As many of you know, my family and I were
recently on a road trip. And at the beginning of that
road trip, it was 2500 miles, which was a lot. At the beginning of it,
it was still fun to drive. And at the beginning of it,
we stopped, and we had lunch at a barbecue place
we found going down to Austin. And our meal there was
accompanied by live Olympic Men's Handball. It was playing on the screens
around the dining area. Now, I know basically
nothing about handball. I know that the women's
handball
teams are required by their sport's governing body
to wear bikini bottoms, and that's caused something
of an issue this summer. The men are not required
to wear bikini bottoms. Thank you, Jesus. That right there is the extent of my substantive knowledge
about the sport of handball. And because we were
at a restaurant, the TVs were all on mute. So I got none of the commentary or explanation that would normally help
make sense of this thing I was watching. I could glimpse
only th
e broadest strokes of what was going on. And you know, the Olympics are
are always like this. I encounter modern pentathlon
precisely once every four years, and even then it's
just a glancing blow. There's the aforementioned handball. There is
artistic swimming, which is the proper Olympic name
for synchronized swimming. By the way, have you seen
the official Olympic icon for artistic swimming? Here, I give you this today. It's just a bonus;
it's just my gift to you this morning. This
is
the official Olympic icon for the sport
of artistic swimming. They're being tortured. This is artistic drowning. Anyway. If you just jump
into the postgame, posts-swim interview
with an artistic swimmer or, say, the captain
of the French handball team, it will sound like he's
speaking a foreign language. I mean, he's probably speaking French,
but it's not what I mean. I mean, the terms
and the explanations of what is going on in
handball will make no sense. Or, to use a sport, we know b
etter, if you hear
a basketball player talking about, in the postgame
interview, how they protected the paint, that will make sense to you if you know something
about basketball. That means something specific. If you don't, and you just parse
those those nouns as they normally would mean,
it will sound like he is moonlighting as a security
guard at Sherwin-Williams. And Jesus, in our
gospel reading, is more or less giving a postgame interview. We don't have the full chapter before us this
morning
in your bulletin, but the narrative event
that preceded this, the spiritual gold medal match,
if you will, was Jesus feeding the 5000, the
multiplication of the loaves. And, Jesus is now, after the fact, getting questioned,
getting interviewed. And he's doing quite a lot of pontificating, frankly,
about what it all means. And he and his opponents
are using, in this passage, some terms, some ideas
that depend on context you and I do not naturally have, because, for us, first cent
ury
Jewish thought and theology is about as familiar
as the rules of men's handball. So this passage from John before us today is on page four
at the bottom of your bulletin. This particular passage, along with next week's passage,
which will be on next week's bulletin, if you put them
together, these two passages make up what is called
the bread of life discourse. That's because Jesus says, multiple times, "I
am the bread of life." So for the next two weeks, we're going to work through
this little bit of scripture. I'm going to provide some
commentary and some explanation, particularly this week,
to try and make sense of Jesus' postgame interview, because it's really important
that we make sense of it. Jesus says understanding this
is a matter of life and death. Now, by the time
our passage picks up, in verse 35, we are joining a postgame interview
that is already in progress. We've missed a little bit of the back and forth that started
things. What happened is the crow
ds around
Jesus have asked for a sign. Never mind that he just
fed 5000 people. They weren't ready yet. You know, do over, they say,
now we're ready. Show us the sign Jesus. And the way they challenge
him is in verse 31, several verses before ours. And it goes like this,
saying, "What sign are you going to give us then,
that we may see it and believe you. What work are you performing? Our ancestors ate manna
in the wilderness; as it is written, 'He gave them
bread from heaven to eat.'" S
o this is the gantlet
that is thrown down. They say, look, Moses
gave our ancestors bread from heaven in the wilderness,
giving them manna. What you got, Jesus? What's your game? Now, a quick refresher
on the manna. The Israelites, after they had escaped
from Pharaoh in Egypt, to escape from slavery, they were sojourning
in the desert for 40 years before they entered
the promised land. There's not a lot of
food in the desert. And so right before they starved
to death in the desert, God
sent manna from heaven. Manna was literally food that fell out of the sky. The closest literary
parallel we have is that classic children's work by Judy Barrett entitled Cloudy
with a Chance of Meatballs. That one. Except, unlike the children's book,
it was the same every day. You know, in the book,
they get flapjacks one day and hotdogs the next. There's none of that. Also, hot dogs aren't kosher,
so they weren't coming anyway. But it's the same thing
every day. It's is this fine, flaky s
ubstance that
literally came from the sky. The Bible says it descended like dew and was
there each morning. So there's this literal story,
this narrative story, that the people around
Jesus are referencing. But over time, in between the thousand years or so,
between the Exodus and Jesus, over time as Jewish thought
and theology developed this bread from heaven
metaphor became a way of speaking about the word
and wisdom of God. The bread from heaven was God's spiritual nourishment then, a
s much as physical nourishment. And you can see this all over
the Old Testament. I'm just going to give you
a couple of examples. The prophets do it. The Prophet Amos,
he writes of a coming famine. But what he's talking about
is not a famine like there's no food to eat but
