First Presbyterian Church of Willmar
August 19, 2012
John 6 : 51-58
Over the last four weeks we have been reading the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John. We are only about two-thirds of the way through the chapter, but a great deal has happened. Because it is a single chapter, though, we need to see it as an ongoing conversation within a specific context. Jesus doesn’t make these statements about the bread of life out of the blue.
In the first 15 verses of the chapter, Jesus participates in the miracles of the loaves and the feeding of the 5,000. When the crowd tried to make him a king, he sent the disciples away in a boat, walked on the water and helped the disciples out of rough seas. The mob was anxiously searching for him and finally caught up with him again in Capernaum. They had many questions for him, seeking to understand who he is, how they can do God’s will, asking him to give them a sign that he was indeed sent from God, and then as he tried to use the story of manna to make a point he talked about the bread that is the true bread, the bread of life and they wanted to know how they could get it.
And by the way, Jesus himself is that bread!
At this point the Pharisees are getting a little restless, and the questioning moves from the searching innocence of the crowd to the doubting and insecure probes of the Pharisees.
It’s at this point, within the context of a longer conversation filled with metaphors about bread and nutrition and the miracle of manna, that the answers of Jesus – especially if taken out of context – can seem to be troubling and confusing.
Throughout John’s Gospel Jesus speaks several “I am” sayings. “I am the Good Shepherd.” “I am the light of the world.” Here Jesus declares, “I am the bread that has come down from heaven.” It seems like a pleasant enough domestic metaphor, until he adds: “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.”
Suddenly we are no longer in the midst of a pleasant domestic metaphor. Something else is happening. And that something is the very thing that marks Christianity as apart from all other religions. Being a Christian isn’t a life of religious ritual: it’s a metabolic experience that changes the way we look at the world. We must digest the life of Christ and make it our own.
In the first centuries of Christianity, Christians were often accused of being cannibals. Because their neighbors would hear them talking about eating Jesus’ flesh and drinking Jesus’ blood -- so what else could the neighbors take that to mean? What Jesus was getting at was that it’s not enough for us just to say that we believe in him with our minds. What Jesus wants is for us to make him a part of our very lives, just like bread becomes a part of our bodies when we eat it.
I’ve always been a big bread eater. I love peanut butter on just about any kind of bread, but there are some required variations. When I was a kid, my father worked in a bakery, and on Saturday mornings he would bring me a large, unsliced loaf of dark and sour German rye bread. I was known in my younger days to slice the loaf lengthwise and make one large peanut butter and marmalade sandwich for my Saturday morning breakfast! There’s something about the textures and the taste of dark grainy breads that makes the addition of marmalade to the peanut butter absolutely delicious.
On the other hand, if I eat my peanut butter with a bagel (sesame) then I just have to have the peanut butter straight up with no embellishments.
These days if you go into any grocery store to buy bread, you will find a dizzying array of breads spread out over a very long row. If you look closely though, you’ll find a lot of the same stuff in different labels.
That’s the world we live in. A world where we have more bread than we know what to do with. If you go to a bookstore like Barnes & Noble, in the non-fiction section, what are the two kinds of books that are always bestsellers? Cookbooks and diet books. On the one hand, we’re always looking for new and improved ways to stuff our stomachs. But then when we discover that those foods didn’t satisfy us in the way we had hoped, we look for ways to get rid of what we’ve eaten, so we can make room to try something else.
Inside of us, there’s always a hunger or a longing for something. We think that if we go out and get that something, then we’ll be truly happy. But in the end, we discover that none of those things that we chase after are able to completely satisfy us. Augustine said centuries ago that our hearts are restless until they find their rest in God. In other words, God is the only thing, the only one, who is able to satisfy the deepest hungers that we have in our lives.
“You are what you eat.” What are we filling our bodies and souls with? Are we feeding upon the bread that Jesus offers us? Are we making Jesus a part of our lives? The thing is that if that’s the path you’re going to follow, just don’t expect the rest of the world to encourage you. As far as most of the world is concerned, feeding on Jesus is looked on like eating poison. Making Jesus a part of our lives is something that the rest of the world looks at and says: “You can do so much better. You can make so much more money. You can have so much more comfort and prestige.”
Jesus said, “I am the bread that comes down from heaven.” Are we prepared to take Jesus and to eat him, to take him and make him a part of our very lives? To digest him and make his life our lives? The world around us is yelling, “Don’t do it. We can offer you so much more!” But if we ever want to fill that emptiness, that hunger, that’s deep down inside us, then Jesus is the only thing, the only one, who can give us what we’re truly searching for.
This is not an easy lesson to digest. If you take the words literally you arrive at the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, and Protestants rejected that a long time ago. If you take it metaphorically, it is still hard to live out. Who of us wants to come to the earthly end that Jesus came to on the cross?
You see, one way or the other, you end up talking about real flesh and blood because accepting the call to Christ’s ministry really does turn out to be a giving away of one’s life – one’s body and blood – for others. When we take up his life, his words become the bread of life for us, and then our lives, through the work of the Holy Spirit, can also become bread for all the world.
“Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day.” So said the Lord. Amen.
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