[Sermon preached on 11 March 2018, 4th Sunday in Lent / 3rd year, ELCF Lectionary]
Recently, a survey was held in the US among people from all ethnic backgrounds, cultures, religions, social strata and walks of life. One of the questions they were asked was: How satisfying or fulfilling is your life? The answer was alarming: more than 70% of the respondents answered that they were rather or much dissatisfied with their lives. They felt that their lives were not really fulfilling. Life felt meaningless, without purpose.
The answer was the same among poor people and rich. It was the same among successful executives and among the unemployed and uneducated. It was the same for atheists and religious people.
In my ministry as a pastor, I often meet with people who are dissatisfied with their lives. They feel that there is something essential missing—something to meet their need for purpose, meaning, quality of life, and happiness. They are restless, seeking for something that would make them feel happy and fulfilled. But they don’t find it.
On the internet you will find hundreds, if not thousands, of discussion groups, where people complain about the emptiness of life and ask others to tell them what can change that; blogs that offer advice, personal testimonies, and expensive courses that should change your life once and for all; self-help books offering solutions—some of them the hard way, but most of them in a simple and foolproof “How to get happy and fulfilled in 10 days?” type of way.
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The psychologist Abraham Maslow became famous some seventy years ago for his pyramid, representing a hierarchy of human needs. He claimed that if the most basic needs in the bottom have not been met, the needs higher up in the pyramid cannot motivate people.
On the bottom are the most basic human needs: the need for air, food, drink, shelter, warmth and sleep. These are essential for our survival. If you cannot breathe, you will hardly be motivated by a career opportunity. If you have nothing to eat or to drink, you won’t give much thought to attending a concert or an art exhibition.
Only if your most basic physiological needs have been met, your thoughts and desires will go out to secondary things like safety, love and belonging, esteem, or self-actualization. Maslow said:
“It is quite true that man lives by bread alone—when there is no bread. But what happens to man’s desires when there is plenty of bread and when his belly is chronically filled?”
And he continues to give his answer to that question:
“At once other (and “higher”) needs emerge and these, rather than physiological hungers, dominate the organism. And when these in turn are satisfied, again new (and still “higher”) needs emerge and so on.”
The Bible disagrees with Maslow at least on one thing:
“Man does not live on bread alone.”
When Jesus was in the wilderness to be tempted by Satan, he fasted for forty days. In the end, he was very hungry, and there was no bread anywhere near. So Satan, who must have known Maslow’s hierarchy inside out, suggested that Jesus turn some of the stones into bread. And even though Jesus was very hungry—his body and mind weakened by the lack of nutrition—he refused. And he quoted the words from Deuteronomy 8:3:
“Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.”
It was this latter bread—the word of God—that Jesus offered the crowds who were following him everywhere. He was eager and determined to preach the good news of the kingdom of God. That was his purpose. That was driving him like a turbo engine.
But most people in the crowd were after something else. They had seen Jesus performing signs by healing the sick. So those who were sick followed him in the hope to be healed. And those who were healthy wanted to be there to witness the sensational miracles for themselves. Their lives were empty, and they felt that the entertainment that Jesus offered would fill some of the vacuum inside. Or perhaps they were more serious and needed to see the miracles as signs of the coming of the kingdom of God.
But then, when the day went by, the people felt their stomachs protest. Most of them had not been eating for many hours. And that is where—quite in line with the theory of Maslow—their empty stomachs started taking over.
I don’t go into detail about what happened next. That is stuff for another sermon or two. But Jesus fed the 5,000+ people there, and then escaped the crowd. But not for long. The next day, the crowds found out where Jesus had gone and went after him. And that is when Jesus rebuked them and said:
“You are looking for me, not because you saw the signs I performed but because you ate the loaves and had your fill. Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.”
What Jesus claims here is actually an important modification of the Maslow hierarchy. He says that the most elementary needs we have are not physical or physiological needs. Our spiritual needs are much more basic. Air, bread and water will only keep us alive for a limited time. We all know that our bodies will not last forever. Our deeper and more fundamental needs are for “food that endures to eternal life”.
Many people are looking for such spiritual food from various religions, through yoga, or through mindfulness. Many people these days claim that all religions lead to heaven, and that no religion is better than any other. But Jesus does not talk about religion or yoga or mindfulness. He speaks about himself:
“I am the bread of life that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever.”
Jesus is being very exclusive here. There are no alternatives, no options. He, and he alone, is the bread that God gives. Only by receiving the bread from heaven, we can survive for eternity. Living a good life of love and charity is a great thing. — Don’t let me hold you back. — But it is not going to give you life forever. Only Jesus Christ can give that life.
But there is more in these words of Jesus. He says that in order to have life eternal we must actually eat(!) this bread. We all know that bread does not feed us and does not keep us alive unless we actually eat it. In the same way, it is not enough that Jesus came down from heaven to be our bread of life. We must eat him.
It is not enough that Jesus lived and died for the sins of the human race. It is not enough for us to just look at Jesus, listen to him, admire him, believe in him, sing about him, talk about him. We need to receive him in faith and let him enter our lives and our hearts. It sounds very theoretical, just as the idea of eating Jesus sounds very weird. But the Bible leaves no ambiguity about what it means in actual practice.
In Acts 2, just after the Holy Spirit descended on the believers, Peter preached his first evangelistic sermon. In the end, the people were cut to the heart and they asked: “What should we do now?” And Peter answered:
“Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. […] Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.”
