Nourishment for the Believer

Robert Hall
Tarrytown United Methodist Church

August 13, 2006 

Text: John 6:35, 41-51
There should be no mistaking that Jesus as the Gospel of John pictures him cares about the day-to-day needs of people. Large crowds would follow Jesus because they were wanted to be healed of their diseases, and they had heard that he could cure people. When the crowds became large, Jesus cared about their need for food. He takes the five barley loaves and two fish and feeds the lot of them. However you interpret these aspects of Jesus ministry, the least that can be said is that Jesus’ reveals a God whose compassion is not only for souls but for bodies as well, for the whole person.

Jesus’ example has inspired the church from its earliest days to be engaged in ministries of healing and feeding---and many other acts of mercy with people who suffer for the lack of the necessities of life. We ourselves may have been the recipients of the church’s outreach in our times of need. I believe that Jesus blesses these efforts even now, and inspires us to do our part to continue and greatly expand our efforts. So when we pray for daily bread, we do so on behalf of all people who struggle to survive.

What happens in Jesus’ ministry with the sick and hungry is that the crowds increase. They see that anyone who can provide them with health and food could certainly be their king!

But Jesus flees them, goes to the other side of the lake. When they find him, Jesus begins this long conversation in which he uses bread as a metaphor, a symbol, for something much different. “You come to me because you got from me all the bread that you wanted. Don’t be so concerned about this kind of food; be more concerned for the food that endures.”

I must admit that I squirm when I read these words. How often have we, in our privileged position, criticized the poor because they are so concerned about physical instead of spiritual things. It is far too easy for us, who have most all of our physical necessities met, to look down our noses at those who are desperately preoccupied with getting food on the table. But Jesus was NOT making light of the crowd’s need for food. He WAS pointing them beyond the literal meaning of bread to another kind of bread.

William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury in the mid 20th century, wrote that “When we give bread, we bear witness that neither we [nor they] live by bread alone.” (Quoted to me by Dr. Schubert Ogden; source unknown.) He is, of course, quoting from the story of Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness, when Jesus recites Deuteronomy 8:3 to the devil, adding that we live “by virtue of every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.”

This is true for the needy as well. The opposite sin we commit against the poor is to assume that, because they are physically poor, they do not need to hear of the other kind of “bread” (necessity) that Jesus had to offer people.

I remember working on a project to roof a poor widow’s home. We did a fine job on the roof, but never was a word shared with the widow, living in the house beneath us. When I asked our leader why we did not visit with her, he said that her need was for a new roof, not for talk. Well, yes, and no. She does not live by bread (or for a new roof) alone, just as we do not.

So what is this other kind of bread that Jesus speaks about? Is it manna, like God provided in the desert for the people of the exodus? Well, Jesus says, not exactly.  Is it a message of wisdom, of how to avoid being a fool, and get on with life? This is close, Jesus says. But let me surprise you: “I am the bread of life; I am the living bread; whoever comes to me will never be hungry; whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” It is not just healing, or food, or words that I give you: I give you myself, and, in so doing, I give you God! The Giver is the gift!
 
What Jesus is saying is that there is a god-shaped emptiness within us. We try to fill up this empty space with whatever we find close at hand: accumulations, stocks and bonds, food, busyness, amusement, excitement, work---we are very creative in this effort. But we will only be deeply satisfied when we have an active, lively relationship with the God who created us and redeems us, the God who lives in Jesus, and in whom Jesus lives.

Well, the opponents of Jesus are shocked. They know Jesus’ address. He is Joseph’s son. How can he be claiming to be God’s bread from heaven? They took his claim to be ludicrous.

Fair question. How do you and I get from admiring Jesus the teacher and prophet to believing—trusting--- in Jesus as God’s living word?  From the simply human Jesus to the Jesus who is both human and divine, in the same person?

Jesus’ answer is not a “how to” answer. He says that if you come to believe in him, it will be because God has drawn you to him. All who come to Jesus are welcomed; those who come to Jesus are drawn by God to him. God’s drawing is like a divine magnetic force.
 
John Wesley commented on this passage by writing, “He draws [us], not by compulsion, but by the strong and sweet, yet still resistible, motions of his heavenly grace.”  (Notes on the New Testament)

I cannot explain this. But it seems to me like the experience we have when we understand in retrospect how God’s hand was at work, leading us in certain directions.

 For example, I can trace in my life people and events and seemingly chance encounters that have shaped my life: A pastor here, the influence of hymn-singing, books I read, pictures of Jesus and the disciples in Sunday School classes, college teachers, late-night philosophical discussions, personal crises. It was not a straight road. Only by remembering can I discern a “drawing,” which first led me into a relationship with God through Jesus Christ, and then, much later, into pastoral ministry---and which draws me yet.  I was and am certainly free to choose otherwise. I could, and did resist. But God’s strong, “sweet motions” did bring me to Jesus, who introduced me to a God whose greatness and love I could not have found by my own efforts alone.

