Give Us This Bread Always!

John 6:22-34.  (May 3, 2015)

I.

So the crowd Jesus fed apparently camps out on the hillside, and in the morning they awake to discover that Jesus and the disciples are gone.  But they know he was headed for Capernaum, so some of them get in boats and make their way up the coast in search of him.  The last we heard, they were intending to make Jesus king by acclamation.

When they finally locate him, they ask, “Rabbi, when did you come here?”  “How did you come here?” might have been a better question.  I mean, Jesus went up into the mountains, and his disciples took their only boat in the other direction to Capernaum.  Yet here is Jesus now, in Capernaum.  He could not have walked the rugged terrain that distance; and, since they were already astounded by the bread miracle, he doesn’t tell them about walking on the lake.  They probably couldn’t handle that.

He doesn’t answer their question anyway.  He just says, “You are looking for me for the wrong reasons.  You do not recognize the signs I am doing as pointing to larger, spiritual truths; all you seem to care about is feeding your faces with that bread from yesterday.  I have not come to set up a chain of bakeries!  You have to get over the literal understanding of what I am doing.  Do not work for this physical food that perishes.  But work for the spiritual food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.  For it is on him that God the Father has set his seal.”  

Obviously Jesus understands that people need to eat.  He showed this on the hillside by feeding the 5,000 hungry people in the first place.  But this is not the end of the story.  Feeding people is important, but it’s just the beginning.  It is not an end in itself; it is a sign pointing to a larger, higher, more profound, and greater reality.

Sometimes we can get lost in the basics, in our physical needs and desires.  I suspect we are biologically hard-wired to focus on locating and consuming food.  So that even now, when at least those of us in this room probably do not have to worry about getting enough food, we still crave it.  If anything we are perpetually putting ourselves on diets and exercise regimes because we consume too much.  If food is available there is something in us that tells us to eat it because… you never know about tomorrow.

We have developed an economic system that is very good at producing food for consumption.  But because we have not allowed ourselves to consider the spiritual meaning of food, and because therefore we have not connected our ways of producing and distributing food with ideas and practices of justice or equality, we end up benefiting a few fortunate people, who have their needs met and more, while allowing a few billion others to live in chronic hunger.

The spiritual always bears fruit in the social.  One cannot be both selfish and spiritual.  True spirituality is never a collapse or implosion into our own ego.  It aways finds a deeper connection to God, the creation, and other people.  Therefore Jesus says not to work for regular food but for the food of spiritual life which comes from God.

II.

To their credit Jesus’ questioners at least pretend to be tracking with him here, and they ask what they have to do to do the works of God, the work that will get them the spiritual food.  You will notice some parallels with the conversation the Lord had with the woman at the well in Samaria two chapters ago.  Then as well they started literal and quickly moved into the  spiritual, metaphoric, and symbolic speech that is the only way to communicate what Jesus is talking about.

Jesus replies that the work of God is to “believe in him whom [God] has sent.”  And this is of course where it gets sticky, and where we tend to invent easy and superficial ways to satisfy this requirement.  For we founder upon the meaning of the all-important word, “believe.” 

I have a close friend who is a Methodist pastor from India.  He tells me that there are Hindus who come to America to teach yoga classes.  When they go back home they raise money by testifying that everyone who comes to their class has actually converted to Hinduism, because, they say, chanting “Om” is actually a confession of faith.  (This reasoning makes me a Hindu, by the way.)

Christians engage in this kind of foolishness as well.  I have another  friend who used to be a fundamentalist; he once told me that in his former church evangelism consisted of getting people to repeat a specific sentence about Jesus.  Once people did that, they were officially saved.  

I suspect that Jesus means something more than the recitation of a verbal formula when he says that the work of God is to believe in the One God sent.  Merely saying “Jesus is Lord” doesn’t make one a Christian any more than saying “Om” makes one a Hindu, or saying “There is no God but God” makes one a Muslim, or reciting the Shema makes one a Jew.  

We have a nasty habit of reducing faith to a word or phrase that expresses a cognitive opinion about something, in our case Jesus.  As if all Jesus wants is for us to say the right words, and have the right doctrine in our heads about him.

For Jesus, “to believe” means more like placing your whole-hearted trust in something; it means acquiring a new way of thinking and seeing; and most importantly, it demands a radically different and transformed way of life in terms of actual behavior.  Jesus is always telling his disciples not what to say but what to do.  “Keep my commandments.”  “Love one another as I have loved you.”  “Follow me.”  And so forth.  

Jesus uses the word “believe” to sum up this whole character of a changed life.  Certainly what we think and say is an element of that.  But it has also to be reflected and expressed in what we do, or it isn’t happening.  Jesus brother, James, learned this as “faith without works is dead.”  Clearly misunderstanding and underestimating what Jesus means by “believe” was a problem from the beginning.

III.

Jesus’ interlocutors seem willing to believe in him, but they want another sign.  I find this amazing since they had witnessed the spectacular sign with the bread on the hillside the day before!  I guess it’s like, what have you done for me lately?  They need another sign today.  They remind him that in the Torah God provides miraculous bread for the people every day (except the Sabbath).  It is as if they are saying, “We’ll believe whatever you want if you can do that thing with the bread on a daily basis.”  (Clearly they really liked that bread.  Must’ve been sourdough….) 

