
“We do not live by bread alone, but by the word of God”,
the same answer He gave to the tempter in the wilderness.
He was saying that physical things are important but only last for a time,
but spiritual things are more important because they last for ever.
He was challenging the people of that time and space
to come to see that in Him,
they could truly behold and be fed,
not with physical bread,
but with the word of God,
spoken by Moses, the Prophets, and now by Him,
and with the word of God
written in the Torah and the Talmud,
and there before them in Him,
the Son of Man through Mary and the Son of God through the Holy Spirit
that the archangel Gabriel said would come upon her (in Luke 1:35).
In and through and because of Jesus
God’s Word came and dwelt among men.
As our Liturgy for Morning Prayer says,
‘In many and various ways, God spoke to His people of old by the prophets
but now in these last days, He has spoken to us by His Son’.
God had come into the world of fallen man;
had come among us in the person of Jesus the Christ,
as the apostle John begins his Gospel with these words:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
And then John adds, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us,
full of grace and truth.”
John wants us to understand that as we come to know Jesus,
we come to embrace the very Word of God.
He wants us to know that Jesus is the embodiment of the Word of God.
He wants us to understand that in Jesus,
the word of the Torah, the Law,
and the teaching of all the prophets,
is personalized.
As Christians we are not filled and motivated by some abstract ideology
on which we strive to live our lives,
but by Almighty God, Who in Jesus has become present and personal to us.
In his Gospel, John wants us to realize that as we must embrace Jesus,
and take Jesus into our lives,
just as we take bread to nourish our bodies.
Jesus Christ is the only food for spiritual life.
Every verse of this chapter is vivid with meaning,
but verse 51 is especially significant.
Here Jesus says, “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 the life of the world is my flesh.”
There are three messages, three mini-sermons just in this one verse.
First of all it contains Jesus’ claim that His life did not start when He was born
in that manger in Bethlehem,
or even when He was conceived in Mary’s womb nine months earlier;
He is claiming that He pre-existed;
He is claiming that He is part of the Godhead;
He is claiming that He is co-equal with the Father and the Holy Spirit.
We believe this, and we confess it every Sunday,
but as we so sadly aware, many people do not.
Secondly He is claiming that all who take Him into their very inner being
will live forever.
He is claiming again that ‘He is the Way and the Truth and the Life’
and that ‘Non one can come to the Father except through Him’.
We believe this, we confess this every Sunday.
Again, as we are so sadly aware, many people do not believe this
and maintain that they can get to Heaven, if there is such a place, without Him.
Thirdly He was forecasting or prophesying His own death on the cross,
which we know with hindsight happened about three years after He spoke these words.
We believe His death was to propitiate the wrath of God against sin, our sin,
and that by His atoning death, our punishment has been paid.
Again, as we are so sadly aware, many people do not believe
that the cruel death of a man in a country thousands of miles from Scotland,
can have anything to do with them.
Many people in Jesus’ time, and many in our own
get hung up by understanding this teaching of our Lord in purely physical terms.
Jesus was not asking people to become cannibals,
to actually eat His flesh, his human body.
He was not asking people to actually drink His physical blood,
which to Jews who avoided any contact with blood would have been anathema.
John does not specifically mention Jesus instituting the sacrament of Holy Communion, but he certainly knew of, and understood its place in the worship life of Christ’s church.
You do not have to be a theologian to make the connection
between this comment of Jesus,
and the celebration of the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper,
and its role in the worship life of the church.
I believe that we truly partake of Christ’s presence in the sacrament,
but I do not believe that the consecrated bread and wine
somehow magically or spiritually are transformed into the actual body and blood of Jesus.
I believe that as we come to receive Holy Communion, we are fed with the Bread of Life.
Jesus has promised to be present to us in the Sacrament,
as Luther said, “In, with and under the forms of bread and wine,”
to enable us to receive God’s grace,
poured out for us through Christ’s death and resurrection.
The Sacrament is an important Means of Grace,
but we need to look beyond the pure physical act of eating the bread
and drinking the wine,
as if these things were ends in themselves.
Yes, Jesus is present in the Sacrament,
just as He was present that day when He multiplied the loaves to feed that great crowd,
but He does not just come to us, and feed us,
on one Sunday in the month,
but every day as we behold, by faith,
the living Word of God that is in our midst.
And in the time we have left until He comes again to judge both the living and the dead,
let us pray that more will come to believe in Jesus,
that He is
and that He gives, the Bread of life,
and that they will taste and see for themselves
that the Lord is good.
Amen, and the peace ..................................
