“Our hungers are so deep. We are dying of thirst. We are bundles of seemingly insatiable need, rushing here and there in a vain attempt to assuage our emptiness. Our culture is a vast supermarket of desire.” (William H Willimon, Feasting on the Word)
The audio of this talk can be found here
And Jesus says “Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty”.
There are four staggering claims that Jesus makes in our reading.
1.He has come from heaven in a unique way
Jesus claims, “I am the bread that came down from heaven”.
It is a staggering claim. So much so that the people complain. Not because he said he was bread, but because he claimed that he had come from heaven.
“How can he say that. We know his parents. Joseph and Mary. We know where he has come from”.
To be honest, they didn’t know his parents. Mary, for obvious reasons, would have kept quiet about the virgin birth. Perhaps she only spoke about it after his resurrection. And they were only looking at Jesus from a human perspective.
And Jesus rebukes them. He is claiming that he was with God, that he has seen God, that he has come from God, that he can speak of God in a unique way – and he tells them that if they were really listening to God, then they would come to him.
Of course, we need to beware of people who speak on behalf of God. They are 99% of the time speaking for themselves. But that does not mean that 2000 years ago a Palestinian Jew, born in a cowshed, living his early life as a refugee, growing up as a carpenter, did not speak for God.
2. The second staggering claim of Jesus is that he has come to give himself in love for us
“I am the bread of life; the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh’ (v35,48,51)
In describing himself as bread, Jesus is saying that he will give us life by being broken and consumed.
Earlier in John 6 we have been told that Jesus fed the vast crowd with fish and loaves. He took the bread, gave thanks to God for it, broke it and shared it.
By saying that he is the bread of life, he is saying that this is a picture of what would happen to him.
He will be taken, broken and then shared – so that people can be filled, they can live.
The temptation is to read this passage and focus on the bread.
Is the bread Jesus is talking
about his word?
Or is he talking about the
bread we break at communion?
But the point that Jesus is making when he says that he is the bread of life is that he has come from heaven to give his life for us so that we might live.
On Thursday we visited Sutton Hoo, the site of the Anglo-Saxon great ship burial. There was a film showing an imagined conversation between two women, one older, one younger. They were preparing for the funeral of the king, polishing the spectacular golden items which he would take with him on his journey to the next world. The younger says that she is going to follow the new Christ king because, she says, when he travels, he travels with nothing.
Jesus came from heaven and gave up everything for us. He came not to receive our tribute, not to be honoured with precious gold. He came instead to give himself for us, just as bread is given for us. He came to give himself completely for us in love, to sacrifice himself for us, so that whoever receives him will receive eternal life
So when Jesus says ‘I am the bread of life’, he is saying I have come from heaven to die for you
3. The third staggering claim that Jesus makes is that he can give us eternal life
“I will raise that person up on the last day” (v44)
“Whoever believes has eternal life” (v47)
“Whoever eats this bread will live for ever” (v51)
We live in decaying bodies. One of Alison’s aunts is bed bound. She can’t walk. She can’t really see or hear. Her quality of life is, by any standard, pretty low.
Nobody would wish to live for ever in that sort of state.
For us, as human beings living in a fallen world, death comes as a mercy.
But that was not how God created us to live.
He has, as the writer of wisdom said, ‘put eternity in our hearts’ (Ecclesiastes 3:11 NIV).
And even though we live in a world in which it appears that death has the final word, we can imagine a life without death - in which we are healthy and whole and continuing to grow in strength and wisdom and understanding. We can imagine a world in which there is always something new to discover, and something more to become – and love.
And Jesus offers us that life. Indeed, he not only offers that life there in heaven after death, but on earth here and now – or at least glimpses of that life: moments of communion with God, of sheer joy when it seems that time stands still; moments when heaven breaks into earth, when we suddenly know that this was what we were created to be and to do.
Paul speaks of one such experience when he says he was caught up to the seventh heaven.
So yes, we do live in a world of contradiction, confusion, twisted desires; a world where there is much suffering and pain and death, but our hope, our faith is that those glimpses of the eternal are but just tiny glimpses of what is to come, like looking through frosted windows at the real world, of the life that is to come.
4. The fourth claim Jesus makes is less a statement and more an invitation. He invites us to eat him!
We receive eternal life by being drawn to Jesus and receiving Jesus
Jesus says, “No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father”.
