Sermon for the Lord’s Day

August 9, 2009

Rev. Lorelei Hillman

University Presbyterian Church

John 6:35-51

³⁵ Jesus said to them, ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. ³⁶But I said to you that you have seen me and yet do not believe. ³⁷Everything that the Father gives me will come to me, and anyone who comes to me I will never drive away; ³⁸for I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me. ³⁹And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day. ⁴⁰This is indeed the will of my Father, that all who see the Son and believe in him may have eternal life; and I will raise them up on the last day.’

⁴¹ Then the Jews began to complain about him because he said, ‘I am the bread that came down from heaven.’ ⁴²They were saying, ‘Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, “I have come down from heaven”?’ ⁴³Jesus answered them, ‘Do not complain among yourselves. ⁴⁴No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me; and I will raise that person up on the last day. ⁴⁵It is written in the prophets, “And they shall all be taught by God.” Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. ⁴⁶Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father. ⁴⁷Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life. ⁴⁸I am the bread of life. ⁴⁹Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. ⁵⁰This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. ⁵¹I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.’

“Living Bread”

The other day we tried a new grocery chain in our neighborhood.  The store was new, and immaculate, but the experience was a bit surreal.  Every piece of food in the store was wrapped in plastic or boxed, and usually in containers quite a bit larger than the food they held.  I felt a bit like I was in some sort of sci-fi movie, a sort of ‘green nightmare’ where everything was pre-formed, pre-packaged and hermetically sealed.

Then I noticed, we were in a whole store full of food and there were no smells…

Food should smell.  That’s how we choose good food.  Is a cantaloupe or a nectarine ripe?  What a lovely smell they have!  How strong is an onion?  Whew!  Is the bread fresh?  Ah!

The smell of bread is a full-blown memory.  Our brains seem to connect to the smell of bread with a kind of mysticism; smell bread and you are transported back to some of those wonderful memories – grandma’s kitchen, the day you learned to bake, a feast of friends.  Bread reminds us of where we were, and who we were with.

When I smell bread, I ‘go back’ to a dark little shop with a dusty floor.  I can remember the arched doorway to the oven, which allowed just a glimpse inside to the curved brick roof inside.  The bakery was in Dammam, Saudi Arabia – a tiny enterprise owned by a humble family.  The owner, the father, used a long wooden paddle to flip round patties of dough up onto the roof of the oven.  When they were cooked on the top side, they would fall to the floor of the oven, cook just a minute more, then he would slide them out on his paddle.  You had to wait a moment to pick them up, they were hot!  When you ate the bread, you got flour on your hands and face.

Bread is, for most of the people in the world, the food of daily life.  In this passage from the Gospel according to John, Jesus says, “I am the bread of life.”  That’s not too hard to understand.  It’s a metaphor.  Pretty much automatically, we join that with his other teaching, “People do not live by bread alone.” (Mt. 4.4)  We understand that while we do need to eat, we also need God, and Jesus ‘feeds’ us what we need to stay healthy in our relationship with our Creator.

At different times in our history, this need for God’s sustaining nourishment has been interpreted in different ways.  In the fourth century, a theologian named Pelagius asserted that human beings have the ability to choose for God.  In essence, he said, ‘God helps those who help themselves.’  We might consider this an interesting approach to table manners!  Saint Augustine responded by saying that human beings did not have the innate power to choose what was right; we were born sinful and it was only by God’s grace that we were fed at all.  This was more or less, ‘God helps those who can’t help themselves.’  Perhaps a more familiar table setting to most of us, whose parents had to serve their food up for them until they got big enough to do it for themselves without creating a mess.  But Saint Augustine said we never grow up enough to ‘serve ourselves.’  For centuries, a middle ground was the functional approach – we are none of us able to choose perfectly well, but we do have the ability to cooperate with God, and therefore receive our spiritual food.

Then in the 1700’s, the puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards gave a mediating approach by saying, God gives us an appetite for eternal food, so we don’t choose to want it but we have the freedom to receive it or not.[1]  I think perhaps Mr. Edwards had a large family, and had spent some time at the dinner table observing his children!

Still, the phrase that intrigues me in this scripture passage is in verse 51, when Jesus says, “I am the living bread.”  He compares himself with manna – a bread of sorts, given by God to the Hebrew people in the wilderness, after they had been liberated from slavery in Egypt.  It seems to me, that while the Hebrews should have been grateful for the manna (after all they were living as nomads in a wilderness, and didn’t have time or means to grow grain for flour), in a way, manna was pre-formed and pre-packaged.  For forty years, they ate it, one kind of bread with one distinct flavor, day in and day out.  Jesus is saying that he is different; he is bread that is alive, that lives, that brings life.  What can he mean?

First, the context tells us that Jesus is not saying we don’t need to eat!  He has been feeding hungry people with bread; he has a concern for the physical needs of those who come to hear him.  But his concerns go beyond the physical, to the spiritual, to the eternal.

At the same time, our dependence is not in question.  God has given the manna, and God gives us Christ.  That is clear.  Perhaps this part of the lesson is to teach us:
            that we must always in some regard rely on God;
            that we should daily celebrate God’s goodness;
            that we should be humble and thankful for what we have;
            that we are continually connected to the good earth which we inhabit.
God gives us bread out of love and care for our being.

But Christ as “living bread” goes well beyond filling our stomachs.  If we only take the part that Christ is Emmanuel, ‘God with us’ then we can also know that no state of being (our physicality, our intellect, our mortality) can separate us from God.  God knows and understands what it means to be a human being, in all our limitations.  God does not reject us for being human, but embraces the experience of it with us.

Taking the metaphor a bit further, Christ as ‘living bread’ is an invitation to eat that bread.  We are meant to partake of what is offered to us.  John Poulton, in his small book “The Feast of Life” says, “We come to God, and because God wanted it that way, and ordained it that way, and wants to make the point once and for all, he puts himself into our hands…”[2]  We are being given food for life, and the point is that we ingest it.

This is a very visceral metaphor!  How exactly do we ‘ingest’ Christ?
            By chewing on his story, the Gospel, the Good News;
            by digesting his teachings;
            by absorbing into our very selves who he is.

Think about every good thing you have come to know about Jesus:
            every good deed he is supposed to have done;
            every wise thing he ever said;
            every gesture or act of kindness.

No matter what you believe about Jesus, whether you think of him as God on earth, or just a great man, or something in-between, you are embodying what you know of him: his message, his thought, his character.

In Christ, you ingest – the word means ‘to carry in, to bear’ – who he is.  In him, you also are a teacher, a healer; in him, you become what he is, a child of the living God.

There is mystery in this process.  You will eat what you can, what you want.  That’s a fact of humanness.  You will absorb Christ differently than the next person; you’ll carry the weight differently, depending upon your ‘body type.’  Some will have a higher metabolism, and will need to eat more often.  Others may eat slowly, savoring the feast.

This living bread will have its price.  Along with all the gentler traits of Christ, you will consume
            his disdain for arrogance;
            his impatience with shallowness;
            his ability to locate and confront hypocrisy;
            his intolerance of abuse.

The seed for this wonderful food, for the living bread, was planted in the life, teachings, death and resurrection of Jesus.  In him, we see the full experience of God both with and within humanity:
            not as manna, which was laid out every morning by an unseen hand,
            but as fresh, warm bread from the oven of God’s love,
                        measured out by human knowledge,
                        kneaded by human experience,
                        formed by human ability,
                        and baked in the heat of Christ’s challenge to believe.

So, how’s your appetite?