This evening we are beginning a series of sermons exploring the “I am…” sayings of Jesus in the eye witness account of the good news of Jesus written by his friend John. Each of these gives us a different perspective on who Jesus understood himself to be, and what that means for us. Just as me saying “I am a father”, “I am a vicar”, “I am a son”, “I am English”, “I am six foot two”, tell you different things about me and how I understand my identity. They are all true, but none of them are complete. So the “I am” sayings of Jesus reveal different aspects of his identity and call out a different response from us. This evening we are making a start with Jesus declaration, “I am the bread of life.”
Now, I know that this is quite a big chunk of John, but it felt to me like it was all important for us to get a rounded view of what Jesus meant when he talked about being the bread of life. There are a number of different facets to it. Fortunately for us, it’s not just one big indigestible loaf. It is more like one of those tear and share loaves. It is one big piece of bread, but it seems to me that it divides up quite neatly, with the tear lines being where the crowd ask questions.
So, we’re going to tear off a chunk at a time and see what each chunk gives us, whilst bearing in mind that it is all the same bread.
So, we find the first question in verse 25 when the crowd ask Jesus, “Rabbi, when did you get here?”
Which, without knowing the background might seem like a slightly strange opening to a conversation. It implies that they are confused about his arrival and how or when it happened. Which, when we look back at the beginning of chapter 6 is entirely understandable. The day before Jesus had been on the other side of the Sea of Galilee teaching and healing and a large crowd had gathered, but they had not brought enough food with them. Jesus had discussed the problem with his friends and followers, his disciples, and they hadn’t really got a solution but had found a small boy with a packed lunch of rolls and fish. Jesus had fed the whole crowd with that tiny meal, and there were left overs. To escape from the crowd who wanted to make him king by force Jesus had withdrawn up the mountain by himself.
The disciples headed out across the lake in a boat, leaving Jesus on the mountain. Until, in the middle of the night he joined them, walking across the lake to do so. The next morning the crowd couldn’t find Jesus so all piled into boats to head for Capernaum to look for him. When they found him they were confused about how he’d got there ahead of them – he hadn’t gone with the disciples in their boat, and he hadn’t come with them in theirs. How had he got there? When did he get there?
Jesus, in true Jesus fashion, completely ignores their question. Because he knows it’s not the important question. He doesn’t explain that he walked across the lake to catch up with the disciples. He knows their hearts, and he picks up the bread theme from the day before. That had been the object lesson, the illustration to begin the sermon, to prompt the wonder. Now he’s going to teach them what it means. That was the sign, but what did the sign point to?
The sign pointed beyond physical provision that keeps a body going for a day towards a provision of true, deep, unmeasurable life. Jesus is challenging his listeners to think about what they are working for.
What are they spending their time, their energy, their selves on? What is the focus of their lives? Are they things of true importance or significance?
This prompts their next question, “What must we do to do the works God requires?” This is the repeated question of humanity. “What does God want of us?” There was one set of answers in the sacrificial and holiness laws of the Old Testament. There was another in the legal framework with the ten commandments at the centre. Much of the teaching of the Pharisees at that time was based on trying to understand exactly how the people of God were to live in order to avoid breaking God’s law and being exiled again. The prophets had answered this question in a number of different ways, all around the theme of being faithful to God, of obeying the commandments, of worshipping truly. The prophet Micah wrote,
“He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.
And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God.”
All of these answers are bound up in the two great heart commandments to love God and to love our neighbours, as Jesus points to when he is asked what the greatest commandment is.
But this isn’t what Jesus points to on this occasion. Rather, he says:
“the work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.”
Over the centuries the people of God did not have a great track record of believing the ones that God had sent. He sent Moses to free them from Egypt and they doubted and bickered. He sent the Judges to rule and provide guidance and each man had done what seemed best to him. He sent the prophets- Elijah, Elisha, Isaiah, Jeremiah and others to warn the people what the consequences of not being faithful to God would be, and they’d tried to kill them, thrown them in dry cisterns, and generally ignored the warnings.
But actually Jesus wasn’t just asking them to believe him. He was asking them to believe in him. That’s another step of trust, isn’t it.
Not just to believe that what someone is saying is right or true, but to trust that they have a way through, can make change, can bring in a new way of life. That’s a big ask. So the crowd have more questions.
‘What sign then will you give that we might see it and believe you? What will you do? Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, “He gave them bread from heaven to eat.”’
There’s a few things to notice here. The first thing is that the crowd has changed it back again. No longer is it “show us a sign that we might believe in you” We’re back to “believe you”. Jesus has asked for the second step, and they’re back on the first one. Perhaps he thought that feeding over five thousand of them the day before might have counted as something, but obviously not. It’s amazing how short our memories can be when God does something amazing in our lives. How quickly we rationalise it away.
There was a trend some time ago to demythologise the accounts of Jesus’ miracles. In this case it was suggested that when everyone in the crowd saw the boy’s willingness to share his meal they got their pack lunches out that they’d been hiding in case someone else tried to nick it, and that the “real” miracle wasn’t that Jesus produced the bread and fish out of thin air but that people shared nicely. Perhaps that process of rationalisation had already started, even in the minds of those who had experienced it.”
