How can we receive: Genuine Food and Drink?
Saint John 6:51-58
Introduction
If you look through last week’s bestseller list under non-fiction books, you’ll find that three of them were from the same author: the late Dr. Atkins. In fact, diet books and cookbooks generally make up the greater share of non-fiction bestsellers; Americans are concerned about health...and concerned about having health in the least painful and best tasting way.
Thus we see a boxing champ selling us electric grills on TV and a hyperactive octogenarian who preaches the health benefits of drinking parsley, carrot, and cabbage juice to sell his machines at around $200 a pop...and they’re selling like hotcakes...a food that we are told to avoid...unless they’re Dr. Atkins ’special’ pancakes, topped with sugar free syrup...
We are being bombarded with health advice, and nagging, and the debate between lowfat and law carb products...It’s nearly enough to make you lose your appetite completely. When we see how much time and effort people put into ’eating right’ for maximizing their life in this world, and the things that happen to them, does it not make us cry out for more? Dr. Atkins recent death--caused by slipping on some ice and injuring his head--reminds us of the death of Frank Shorter: the leader of the ’jogging’ movement in the 1970s...who died from a heart attack!
All of the exercise and all of the nutrition advice in the world is unable to sustain us for more than the few years of this earthly sojourn. We need such things to be good stewards of what God has given us in these "fearfully and wonderfully made" bodies, but we really need something beyond low-fat and no-fat, beyond vegetarianism, beyond low-carb and macrobiotic. With the words in today’s Gospel, Jesus would have us receive something above the best of the foods we are able to prepare: GENUINE FOOD AND DRINK, the Food and Drink that alone will satisfy, and that we can eat only through the faith that God creates in our hearts.
I. We need the Genuine Food.
A. Nothing else will satisfy (not even manna).
As we have seen in our readings in John chapter six these last few weeks, there is a Food that we need, a Food that is truly food, genuine food. We’ve seen that we need this Food because there is nothing else in the world that can truly satisfy us. Even the manna that God sent down from heaven was not enough to satisfy permanently; as Jesus said to the Jews: "Your fathers ate the manna, and are dead !" He might have added that they were also so unsatisfied with the manna that they grumbled all the while that they ate it.
B. Nothing else gives life (which we need because...).
We’ve also seen that we need a food that does more than just satisfy; we need a Food that can make us alive! According to God’s Word, our natural state is to be "dead in trespasses" and sins. Because of Adam’s sin and our sins, we must face physical death, and, unless we partake of a Food that gives life, also eternal death--eternity lived out conscious that our suffering is because of our unnecessary separation from God and His love--unless we partake of a Food that gives life, eternal death will be our lot, as well.
II. We can’t get it from:
A. the world,
In today’s Gospel, Jesus becomes more specific about how we can receive the Food of which He has spoken. It’s obvious that we can’t get the genuine food, the Food that really feeds us, from this world. The things of this world can help us on the physical level--and they can snare us at the spiritual level--but they are completely unable to cancel the punishment for our sins and give us life.
B. our works, even the superficial hearing of the Word and partaking of the Sacrament
Instead, we are instructed to feed upon Jesus, who calls Himself ’the Bread of Life’; HE is the GENUINE FOOD AND DRINK. We need to receive Him into ourselves as food, so that we will be nourished unto life.
This is not something that we can do by any working of our own, not even by doing good works in imitation of Christ. To look at it on a physical level, we can imitate a piece of bread all day, but that’s not the same as eating it!
Even physically partaking of the Lord’s Supper doesn’t guarantee that we are receiving the GENUINE FOOD AND DRINK in a way that helps us, as the Bread of Life who has come down from Heaven.
Many people think that the mere act of coming to Communion is what gains eternal life for them. Some even base their thoughts on the very words of our text: "Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life," but it is clear that Jesus is not discussing the Lord’s Supper in these verses.
