Jesus Is...We Are To Be...The Bread of Life - John 6:26-35 (Wednesday Night Worship)
If you don’t already know it, I love bread. I love most all breads, with the exception of
any that have onion or oats (because of allergies), and I am not a real big fan
of banana-nut bread. For years my
favorite bread was the yeast roll at Golden Corral. In fact, there were many times were I would
eat an extra yeast roll or two instead of visiting the dessert bar (and that
was on top of any that I ate during rest of the meal). A few years back, I found a new favorite when
my parents took us on a cruise. It is Norlander
bread. It is good warm or room
temperature with butter spread on it.
Unfortunately, while loaves of Norlander are plentiful on a cruise ship,
I have yet to find it in any store or bakery in North Carolina. That’s okay, though, because I have come to Harkers
Island and light rolls, no other bread is really needed.
When it comes to folks watching their waist-line, bread tends to
be a “no-no.” When I was in seminary I
went through a period of trying to lose weight.
I used a modified version of the Atkins diet, the biggest factor of
which was eliminating the bread and pasta from my diet. My friends would make fun of me when we would
stop at Burger King, or somewhere like that, and I would order my burgers
without the bun. It was pretty
successful and in a month’s time I had lost twenty pounds. I happened to visit my doctor during this
time and she commented on my weight loss.
I told her what I was doing and asked her if it was okay, as in healthy,
in her opinion. She said it was perfectly
fine, and that I would be successful in losing more and keeping it off, if I
was willing to make it a lifetime commitment.
I said, “you mean give up bread and pasta for the rest of my life?” She said, “pretty much.” I knew leaving the doctor’s office that I was
done losing weight…and sure enough, within a couple of months of starting to
eat bread again, all the weight was back, plus some.
Tonight we are beginning a new series. In this series we are going to journey
through the Gospel of John examining the “I am” statements of Jesus. Through the Gospel, Jesus says, “I am” seven
times—“I am the Bread of Life,” “I am the Light of the World,” “I am the Gate,”
“I am the Good Shepherd,” “I am the Resurrection and the Life,” “I am the Way,
the Truth, and the Life,” and “I am the Vine.”
When we hear these statements, if we have grown up in the church,
or even if we are not a Christian, we don’t think too much about the
significance or scandal that would have been heard and understood when Jesus
first spoke them. We may not think the
statements much more than if Brenda was to say “I am the Church Council Chair,”
or Ms. Ruth was to say, “I am the Pianist,” or Lee was to say, “I am the Groundskeeper.”
However, when Jesus said it, it was heard with a good bit of
scandal. To understand the scandal, we
must go back to Exodus 3. God had
appeared to Moses in the burning bush and told Moses that he was to go back to
Egypt (remember Moses had fled Egypt, though being raised in Pharaoh’s
household, he killed a fellow Egyptian who was beating on an Israelite) and
lead the Israelites out of slavery.
Moses, from the very beginning, was trying to find a way out, said, “If
I go back to Egypt and tell the Israelites that the God of their ancestors had
sent him, they are going to want to know who this God is and I don’t even know
your name. What am I supposed to tell
them?” God replied to Moses, “‘I Am Who
I Am.’” God continued on, “‘Thus you shall say to the Israelites, I Am
has sent me to you…The Lord, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the
God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.’ This is my name
forever and this is my title for all generations.’”[i]
“I Am” was understood as means of identifying and addressing who
God was, is, and always will be. Those
surrounding Jesus in the Gospel of John would have known this immediately. So now you can imagine the reaction of those
who heard Jesus, not once, but seven times say, “I am….” As they heard Jesus say this, they would have
heard, and on more than one occasion Jesus was accused of this, as
blasphemy. The Israelites, the Jews, of
Jesus day would have heard Jesus identifying himself with God…of saying that He
was God.
For us, today, that is not controversial. We know from the beginning of the Gospel of
John that Jesus is to be understood as God made flesh. We know, at least as Christians, that Jesus,
the Son of God, is to be understood as God Himself—a member of the Holy
Trinity. We know that if we want to see
what God looks like, we have no further to look than Jesus, the Word, God’s
Word, in the flesh.[ii]
Tonight, we hear Jesus say, “I am the Bread of Life.”
Prior to our reading this morning, earlier in John 6, we find
Jesus teaching on a hillside late into the evening. It comes to be dinnertime and rather than
sending the people on their way to eat in their own homes as one of the
disciples suggested, Jesus takes the dinner of one young boy, the only one to
volunteer up any of his own food, and used those five loaves and two fish to
feed over twelve thousand folks. Jesus and
the disciples went on their way afterwards, trying to find some peace and
quiet, they sail across the sea of Galilee.
The folks, so impressed with being fed off those loaves and fish track
Jesus down, and innocently ask, “Rabbi, when did you come here?” Have you ever done that before?? You track someone down intending to be where
they are going to be and bump into them and act all surprised, “Oh, what are
you doing here?” or “Oh, you came too?”
But you can’t fool Jesus.
Jesus confronts them. “You didn’t
just happen here…you tracked me down…and you didn’t track me down because you
think God’s kingdom has come, you tracked me down because I gave you that food
yesterday and you want some more.” Jesus
continued on, “If that’s why you are here, then you have missed the whole point
of what yesterday was about. You have
got to stop chasing after the food that perishes and seek after the food that
endures for eternal life—the food that only I can give you.”
