“I Am the Bread of Life”
September 29, 2002
John 6:32-35
The Rev’d Quintin Morrow
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
Fort Worth, Texas
Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Moses gave you not that bread from heaven; but my Father giveth you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is he which cometh down from heaven, and giveth life unto the world. Then said they unto him, Lord, evermore give us this bread. And Jesus said unto them, I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst (John 6:32-35).
In his book entitled God’s Psychiatry, Charles Allen tells this story:
As World War II was drawing to a close, the Allied armies gathered up many hungry orphans. They were placed in camps where they were well-fed. Despite excellent care, they slept poorly. They seemed nervous and afraid. Finally, a psychologist came up with the solution. Each child was given a piece of bread to hold after he was put to bed. This particular piece of bread was just to be held—not eaten. The piece of bread produced wonderful results. The children went to bed knowing instinctively they would have food to eat the next day. That guarantee gave the children a restful and contented sleep.
It seems that regardless of the socio-economic group to which we belong, or how sophisticated our palette becomes, every one of us recognizes the significance of bread as a staple of our basic human existence.
We are continuing this morning with the 2nd of a series of 7 messages on the 7 “I Am” sayings of the Lord Jesus in the Gospel of John and the Book of Revelation entitled: Meeting Your Maker: The 7 I Am Sayings of Jesus. Last week, you will recall, we examined the revelation that Jesus is the Light of the World from John 8:12. From that we saw that Jesus Christ uniquely triumphs over and scatters the darkness of human wickedness and its consequences, and death and hell; that He gives direction for this life and the life to come; and that Jesus is our solace and comfort in turbulent times.
Today, in John 6:35, Jesus proclaims Himself to be the Bread of Life. As always, proper interpretation and application require context.
John chapter 6 opens with Jesus crossing over to the far side of the Sea of Galilee. John the evangelist tells us that a large crowd of people followed the Lord because they had seen His miraculous healings of the sick. Jesus, seeing the great crowd, asked His disciples where they might find enough bread to feed all these hungry people. Philip volunteers that 8 months worth of wages would not be enough money to buy enough bread for everyone to have even a bite, much less a satisfying meal. Then Andrew chimes in: “Well, there is a boy here with five small barley loaves and two small fish, but how far will they go among so many?” This little bit of faith on Andrew’s part was enough; Jesus said, “Have the people sit down.” Jesus took the bread and fish, gave thanks, distributed them among the crowd, and in excess of 5,000 people were fed. John adds that everyone ate their fill, and yet there remained 12 baskets of leftovers which the disciples gathered. That night, fearing that the misplaced zeal of the crowd would now compel them to come and make Him king of Israel by force, Jesus walked on the water to reach the city of Capernaum on the other side of the lake. Undeterred, the crowds next morning all pile in boats, cross the Sea of Galilee in search of Jesus, and when they find Him begin interrogating Him about how He crossed the lake without a boat and if He will perform another miraculous sign to prove He is the Messiah. What becomes sadly clear in the ensuing discussion is that the crowd following Jesus completely misses the point of the miraculous feeding of the 5,000, as well as its Old Testament antecedent the miraculous feeding of the children of Israel by God in manna—bread from heaven—during their 40-year wilderness wandering.
Notice first the people’s misunderstanding. Verses 32 and 33:
“Most assuredly, I say to you, Moses did not give you the bread from heaven, but My Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is He who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”
This crowd is under the misapprehension that Moses and not God was ultimately responsible for the manna; and this crowd is following Jesus now not because they want to hear the words of eternal life, but because they think they’ve found in Him a never-ending supply of bread. The same phenomenon occurs, you recall, when Jesus reveals Himself to be living water to the woman at the well in chapter 4. She replies, “Great! Give me some of this water so I don’t have to keep coming to Jacob’s Well for water.” This crowd following Jesus in John 6 are looking for the wrong thing in the wrong place. They want literal bread to satisfy their physical hunger; and they want a political deliverer, like Moses, to satisfy this need. But Jesus is spiritual bread, to give and sustain spiritual life; He is that bread, in His person and work. He doesn’t give it. And this spiritual bread came down from heaven by God, and by the way, is God Himself.
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:
As a new Christian, I presumed Jesus’ main job was taking care of me. He led to me a job, roommates to share apartment costs, and a car that ran. But after a while my tastes got fussier. Like the Israelites waking up to manna every morning, I was tired of the same-old, same-old. I wanted a home with more privacy, a more interesting yet less stressful job, and a shinier new car. My list continued to grow. I wanted Jesus to perk me up when I was down, remove my difficulties, and make living a whole lot easier.