We don’t physically eat the body of Jesus. We cannot, because forty days after he rose from the dead he was taken up into heaven. He is no longer with us in the body. In fact, the Bible teaches us that we—the believers in Christ—together form the body of Christ in the world here and now. But he is still with us, still present in the world through the Holy Spirit—the Spirit of God and the Spirit of Jesus. And the Bible calls us to receive the Holy Spirit into our hearts. How? Through repentance and baptism.
The reason why we don’t have everlasting life in the first place is, because we have sinned against God. We have turned our backs toward him and walked away. In fact, when you look at what “life” means in the Bible, you will see that it means fellowship with God. When God is away and missing from our lives, we are dead. We are dead already, even though our bodies are still alive and kicking. In the same way, heaven is life with God forever. Hell is existence without God. I think one woman was closer to the truth than she and her listeners realized, when she said: “I know what hell is like: I have lived there all my life.”
When we repent from our sin and stop rejecting God, God reconciles us with himself. We are re-connected and reconciled with him. That is what Jesus accomplishes through his death on the cross. When we accept his sacrifice on our behalf and come to him in faith, we become a new creation. And as a seal of our salvation, God gives us the Holy Spirit. That is what we celebrate and affirm in the sacrament of Holy Baptism. The Spirit of God lives in us. We have internalized him into our life and existence, just as we internalize food when we eat.
But in this passage from John 6, Jesus talks much more still about another sacrament—that of Holy Communion.
“Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them.”
John obviously alludes to the Jewish Passover celebration—what we celebrate as Easter. The Passover festival was given to the Jews when they fled Egypt under the leadership of Moses. God had threatened Egypt with a disastrous plague—the last in a long sequence of ten plagues. God would send an angel of death to Egypt and take the lives of all firstborn men, women, boys, girls, and livestock. The people of Israel had to slaughter a lamb and brush the blood of the lamb on the doorposts of their houses. Then the angel of death would pass the house and spare the lives of those inside. The lamb should then be eaten in a great hurry, so that the people were ready to go at once when the King of Egypt gave permission.
In his Gospel, John depicts Jesus as the Passover Lamb. He was sacrificed so that we would be liberated from slavery to sin. The blood of the Lamb, i.e. his death on the cross, would save us from death. Twice in the opening chapter of his Gospel, John writes:
“Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!”
To refresh this analogy, in the beginning of chapter 6, just before the miraculous feeding of the 5,000, John reminds us of this, when he writes:
”The Jewish Passover Festival was near.”
Eating the flesh of Jesus—symbolic as it may be—refers to the Passover meal. Originally, it was a preparation for their journey into freedom, and in following years became a meal of remembrance.
But when Jesus speaks about drinking his blood, the analogy with the Passover meal breaks down. What is more, we find a strong conflict here with the command repeated so often throughout the Old and New Testament, that strictly forbade the drinking of blood or the eating of meat that still had blood in it. E.g. in Deuteronomy 12 God says:
“Be sure you do not eat the blood, because the blood is the life, and you must not eat the life with the meat.”
And in Acts 15, when the church council of Jerusalem sends instructions to the non-Jewish churches elsewhere, they confirm that this commandment is still valid.
The reason that drinking blood was so strictly forbidden is that the blood contained the life of the other. And that’s exactly why Jesus gives this seemingly contradictory command to drink his blood. You could say that, by eating the flesh of Christ, we identify with his death. But in drinking his blood, we identify with his life and resurrection.
That is why Jesus gave us the sacrament of Holy Communion. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians:
”Is not the cup of thanksgiving for which we give thanks a participation in the blood of Christ? And is not the bread that we break a participation in the body of Christ?”
In this Gospel story, Jesus invites us to receive him. In Holy Baptism, we have received the gift of the living Spirit of God. In Holy Communion, we affirm this gift and receive Christ himself in, with, and under the bread and wine—as Martin Luther explained it.
The human body has been created most wonderfully. We have a feedback system built in, that warns us for all kinds of dangers. Pain is a feeling that often saves our lives, since it warns us to do whatever is needed to reduce that pain. So is hunger. If our bio-system didn’t warn us when we run out fuel, we would go on till we drop dead, literally. It is the feeling of hunger that makes us look for food and change to low-energy mode until we have eaten.
Spiritually, we have a similar feedback mechanism. When we live in separation from God, we sense spiritual hunger. When we rebel against God, our conscience starts to make us feel bad. Of course, we can ignore those feelings, and after some time they might go away. But a spiritual hunger for God is part and parcel of our makeup. The Old Testament prophet Amos spoke on God’s behalf:
“The days are coming,” declares the Sovereign Lord,
“when I will send a famine through the land—
not a famine of food or a thirst for water,
but a famine of hearing the words of the Lord.
People will stagger from sea to sea
and wander from north to east,
searching for the word of the Lord,
but they will not find it.
We need to eat the bread of life. But we also must share it with others. There are so many people around us—even in our close circle of friends and family—who are hungry for the bread of life but have not found it. When we talked about sharing the good news of Jesus with others in the Tuesday Bible study, it was obvious that we have difficulties with that for a variety of reasons. We may feel shy, unsure, unable to “build a case” for Christ, or afraid to be rejected. But someone also shared the joy of leading someone to Christ through our feeble attempt to share the gospel.
Most important, though, I think it is to love our neighbor as ourselves, and to wish that they might find the life that we have found in Christ Jesus. Let us pray for such love, for courage and wisdom, and for opportunities to share the bread of life with those who hunger and thirst for God. Amen.
