Fourth Sunday in Lent
Exodus 16:9-15, 1 Corinthians 10:14-22, John 6:10-58
“Eating the Bread of Heaven”
Jesus’ feeding the 5,000 is understandably one of the most preached passages from John’s gospel. I am sure you have heard a great many sermons on it. I know I have. I’ve even preached a few of them. I would guess, however, that you have heard far FEWER sermons on the rest of John chapter six. This is the gospel which you heard read a short while ago. It is, for many Protestants, one of the most difficult portions of the Bible, for in ordinary Protestant ears – at least in American Protestant ears – it sounds so very Roman Catholic.
There is a huge irony in this state of affairs, especially for evangelical Protestants. By and large, evangelicals have championed idea that teaching the Bible is an avenue superior to all others for attaining salvation and fellowship with Christ. And, yet, this passage – which contains the express teaching of our Savior Himself, teaching that is manifestly about salvation and a believer’s fellowship with God in Christ – this passage is, as I have said, a portion of Scripture which Protestant teachers and preachers tend to shy away from. And, when they do engage this passage in the ordinary Protestant pulpit, the sermon often becomes an exercise in what I call “unpreaching” the Bible – that is, explaining why the passage under consideration is NOT ACTUALLY saying what is so obviously plain and simple on its surface.
What, then, is so simple and obvious on the surface of Jesus teaching here? It is simply this: Jesus offers himself to us as food, and that by receiving him in this way, we attain a communion with Him and through Him with God the Father that amounts to eternal life.
“54Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.” If that is not talking about eternal salvation, what is it talking about? “56He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him.” If that is not talking about communion with Christ, what is it talking about?
Many found these words hard to hear. John tells us that they grumbled and disputed. And in verse 66 John notes that “66From that time many of His disciples went back and walked with Him no more.” What an irony, and what a tragedy – it is those who called themselves Jesus’ disciples who walk away, and they stayed away.
There is, in our day, a well-settled walking away from Christ among American Protestant communions. It was recently described by Dr. S. M. Hutchens in an analysis of the current worship wars coursing through evangelicalism today. [http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=17-09-018-v]. I want to quote a few points from Dr. Hutchens’ analysis and expand on them briefly.
Dr. Hutchens first noted a classical New Testament text for what it is that the Church is supposed to be doing when it gathers together, and that text is Acts 2:42, where we read that the church devoted itself to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to the prayers. Dr. Hutchens then writes this:
“The central problem here is that the ‘breaking of bread’—the communion meal that is the unique and necessary Christian addition to the synagogue service—has, doubtless in reaction to “Catholicism,” been downgraded and suppressed in the Evangelical [worship] service. Fermented wine, like bread a symbol of death and resurrection, has been replaced by a modern innovation with grape juice as though this were a perfectly natural part of biblical religion. The words of the Lord: “This is my body . . .” have likewise been suppressed, either by not repeating them, or by effectively denying them with some prayer or preachment that the bread and wine are ‘only symbolic,’ meaning that the words of the Lord, repeated by St. Paul, are to be taken only figuratively, so that anyone who believes that what they are taking is in some sense ‘really’ the body and blood of the Lord is in error.”
And, then, Dr. Hutchens puts his finger on what results from this downgrading of the Lord’s Table. He writes:
“An inevitable result of this denial is the distortion of the natural shape of Christian worship. … the very seat of Communion as instituted by the Lord himself has been removed. It is therefore little wonder that the Evangelical service should always be in search of ‘something deeper,’ something more profound and engaging, something that warms the heart and brings one into a more intimate relation with the Lord.”
This ‘something deeper,’ you see, is what gets lost when the deepest intimacy between our Savior and ourselves is diminished or, effectively, eliminated. And, because this “something deeper” is missing when the Communion is downgraded or otherwise explained away, it is natural and reasonable for evangelical Christians to sense this loss, even if they do not understand what is missing and why it is missing.
Viewed from this perspective, you can begin to appreciate the way that what is left of the church’s activities in Acts 2:42 gets distorted. And, what gets distorted is not wrong in itself, but rather it becomes distorted because it must bear the weight of supplying that “something deeper,” that intimacy with the Lord Himself, which is supposed to be supplied in the Communion.
What does this distortion look like in practice? The answer depends on what you focus on in what remains in Acts 2:42. There are, in Acts 2:42, two things other than the reference to the breaking of bread. First, there is what Luke calls “devotion to the Apostle’s teaching and fellowship.” These are most rightly understood as one thing, not two – in other words devotion to Apostolic teaching and the Christians’ fellowship in that teaching.
These closely related things — Apostolic teaching and Christians’ fellowship with one another in submission to that teaching —these things are well and good; they are necessary for ordinary Christian living. They should in no way ever be diminished or set aside. However, in the circles where my Christian life was first formed – the Bible Churches and similar ministries – these Christian communities put a very high premium on teaching and preaching the Bible. And, this activity was distorted, not because teaching the Bible is pernicious; but, rather because the Apostle’s teaching (we called it “Bible doctrine”) was deemed to be that thing which provides the deepest intimacy with the Lord Himself. The more Bible doctrine you knew and understood, the closer you were to God.