First of all, Jesus is not speaking primarily to His disciples here, but to unbelievers whom He is trying to convert, and the fact that He wasn’t even going to institute the Sacrament until more than a year later would make a discussion of the necessity of Communion a bit out of place. When Jesus discussed Baptism in John 3, John was already Baptizing, and Jesus had His disciples Baptizing, as well (John 4:2).
More than that, we notice that the eating of which Jesus speaks here is one that is always necessary for salvation, and which always works salvation. His words are, "Whoever eats My flesh has eternal life," and "unless you eat My flesh, you have no life in you"; yet Paul tells us in His first Letter to the Corinthians that the Lord’s Supper may also be received to judgment and physical sickness and death, as well as to life and salvation.
III. But we only get it when:
A. We receive into ourselves by faith what the flesh and blood (of) Jesus did for us,
What Jesus is discussing in John 6 is His death as a flesh and blood man who is at the same time God Himself, His death that has taken away the sin of the world. He says: "I am the Living Bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this Bread, He will live forever; and the bread that I shall give--the true, GENUINE nourishment for your souls is this--My flesh being given in behalf of the life of the world." The genuine food and drink, which our souls must have for life, is the fact of Christ’s dying and rising for us. It is not simply ’His flesh’, but ’His flesh given unto death for the world’s forgiveness’, that is truly life-giving. And it is in realizing this and relying on it that we truly ’eat His flesh and drink His blood,’ eating and drinking to the benefit of our souls.
B. Which is what we do when we hear and partake rightly.
Just physically hearing God’s Word or just bodily eating and drinking the elements of the Lord’s Supper is not enough; these must be accompanied by faith, which gathers and holds fast the benefits of such hearing, eating, and drinking. It is faith that ’digests’ this food...and that is an interesting concept: our digestive system is a gift from God that not only digests food, but is triggered by the food to begin digesting. Just so, the Genuine Food and Drink is not only digested and appropriated and made use of by faith, but is the cause of faith, as well! "Faith comes by hearing the Word concerning Christ."
The Church of the Reformation confessed this in the Formula of Concord, Article VII, "there is a twofold eating of the flesh of Christ. There is not only the oral eating of that flesh in the Sacrament, but also a spiritual eating, and this spiritual eating is simply faith, faith in the Gospel which is preached, as well as in the Lord’s Supper--namely, that we hear, receive with faith, and appropriate to ourselves all the benefits Jesus has gained for us by giving His body into death and by shedding His blood for us: the grace of God, forgiveness of sins, righteousness, and everlasting life; and that we rest with certain trust and confidence that we have a gracious God and eternal salvation for the sake of Jesus Christ, and hold to it in all difficulty and temptation.
Really, then, the John 6 eating must precede the reception of the Lord’s Supper and happen again during the eating of it. This is why we are Baptized before we commune and why we have the Divine Service constructed the way we do: to lead us up to the altar in true faith, to bring us once again to be focused on the promises of God and on what He has done for us, so that when we eat this bread and drink this wine we are not merely ’taking’ the body and blood of Christ--which would be there whether we believed or not--but so that we receive Christ’s body and blood, receive them to our benefit, just as we pray: "Lord, may Thy body and Thy blood be for my soul the highest good!"
Truly, the body given up for you on the cross and the blood poured out to pay for your sins are your "highest good," whether you realize it or not. What we pray with these words, then, is just like when we pray in the Lord’s Prayer, "Give us this day our daily bread," and we mean by that, "God certainly gives daily bread to everyone without our prayers, even to all evil people, but we pray in this petition that God would lead us to realize this and to receive our daily bread with thanksgiving."
Conclusion
As you hear the Word of God today, and especially as you partake of the Lord’s Supper, God grant that neither be done ’mechanically’, but realizing just what you receive, the salvation which the giving of His flesh on the cross has won, may you with the greatest of joy take for your nourishment the GENUINE FOOD AND DRINK.
To God’s glory, and to your salvation, Amen!