One theologian described it like this: “the "drawing" by God takes place when one abandons one’s own judgment and "hears" and "learns" from the Father, and so allows God to speak to me”.
It is about stopping and putting aside my fears and prejudices and pride and self-justification, and listening instead to God who shows us Jesus, who draws us to Jesus.
And we receive Jesus
By believing in Jesus:
“Whoever believes in me will never be thirsty” (v35)
“Whoever believes has eternal life” (v47)
As I said last week, believing is not just a head thing, but a heart thing: putting our trust in him.
By coming to Jesus:
“Whoever comes to me will never be hungry” (v35)
“No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father” (v44)
“Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me” (v45)
Coming to Jesus in our heart and mind. Putting aside time to come to him, to be with him. Going to your place of prayer, opening your bible, lighting your candle, picking up the prayer beads – whatever it is that you do that helps you. When you come to church, think of it as coming to Jesus.
But a third way that Jesus describes receiving him, is the invitation to eat him.
“One may eat of this bread and not die” (v50)
“Whoever eats this bread will live for ever” (v51)
In other words, we receive him by taking him deep into us – his words, his broken body - so that he can change us.
It is very physical language.
Jesus’ first listeners didn’t get him. And the early Christians were sometimes accused of cannibalism.
[I don’t know how you personally understand communion.
Some may understand it as a memorial feast. We use bread to remember that once and for all time sacrifice of Jesus for us. Certainly, we say that in the service, “Do this in remembrance of me’. But if it is just a remembrance, it doesn’t really explain why Jesus insisted that we should eat the bread at communion.
Others understand that the bread we use at communion truly becomes the body of Christ.
Others, and this is probably a more mainstream Anglican understanding, will understand that the bread remains bread, but as we eat it by faith so we receive Christ into us.]
Whatever our understanding of communion, it not only gives us a wonderful picture of how we come to Jesus, but it gives us an opportunity to do so.
Some of you may have been to rallies when the evangelist calls us to get out of our seats and come forward to receive Jesus. Perhaps we say that that sort of thing doesn’t really happen in the Burnham benefice! But it does!
Every Sunday when we have communion and the priest invites the congregation, “Draw near with faith.Receive the body of our Lord Jesus Christ which he gave for you. Eat in remembrance that he died for you, and feed on him in your heart by faith with thanksgiving”, it is an invitation to get out of your seats, to come forward and to receive Jesus.
So as we walk up, we can imagine that we are walking towards Jesus, with open hands, trusting him, and coming because we are empty, struggling with contradictory desires, confused, full of doubt but knowing that we want to be filled by him, that we want life. We come to receive him and ‘eat’ him.
The line we pray in the Lord’s Prayer, ‘Give us today our daily bread’, is not just a prayer for physical needs. It is a prayer expressing our dependence on God for both our physical and spiritual needs, and it is a prayer for Jesus to fill us with himself – through physical bread, through his word and in communion.
It is the hungry and the empty who God invites to draw near and who he fills. As Mary says in the
Magnificat: “He has filled the hungry with good things, but the rich he has sent empty away”.
This is what makes evangelism easy.
If someone is full of themselves then we cannot say anything about Jesus. Or if we do say something then they won’t hear it.
Last week, we had a couple of
days in Woodbridge staying at one of those wonderful spa hotels. I had a
conversation with a man in the sauna! Or more to the point, he was telling me about
his life: how he had turned it around; how he had won this tennis competition and
that golf tournament.
I was wondering why he could
speak so freely of what he was interested in and I could not speak to him one
word of Jesus. And I realised that, apart from my cowardice and fear of rejection,
I couldn’t speak of Jesus because he appeared so full, full of his
achievements, of his success, of himself.
Of course, usually, in most of us, behind the bravado there is a lostness and an emptiness; and I realise that he didn’t know me and therefore couldn’t really open himself to me. But it is when people are prepared to admit that they are lost, broken, hungry, that we can then simply invite people to come to Jesus and receive life.]
That is what happens at communion. We are invited as those who are lost, broken, hungry and empty to come to the one who came from heaven, who gave his life for us in love, who offers eternal life, and invites us to eat him!
And as we come forward and eat the bread in faith (trusting him), and it comes deep into us – so he comes deep into us. He becomes part of us, and we become part of him. The Holy Spirit, someone said, is like a good virus, who comes into us and starts to change and transform us, not for harm but for good, to make us like Jesus. And he will satisfy us, he will give us life, eternal life.