Only recently I came found the poem “Holy Communion”by George Herbert, with this verse:
                “Thou creepest into my breast;
                  Making thy way my rest…”
All of my years, God has been “creeping” into my life, for my great healing and protection, and in ways which I can only guess.

Perhaps you can trace in your life, in the distant past or in recent times, when God was pulling you into a deeper relationship, opening new vistas of understanding or service. You were free to choose; but God was unrelenting---all for your own deeper happiness or contentment. This is the paradox of believing: we choose but God is the one bringing us home.

 Frederick Buechner is right when he says to us, “Listen to your life!” The faith we confess is not about abstractions. It is about life, our lives, the life of our whole bleeding, dangerous, wonderful, beautiful world. God is in our lives even if we are usually too blind and deaf to recognize him.

Make no mistake: in the Gospel of John, it is in believing in JESUS HIMSELF that our hunger is satisfied.   “I AM the bread of life,” Jesus says. The bread he offers is not some vague spiritual commodity: it is his own life, his flesh and blood existence. Belief, in the Gospel of John, is impossible without a close personal relationship with the Son of Man in heaven.

But WHICH JESUS, we may ask, should we believe in? Since each of the gospels has a different slant on Jesus’ life and works, which should we take? And what about Paul’s theology about Jesus, not to mention the other NT writers? And then there is the Jesus of church tradition: Jaroslav Pelikan identifies 17 different images of Jesus that have been emphasized through the centuries. New Testament scholars are always on the hunt for the “real” Jesus, as they try to determine which are the most authentic of the earliest strata of the gospel accounts. (I have myself lived to see two such quests for the historical Jesus.) Maybe you have to be a scholar to get at the real Jesus?! Or let them decide which one the church should proclaim? Maybe not.

This is not the time and place for a debate on this issue. But I do believe and I have observed that ordinary people do find Jesus in the New Testament witness to his life and work, just as it comes to us in the Bible. Of course the biblical accounts of Jesus have different emphases. It taxes our human abilities with words to describe the incarnation and the redemption of the world! But the witnesses are reliable enough for God to get God’s work done.

Maybe the God who draws us to Jesus, draws us to the Jesus who really SPEAKS to us that which we need most to hear.

 I was, early on, entranced by the beatitudes of Jesus in Matthew, and learned them by heart. The story that Luke alone tells of the Good Samaritan made a deep impression on me about the necessity of helping people in need. Paul’s vision that “in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free,” spoke to me as a teen as the truth behind struggles against racial segregation and prejudice. On so many different occasions, an aspect of Jesus’ ministry has hit me with the force of persuasion.

Paul Tillich, the protestant theologian of the last century, wrote that, as a child, when asked what his favorite scripture verse was, said that it was the saying of Jesus, “Come unto me all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” The teacher laughed and said to him: “You are just a child; what do you know about being heavy-laden?” But of course, he did know about such things, as many children do today. THIS JESUS spoke to him.

We are drawn to Jesus by God in whatever ways God chooses to use, mysterious as they may be to us. Remember that the first believers did not have a New Testament to which to turn; and, for the many centuries, the Bible was not available to the common person in any form; and yet people encountered Jesus through the spoken word, the stories told, artists’ depictions of Jesus, music sung about Jesus, and lives lived in the imitation of Jesus, among others ways we will never know.

Believing in Jesus is trusting in the One who speaks to us in our own deepest needs, our hungers for meaning, hope and healing. We “take hold of Jesus and trust that he is the Fountainhead of life.” (Martin Luther) It is a leap of faith based on an encounter with Jesus.

We do not, of course, understand all of the finer matters of doctrine about him. But, as with any friendship, we start with a basic trust in the other, and then we begin to understand more fully. Such it is with our relationship with Jesus.  Abiding in Jesus--- such an intimate way of describing this relationship!---we learn by studying, praying, serving others in his name, and contemplating the mysteries of God’s love for us.

 It is not always a comfortable journey; we will find our most cherished values challenged; we will suffer or sacrifice for our witness to God’s vision of the way the world must be. We will know the joys of being in his presence through the Holy Spirit. It will be the “abundant life” that Jesus tells us about. (“The glory of God is man or woman fully alive.” Iraneus)

The way Jesus identifies this quality of life in attachment to him is to say that we will have “eternal life.” Such a rich phrase! It means something like this: shared life with God, who is “pure, unbounded love,” (Charles Wesley), who sustains us whatever happens to us; and who then gives us everlasting life with him.

Where are you in your relationship with Jesus? You are loved beyond measure, whoever and wherever you are. God is at work in your life to draw you closer. Jesus himself, the one we read about and sing about and in whose name we pray and work---this Jesus meets you where you are, and feeds you with the very substance of eternal life itself: the love which will not let you go, that makes you whole and saved, for this life and the next.