One miracle, one sign, is never enough.  Things like this?  They need constant reinforcement.  People forget.  Then people who hear about it what to see for themselves.  If we base our faith on supernatural phenomena we’re sunk.  The miracle would have to happen all the time, which would make it not really much of a miracle.  It would become routine.  And Jesus would be spending all his time proving himself with amazing miracles, which would have to get increasingly amazing to satisfy people who are easily jaded.

That would drive him into the devil’s temptation about fame, from the other gospels.  He performs these signs to open up the consciousness of his witnesses.  Because of them, they are able to see all around them the constant and continual miracles of God in everything that God has made!  It is not about the literal bread; it is about seeing through the sign to the new reality the sign points to and reveals.

I have said this before.  In this area we are kind of like dogs.  If I approach a dog and stick out my arm and finger and point to something, the dog will most likely express great interest in my finger.  Ah, a finger!  Maybe it has peanut butter or, even better, liverwurst, on it!  It certainly warrants a good sniff!

It does not occur to a dog, usually, that the finger is pointing somewhere else and that it should turn its attention in that direction.  So it is with these people and the signs that Jesus performs.  In this case, they remain obsessed with the literal bread he gave them on the hillside.  What do we have to do, what do we have to believe, so we can get some more of that bread?

I get the impression that the Lord, in dealing with humans, must have done a lot of eye-rolling.

I mean, he’s done wine and now bread.  Maybe they were waiting for him to conjure some cheese or something.

IV.

Then Jesus, perhaps restraining himself from saying, “Forget the bread already!”  says, “Very truly, I tell you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven.”  He’s not really talking about actual bread anymore.  He is referring to the teaching, the words, he is giving.  He will make this explicit later in the chapter.  

Remember he is dealing with people who had been taught to base their faith on the Law of Moses.  Jesus’ opponents lifted up Moses as the central figure in the Bible.  Throughout Jesus’ ministry there is this subtext going on about the place and status of Moses and the Law.  Jesus contends that the Pharisees and other Jewish leaders are getting Moses all wrong.  They reduce Moses to a legalistic control-freak for whom it is all about obeying the letter of the Law.  Such an approach suited the leaders of Jesus’ time, as it does for leaders of every time because leaders are always looking for some way to keep people in line and under their control, compliant and busily working to produce wealth for the elite.

Jesus says that Moses refers to him.  That is, Moses is anticipating and welcoming the incarnate love of God who is coming into the world.  Jesus comes to fulfill, not negate, the Law of Moses.  He fulfills it by writing it on people’s hearts by the Spirit, and revealing the heart of the Law itself, which is God’s love.

So when the Lord says it was not Moses who gave the bread from heaven, he means that the divine Word comes from God, not Moses.  Moses refers to and points to the Word, who is the One who comes from God, the One sent into the world by God.  Moses, and all the Scriptures, convey the Word of God, who is Jesus Christ.

Get your attention off Moses!  Look at the One to whom Moses points.  The bread, that is, the teaching, of Moses, comes from God.  Jesus Christ embodies, incarnates, that teaching, that truth.  This is the bread of God, the Wisdom from on high, the true and good commandment, which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.  It is Jesus Christ.

And we don’t follow him by just talking about him.  We don’t believe in him by only thinking about him.  And we certainly don’t do either one by treating him as our private religious possession, as the leaders were doing with Moses, using him to exclude, control, coerce, judge, and condemn people.  The Spirit blows wherever, says Jesus.  The Spirit is wild and undomesticated.  The authorities and leaders don’t manage God at all.

The bread from heaven, the new spiritual manna, the teaching and example and witness of Jesus, in whom the Word becomes flesh and emerges from within the good creation itself, gives life to the world.  His teaching gives life to the world because following it puts us in harmony with the creation and the One who gives it life.  Not to follow his teaching of non-violence, generosity, humility, simplicity, honesty, healing, forgiveness, and blessing, is to fall into eternal death.  It is not to live or even be.  It is to sell out to the powers that have usurped authority in this world.    

V.

The people from the crowd finally say to him, “Sir, give us this bread always.”  Are they really still on about the bread?!  Or maybe some are beginning to get it? 

But if we do get it, then that request is the very heart of faith.  It is what we should be saying to the Lord all the time: Give us this bread always!  Give us this teaching, this Word, this good news, this light and life!  At the end of this chapter Peter says he is staying because Jesus has the words of eternal life.  Give us this bread, give us yourself, always!

We have to crave the Lord’s spiritual bread, we have to hang on his every word, we have to keep his commandments and love each other as he has loved us, by giving his life for his friends.  He gives us this Sacrament of bread and wine to remember him by.  It embraces our physical, biological, organic need for actual food, and transfigures it, extending to become spiritual food that grounds and interprets our reception of his teaching and his life.

May God give us this bread always: our daily bread for physical sustenance, this Sacrament of his Body and Blood by which he becomes us, his teaching of love, and his life, poured out for the life of the world.

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