Here is where the scandal began to erupt. The people said what kind of miracle are you
going to perform? Moses gave our
ancestors bread from heaven out in the wilderness.” Jesus said, “Nope…you have misunderstood that
too. Moses did not give the manna for
the people to have something to eat to sustain them each day, it came from
God…and it is God who will give you the true bread from heaven that will give
life, not for just day to day, but life to the world forevermore.”
The people begged for the food.
Jesus said, “I am the bread of life.
Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will
never be thirsty.” (Now before you start
asking what does bread have to do with not being thirsty, we have to note that
earlier in the Gospel of John Jesus has the encounter with the Samaritan woman
at the well, promising her that if she asks it of Him, he will give her living
water and she will never thirst again.)
Jesus provides the living water, and now He says that He is the bread of
life, and if you partake of it, you will never hunger again.
The people came, maybe looking for all that bread left over in the
twelve baskets, and Jesus told them that they had missed the point. They were not looking for the right
thing—what they were looking for would only satisfy them temporarily…Jesus
said, “y’all make my case, I gave y’all the bread yesterday, and now you are
back looking for more, you are hungry again—that kind of bread does not sustain
you.”
How many times do we do the same thing? How many times do we, in our hunger, go
seeking after something that gives us a temporary satisfaction, only to find
out that the next day (either literally or figuratively) we are hungry again,
and go searching for it again…and maybe this time it takes a little bit more
than it did the first day to satisfy us.
Maybe it started as one beer and pretty soon was a whole case or a
fifth of whiskey…
Maybe it started as a small joint of marijuana and before too long
we needed a syringe full of heroin…
Maybe it started out as a one-night affair and a few years later
we found that we couldn’t name all the partners we had been with…
Maybe it started out as a new dress, a new suit, a new computer, a
new phone, a new car, a new house, and it felt so good, we found ourselves
looking to upgrade every chance that comes along…
Maybe it started out as working a little overtime to get a little
extra “security” money in the bank, and now we haven’t had a day off in the
last six months…
Maybe it started out as a nice scoop of ice cream and now, fifty
pounds later, it is nearly a half-gallon every night…
Each time we think, this will be the time, this will bring me
enough, this time I will be satisfied, and yet we find ourselves still
hungering. Jesus says, “you are chasing
the bread…you are seeking bread that will leave you hungry…If you want to truly
be satisfied then you need to come to Me.”
My brothers and sisters, we all have a hole in our lives, a hunger
in our lives, a part of our lives which causes us to hunger…and it does not
matter how much pleasure or security we try to fill it with…it will never be
filled outside of a relationship with Jesus.
Since the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve sought to eat of the one food
that they were not to eat…when they sought to fulfill themselves in a way that
God had not intended, humanity has hungered…sin has left us wanting…but Jesus
Christ comes into the world to fully satisfy that hunger. Jesus says, “come to me, and eat…experience
the forgiveness, the love, the acceptance, the hope, the strength, the
redemption that I offer, and find that you will hunger no more.”
That may seem like a place to end…but here is where our sermon may
turn scandalous to some…note the title of the sermon, “He is…we are to
be….” Jesus is the Bread of Life, we are
to be the Bread of Life.
I can hear it now, “Wait a minute preacher…now you are talking
blasphemy. It is one thing for Christ to
make the claim to be the Bread of Life…to be God’s life sustaining presence in
the world…but how can we make that same claim?
We are not God! We are not Jesus!” Well, that is right in one way, but not in
another way…we are not God and we are not Jesus, but we have to remember what
we are…and Paul leads us to understand.
In Paul’s letter to the Colossians, we read that Jesus is to be
understood as “the image of the invisible God…[that] in him all the fullness of
God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to
himself all things….”[iii] Paul says that to look at Jesus, is to see
God. Yet, Paul says more than that.
Paul, in one of many places, tells the church in Corinth, “Now you
are the body of Christ and individually members of it.”[iv] I hope you are tracking with me and
understand where this is going. If Jesus
was the image of the invisible God, if folks in His day were to look to Him and
see what God looks like, and if we, the church, are to be understood as the
Body of Christ, it can be concluded that we are to be the image of the
resurrected Christ in the world today.
What Jesus was when He walked the earth, what Jesus is, as He now reigns
in Heaven and in our hearts, we are to be to the world.
What does that mean? What
does it mean for us to be the Bread of Life in the world today? It means that we are to be that which brings
the satisfaction that people need. We as
God’s people are supposed to look into the world and make sure that people’s
physical needs are taken care of. In
doing these things we are doing good things…we are providing the day to day
manna…we are giving them that which will temporarily halt their physical hunger,
just as Jesus did with all those folks on the hillside, but we know that same
hunger will be back tomorrow. The hard
question we have to ask is, “are we offing them the Bread of Life?” Are we introducing folks who are hungering so
much, that which will truly and forever satisfy them? Are we striving to be that which helps
restore them into a relationship with God?
Can the world look at us and see Jesus in the same way we look to Jesus
and see God? For He is the Bread of
Life…and we are to be the Bread of Life.
In the Name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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