The Bread of Heaven
Preacher: The Rev. Andrew Van Kirk
Passage: John 6:35, 41-51
Series: The Bread of Life Discourse
At the beginning of our recent road trip, 2500 miles long, we stopped at a barbecue restaurant on the way down to Austin. Our meal was accompanied by live men's Olympic handball which was playing on the screens around the dining area. It was France vs. somebody. Now I know basically nothing about handball. I know there was some issue recently because the women's handball teams are required by the sport's governing body to wear bikini bottoms. The men's teams are not required to wear bikini bottoms, thank you Jesus.
That fact, right there, exhausts my substantive knowledge about handball. And because we were in a restaurant, the TV's were all on mute. So I got none of the commentary or explanation to help make sense of this thing I was watching. I could glimpse only the broadest strokes of what was going on.
The Olympics are always like this. Modern pentathlon I encounter once every four years, and then only with a glancing blow. The aforementioned handball. And of course synchronized swimming, for which the official name is artistic swimming. By the way, have you seen the official olympic icon for "artistic swimming."
Here, I give you this just a bonus.
That is obviously artistic drowning.
If you just jump in and listen to the post-game interview with an artistic swimmer or the captain of the French handball team, it will sound like he's speaking a foreign language. I mean, obviously, he'd presumably be speaking French. But I mean all the handball terms and explanations would make no sense.
Or to use a sport we know better, if you hear a basketball player talking about how they "protected the paint" – that means something specific if you know basketball. But without that knowledge, it sounds like that player is moonlighting as Sherwin Williams security guard.
Jesus, in our gospel reading, is more or less giving a post game interview. We don't have the full context in our passage today, but the narrative event that proceeds this – the spiritual gold medal match, if you will – was the feeding of the 5000. And Jesus is getting questioned, and doing some significant pontificating, on what it all means. And both he and his opponents in this passage are using some terms in ways that depend on some context that we don't have, because first century Jewish thought is as familiar to many of us as the game of men's handball.
This passage from John before us today, along with next week's passage, make up what is known as the "Bread of Life" discourse. And so for the next two weeks we're going to unpack this bit of scripture. I'm going to provide some commentary and explanation to try to make Jesus' post-game interview make a little more sense. Which is important: Jesus says understanding it is literally a matter of life and death.
By the time our passage picks up in v. 35, we're joining a post-game interview already in progress. We've missed a little bit of the back and forth. The crowds around Jesus have been asking for a sign. Never mind that he just fed 5000 people the day before. They weren't ready yet. Do over. They're ready now. Show us Jesus.
They challenge him like this. "What sign are you going to give us then, so that we may see it and believe you? What work are you performing? Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’”
So this is the gauntlet that is thrown down. Moses gave the people bread from heaven, the manna in the wilderness. What you got, Jesus?
Now, a quick refresher on the manna. The Israelites, newly escaped from slavery in Egypt, were sojourning in the desert for forty years. There's not a lot of food in the desert. So, just when it seemed like maybe they would starve to death out in the desert, God sent manna.
Manna was literally food that fell out of the sky. The closest literary parallel is classic work by Judi Barrett "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs." Except unlike the children's book, it was the same every day. And there were no meatballs; depending on how those are made, they aren't kosher. But in the wilderness, the people were literally fed by food that came from the sky.
Over time, however, as Jewish thought and theology developed, this bread from heaven became a metaphor for speaking of the word or wisdom of God. The bread from heaven was God's gift of spiritual nourishment as much as physical nourishment.
The prophet Amos speaks of a coming famine when the problem will not be a lack of literal bread, but of the words of the Lord.
The prophet Isaiah invites the people to eat and drink by listening to the word of the Lord: "Listen diligently to me, and eat what is good…Hear, that your soul may live." (Isaiah 55:3a,d).
In Proverbs 9, Wisdom personified speaks an invitation to those who would seek her, "Come eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed."
There's a passage in the Wisdom of Solomon about the "bread that was prepared in heaven and able to satisfy anyone's longing...so that the people would learn it is God's word the preserves them."
That's the context for this conversation between Jesus and his opponents. Even before our passage starts, Jesus and his opponents are not talking about a loaf bread as surely as our basketball player who protected the paint was not talking about a gallon of semi-gloss enamel.
It's into this thought world – one in which God offers spiritual nourishment that will bring life – that Jesus says in v. 35, "I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty."
And when he says this, his opponents "complained about him" (v. 41). This is the same verb the Greek translation of the Old Testament used to describe the Israelites complaining about Moses. The people are – just as they did the first time – rejecting the gift of God.
The people started off wanting this situation with Jesus to be like the situation with Moses. For what it's worth, they're doing a really good job of playing their part – complaining against the one God the Father has sent.
And Jesus says, "Stop it." That's verse 43. "I can't make you accept it, but believing in me will lead to eternal life."
"My teaching," Jesus says, "my way of life, the path of following me – what I'm giving is the bread of life. That's the bread, the spiritual sustenance, that makes one full. Not just spiritually fulfilled, but eternally alive."
So to recap, the literal manna from heaven became the narrative incarnation of the idea that God would give perfect spiritual sustenance, the word of God as bread from heaven. And Jesus says, I am that bread.
The physical bread from heaven becomes the spiritual bread from heaven. And Jesus says, "I am that bread." And then next week he's going to say, "and also, my body is physical bread; you're going to eat it." But that's next week.
In closing this week, I want to tie this back to our concrete lives. If a person believes in Jesus as the one whom God sent for the life of the world, and I mean believes in the sense of seeking to know ever more deeply the things Jesus taught and life ever more fully the way Jesus lived, that person will find their longings gone, their cravings fulfilled. They will hunger and thirst no more.
Obviously you'll still need to eat food – but don't underestimate the physical implications of this. It's not for nothing that we speaking of a person's "appetite" for power or money. The "thirst traps" posted on social media did not get their name for nothing. We hunger and thirst for lots of things – love, sex, money, power, winning.
What we acknowledge less often is that being hungry stinks. It's not a good feeling. A perfect Christian would not be one who successfully doges all the temptations like PacMan dodges ghosts. That would be highly stressful; and besides, almost all of us stink at PacMan. One who has fully eaten of the bread of life would no longer face the hungers and thirsts that constantly trip us up. In true Jesus fashion, the demons of life get cast out. Suddenly you're playing PacMan without the ghosts.
Jesus comes to forgive our actions *and* heal our desires. Jesus did not just come to give us infinite lives in PacMan; he came to make it possible to play an entirely different game.
Jesus is not a rule giver but a heart changer; Jesus us offers an alternative to a life of constantly hungering and thirsting for things that won't fill us up – or rather things won't fill us up very long.
Because that's the truth of the matter. It's a lie Christians tell ourselves that there's an empty space within us that nothing else can fill but God. Lots of stuff can fill that space; but that other doesn't leave us full forever. We eventually will hunger and thirst once more.
In fact, I dare say it's not that our age is any less spiritually hungry than those prior, but that we have become particularly adept at pouring into our lives a near constant stream of foods, beverages, drugs, sexual encounters, idolatrous beliefs, social media posts, political activism, and highly produced entertainment, such that we simply fill hungry less often.
We're all still on our way to dying; us wealthy Westerners are just better fed as we go. There's the rub. We can eat all the food the world has to offer and we will still die. Or we can eat of the food heaven has to offer, and we will live.
"Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh." And that takes us to next week, "Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood…". Next week.