When those things didn’t come, I felt as if Jesus had walked away from me. What I didn’t realize was that He had put loving distance between us, just as He did with the crowd that night, knowing that they wanted to force Him to be king. For me, and for them, it took a stormy night to point out why those expectations were off base.
When we are children we are under the illusion that our parents have only one task: To make us happy. It isn’t until we mature that we realize their task is to send us off into the world with what we will need and not always—in fact rarely—with what we want. It is high time we as Christians grow up. Christian maturity begins with the end of us and the beginning of Him. It involves surrendering all of our hopes, aspirations, and expectations, as well as the pretended control we think we have over the things and people in our life, and investing our future with God. That, by the way, is why Jesus told His disciples to leave their families and professions to follow Him. That is why God commanded Abram to leave everything in Ur and follow His lead to the Promised Land. It is also why Jesus said that those who take hold of the plow and look back are unfit to be His disciple. As long as you and I continue deluding ourselves by thinking we know what’s best for us, and demanding a four-course meal with all the trimmings, we will never come to Christ and accept this bread He offers us. It is when we are spiritually impoverished, blind, wounded, lost, and know it—and confess to God we know it—that this life-giving, life-sustaining bread becomes all we need and all we want. It is when we believe that God always has our best interests at heart, and that He always accomplishes what He promises—despite our present circumstances—that this bread becomes a banquet.
Thirdly, and finally, Jesus by revealing unambiguously that He alone is the source of everlasting life and sustainer of spiritual life now. Verse 35:
And Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life. He who comes to Me shall never hunger, and he who believes in Me shall never thirst.”
Them’s pretty tall words: To never be hungry again, and to never be thirsty again. What does the Lord mean by them?
Firstly, He means that He and He alone is the giver and sustainer of spiritual life. I contend that whatever it is that prevents us from all-out to surrender to Christ is what we actually love more than Christ. You recall the rich young ruler who came to Jesus asking what he needed to have everlasting life. The Lord told him to sell all had and give it to the poor. But the man walked away sad, the Gospel writers tell us, because he had many possessions. “In my hand no price I bring, simply to thy cross I cling.” It is when we will be satisfied with nothing but Jesus, and can tolerate the loss of everything but Jesus, that genuine conversion is accomplished. As the Prayer Book collect rightly begs: Help us, Lord, to dread nothing but the loss of thee.
Secondly, Jesus Christ provides—always provides—what we need and not always what we want. Sometimes what we need is a little adversity. Sometimes it will be lack, or loss, or disappointment that will cause us to be grateful for what we’ve been given, or to better rely upon Him from whence it all came. God knows me better than I know me. He knows what will move me along in my pilgrimage toward Christlikeness. And it is the same with you. In feast or famine, we mustn’t boast or complain. We must ask: “Lord, what do you want me to do?”
And that segues nicely into the last thing Jesus means to communicate to us by His declaration that He is the Bread of Life. To receive this “bread” means to believe in and submit to Jesus Christ. Earlier in chapter 6 Jesus admonishes to not work for the food that spoils but to work for the food that endures to everlasting life. The crowd replies: “What must we do to do the works of God?” Jesus replies in verse 29: “The work of God is this: to believe in the one He has sent.” Later on in chapter 6 Jesus informs the crowd that His flesh is truly food and His blood is truly drink, and that whoever consumes these two commodities will have everlasting life. There is of course an echo of a reference to the Lord’s Supper, where He admonishes His disciples to eat His body and drink His blood. But it is only a faint echo. The primary meaning of this revelation about Jesus’ flesh and blood being food and drink, expressed metaphorically, is that to have everlasting life one must receive Jesus, all of Jesus—His teaching, His redemptive work, His commandments—into the innermost core of his being. We say even now that one is what one eats. Jesus is speaking here about total assimilation of, a complete identification with, Himself, His teaching, His passion, cross and resurrection, and His commands. We must receive Him and submit to Him on His terms and not on ours. “Christ in you, the hope of glory,” is how St. Paul explains the mystery of the ages in Colossians 1:27. And his admonition? To the unbeliever it is simple: Flee the wrath to come. Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved. There is no other saving provision or remission of sins available. Jesus Christ is it. Be reconciled to God, Paul exhorts. Now is the appointed time. Now is the day of salvation. Confess your sins. Forsake them. And ask Christ for everlasting life. To the believer Paul says in Colossians 2:6 and 7:
As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him, rooted and built up in Him and established in the faith, as you have been taught, abounding in it with thanksgiving.
“Behold,” Jesus says in Revelation 3:20, “I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me.”
“Taste and see that the LORD is good,” the psalmist declares in Psalm 34:8, “Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him.”
AMEN.