And, so what do you suppose the Christian worship service is like in these circles? It is, fundamentally, an exercise in the exposition of Bible and theology. The sermons are quite long, and very didactic. I know this very well, for I have created a great many such sermons when I ministered in these circles. Long, didactic sermons are exactly what is called for IF, in fact, knowing Bible doctrine is the certain path to fellowship with Jesus Christ.
The other thing mentioned in Acts 2:42 is “the prayers.” On the modern scene, “the prayers” would include not only the saying of prayers during the worship, but also the deployment of music, since, as Paul exhorts us, the singing of psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs is a making of melody to the Lord, and anything addressed directly to the Lord is, in the most basic sense, prayer.
What I find fascinating in our day is the way that the word “worship” has come to be a virtual synonym for “musical praise.” In most evangelical communities today, if you only considered the way that the word “worship” is used, you would have to conclude that praying is not worship, preaching is not worship, giving is not worship, confession of sin is not worship, expressing thanksgiving is not worship – none of these are worship. ONLY singing is worship, and it is the only truly COMMUNAL act of worship that evangelical Christians commonly engage in.
And if that is what a congregation thinks, then what you begin to get is the kind of distortion that is rampant throughout evangelicalism today in the area of Christian music. Communal singing and the music of a worship service is made to bear the weight of generating, sustaining, and culminating the individual Christian’s ostensible intimacy with the Lord. And, in that process, this distortion produces a whole host of aberrations, chief among them the strange and disturbing way that Christian music has become sexually sensual, not only in its musical idioms and in the way it is performed by soloists, but also in its lyrics.
Why do I bring all this up here – in our fellowship? It is not so that we can look down our long liturgical noses with holier than thou expressions on our faces. I bring this up because the gospel appointed for today – the feeding of the 5,000 – gives us an account of a miracle of Christ which had, as its most immediate effect, the disappearance of a large part of those who had come to hear his teaching. Indeed, there is more than a suggestion in Jesus’ question to the disciples — "Do you also want to go away?" — that the disciples were the only ones who remained with Jesus after he had scandalized everyone else. I do not want any of us to miss what Christ intended for all believers to have, because we find his teaching hard to hear.
Jesus’ performed his miracle with the loaves and the fishes precisely to set up the teaching which we read in the gospel for today. And, that teaching is important for us here, because we do in fact make the Eucharist the principle act of our communal worship, and all other worshipful things we do – confessing our sins, receiving assurance of forgiveness, reading the Bible, this sermon, confessing our faith, making our prayers of petition and thanks giving, singing psalms and canticles – all of it leads toward our communion with the Lord at this Table and flows from our communion with the Lord at this table.
And, we have in the Lord’s institution of this communion the answer to those who grumbled, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” When that questioned surfaced as Jesus taught the people, Jesus did not answer it. Instead, he bore down all the harder on the necessity to eat his flesh and drink his blood. He insisted in the bluntest terms that his flesh was true food and his blood was true drink. But never did he answer the question “How can this be?”
But in that first Eucharist, Jesus took the unleavened bread of the Passover and said, “Take; eat. This is my body, which is for you.” And when he took the cup he said, “28 … this is My blood of the new covenant, which is shed for many for the remission of sins.” When he spoke these words, his disciples must have remembered that difficult teaching he had given them a year earlier about Himself being the bread of heaven. I am confident that “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” had been pressing on their thoughts, like a stone in your shoe which you cannot shift away. And, here, at last, was the answer, or as much of an answer as the Lord was going to give them at that moment.
And, so they took and ate; they took and drank. They fed upon the True Bread of Heaven which the Father gives” [John 6:32], they ate and drank “the food which endures to everlasting life, which the Son of Man …” gave them. And while they might not have understood in all its details how it could be true, they were not like those who grumbled by the sea of Galilee. For the disciples believed the one who taught them.
And days later, when the disciples on the Emmaus Road sat down with the one who made their hearts burn within them as He opened the Scriptures to them concerning the Messiah, Luke says they finally recognized him in the breaking of bread.
And many years later, Paul wrote to the Corinthians that, when they rightly ate and drank the elements of the Lord’s Table, they discern in these things the Lord’s body (1 Cor. 11:27ff). “The cup of blessing which we bless,” Paul writes to them, “is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ?” (2 Cor. 10:16).
And, today, here in this chapel, my prayer is that you will find at this Table a true communion with the Lord, brought about in the way in which he taught his disciples and teaches us in the Gospel of John.
God grant that we too may find a communion in the blood of Christ in that cup; and a communion in the body of Christ in that bread. God grant that in this communion we may truly experience that thing for which we thank Him, that in this communion with Christ we are assured of His favor and goodness toward us, and that we are very members incorporate in the mystical Body of God’s Son, the blessed company of all faithful people, and heirs through hope of His everlasting kingdom.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