It was clear that the crowd understood that Jesus was claiming, at the least, to be in that prophetic line of people that God had sent, like Moses. So, probably shaped by the fact that the conversation was about food, they asked for a sign like the sign of Manna, that they attributed to Moses. Bread that appeared in the morning on the ground in desert following their escape from slavery in Egypt.
Jesus challenges this attribution. It was not Moses who gave their ancestors the manna, the bread from heaven, it was God the Father.
The bread of heaven is this true bread that gives life, not just to the people of God in the desert for forty years, but to the world. To all people, everywhere, in every time.
That sounds good. They want some of that.
“Sir, always give us this bread.”
And now Jesus drops the bombshell.
“I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty”
Let’s just sit with that a moment, and if we can, try and imagine what it would have been like to hear that for the first time. I can’t remember the first time I heard it, I think I was probably too young. I’ve read it, studied it, sung it, preached it, countless times. Can we hear it afresh this evening.
“I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty”
This is what the Father sent the Son to be and to do. To be the source of nourishment and life for all who turn to him. And that is the Father’s will that the Son is pleased to enact. To feed our deepest hungers and longings. Not just physical hunger, but emotional, spiritual hungers. Our hunger for love, for significance, for hope, for joy, for life. These are all fulfilled in Jesus.
But the crowd don’t believe him, they definitely don’t believe in him. What they think they know gets in the way of what they need to learn. They begin to grumble, to mutter amongst themselves.
“Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, “I came down from heaven.”
This isn’t the first time that Jesus has run into trouble with people who thought that they knew his life story. In Luke’s gospel we read that following his very first sermon in the synagogue in his home town of Nazareth, the people that he had grown up with had taken offence at his claiming to be the fulfilment of one of Isaiah’s prophecies and had attempted to throw him off a cliff.
Later on one of the reasons that the religious leaders said that Jesus couldn’t be the Messiah was because the Messiah would come from Bethlehem, not Nazareth. They didn’t know that actually Jesus had been born in Bethlehem.
All the way through his life and ministry what people thought they knew about Jesus stopped them seeing who he actually is.
When I have conversations with people who are beginning to explore faith, or have questions about Jesus, or are bringing children for baptism, one of the questions I sometimes ask is “what do you think about Jesus?” The answers vary from “a nice story”, “a myth”, “a good man”, “a teacher”, “the one who died on the cross.” It seems to me that very often there is a whole lot of unpicking to do, of clearing away misconceptions and misunderstandings, before people can begin to hear the truth of who Jesus is. Sometimes that can be challenging, and people can take offence. Because the reality of who Jesus is demands a response in a way that the false image doesn’t.
Jesus doesn’t give way though. In fact he doubles down. He doesn’t seek to lessen the offensive possibilities of what he is saying. If anything, he increases them.
He makes explicit that he is claiming to have come directly from heaven, having been sent by the Father, whom he has seen. To have seen God was a huge, blasphemous claim, even Moses only saw the back of God as he passed by.
He repeats his claim to be the bread of life, bread from heaven that gives those who eat it immunity from death.
And then bombshell number two.
“This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.”
What now? Your flesh? Again, let’s sit with this a moment and hear it afresh, as if for the first time. Wipe from our minds any knowledge of the last supper, of communion, of the cross.
No wonder the crowd have moved on from grumbling to arguing sharply.
“How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”
Again, Jesus makes no accommodation. Not only flesh to eat but blood to drink. We have a huge advantage over those who heard this when Jesus said it then. We know about the last supper. We know about communion. We have drunk the wine and eaten the bread, somehow for us his flesh and blood, torn and spilt on that cross that brought him death and us life. In the past God had sent the manna which had provided life day by day, but not life forever. Now God has sent true bread that provides life by day and forever.
I said earlier that this was quite a long Bible reading, but that we were having all of it because it is of a piece and is all necessary to understand what Jesus was getting at. Actually, we do need to go a bit further.
Verse 60 says,
“on hearing it, many of his disciples said, “This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?”
and verse 66
“From this time on many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.”
This must have broken Jesus’ heart. It wasn’t just the crowd or the religious leaders who doubted him or took offence at his teaching. It was many of his disciples. His friends. People he’d travelled with, eaten with, laughed and cried with. Some of those who had helped distribute the bread and fish, who had seen him walking across the water towards them. They left him. Jesus knows what is like to be forsaken.
He turns to his core team, the twelve.
“You do not want to leave too, do you?”
Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe that you are the Holy one of God.”
Even when life is painful, when there are things we don’t understand, this is where faith ends up. We believe in Jesus even when we don’t get it, “Lord, to whom shall we go?”
As we read in the Psalm, “Whom have I in heaven but you?” He is our daily bread, the one who provides for us, both now and forever.
I wonder what we are hungry for today? When we pray the Lord’s prayer at the moment and ask for our daily bread, what is it, specifically that we are asking for? What do we need from God at this time in our lives, in these circumstances?
I’m going to finish with a reflection on the gift of Manna in the apocryphal book of the Wisdom of Solomon, which seems to me to speak of God’s kindness and tailoring of his provision for us. He doesn’t just chuck a bread roll at us. He sees each of us, knows each of us, loves each of us, and gives us what we need.
“You gave your people food of angels, and without their toil you supplied them with bread ready to eat, providing every pleasure and suited to every taste. For your sustenance manifested your sweetness toward your children; and the bread, ministering to the desire of the one who took it, was changed to suit everyone’s liking.”
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