a famine of the word of God in people's hearts. And
he likens bread to that word. The prophet Isaiah invites people to come and eat and drink by listening to and hearing
the word of God. Isaiah writes, "Listen
diligent
ly to me, and eat what is good... Hear, that your soul may live." In Proverbs, chapter 9, wisdom, the wisdom of God, is speaking,
and wisdom is personified as a woman, and she says, "Come eat of my bread and drink
of the wine I have poured." Then there's this passage
in the Wisdom of Solomon about the "bread
that was prepared in heaven and able to satisfy
anyone's hunger." And the reason, the Wisdom
of Solomon says, that bread came down, the manna
it's referencing, came down was so that p
eople would learn
it is God's word that satisfies them. That's the context
for this conversation between Jesus and his opponents. Even before our passage starts
in verse 35, Jesus and those he's talking with are no more talking
about literal bread, like a loaf of bread,
then the people, the basketball player
who's protecting the paint, is talking about
a can of semigloss enamel. It's into this thought world
then, one in which God offers spiritual nourishment
that will last, that Jesus s
ays, in verse 35, "I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to
me will never be hungry. Whoever believes in me will never be thirsty." And when he says
this, his opponents complained about him. That's what verse 41 says. And this is the same Greek verb,
this complaining about him, is the same Greek verb
that the Greek translation of the Old Testament uses
to describe what the Israelites did to Moses. They complained about Moses. They grumbled about Moses when they were rejecting
the gift of G
od. Now, the people remember
in our story, in our John Reading, they began
this whole conversation with Jesus, wanting
Jesus to be like Moses. And to their credit,
they're doing a very good job of upholding their part. They are complaining, just like they did
in the story with Moses. And Jesus says, stop it. That's what verse 43 says. I mean, you can read it there and exactly the way he puts it,
but that's what it says. And then he says, I can't
make you accept this truth, but believing i
n me will lead to eternal life. My teaching, Jesus
says, my way of life, the act of following
after the path I have set, that, what I'm giving you in
that is the bread of life. This thing you've heard promised and talked
about in the prophets and in the literature of our people, this bread, this spiritual
fullness, I am providing that. Not just to make one
spiritually fulfilled, but to make one live
eternally alive. So to recap, what's happened here conceptually,
is that the narrative st
ory, the story of Exodus about the
literal bread coming from heaven has become a sort of theological metaphor for talking
about the word of God and the spiritual satisfaction
and wisdom God provides. And Jesus has come and said,
I am that bread. That thing you've been longing
for and looking for, I am that bread from heaven. The physical bread
becomes the spiritual bread, and Jesus comes along and says,
I am that spiritual bread. And then next week
he's also going to say, in fact, also,
you're going to
eat my body and drink my blood. But that's a complicated enough
thing that we're going to deal with it next week. But Jesus goes back
to the physical as well. This week, though, in closing, I want to tie this back
to our concrete life. What does that actually mean? What it means is that
if a person believes in Jesus as the one whom God sent
for the life of the world, and by that I mean is seeking
to constantly know more deeply the truth that Jesus taught
and to live more
fully the life Jesus modeled, in that person will gradually occur the process we call
discipleship; that person will find their longings gone and their cravings filled. They will hunger
and thirst no more. I mean, not that
you won't eat food, right, but that you won't be driven
by these cravings and longings that nothing around us actually
can ever fulfill forever. Do not underestimate
the physical implications of this, like the real concrete
world implications of this. It is not for noth
ing that we say someone has
an appetite for power or money. The thirst traps that are posted
on social media, kind of sexualized pictures, these did not get
their name from nothing. We hunger and thirst
for lots of things, for love and money and power and sex
and winning and victory, titles and accomplishment. We hunger and thirst for those things,
but what we acknowledge less often, frankly,
is that being hungry stinks. Nobody likes being hungry. It's not a good feeling. And a perfect Ch
ristian, therefore, would not be one who hungers for all these things
but just successfully dodges the temptations like PAC-MAN
dodges the ghosts. That would be highly stressful. That's an imaginary spiritual
world that is highly stressful. And besides almost all of us
stink at PAC-MAN. One who is fully eaten of the bread of life
would be one for whom they no longer face the hungers and desires that constantly
trip us up in the world. In true Jesus fashion,
the demons of life would get ca
st out. Suddenly you'd be playing
PAC-MAN without the ghosts. Jesus comes, certainly,
to forgive our sins, to forgive our actions,
but he also comes, this is really important,
he comes to heal our desires and our wants. Jesus did not just come give us infinite lives in PAC-MAN
so that when we stumble again and hit the ghost,
we, you know, rise up again. He came to make it possible to
play an entirely different game. Jesus is not so much
a rule giver as a heart changer. Jesus offers us an
alternative to a life of constantly
hungering and thirsting and running after things
that will not fill us up. Or rather, things that will not
fill us up very long. It's an important difference. 'Cause the truth of the matter
is these things will fill us up for a little while. It's a lie that Christians
tell ourselves that there's an empty place within us, that
nothing else can fill but God. The other stuff will fill it
just fine. Promise. The thing is, it will not
fill it forever. We e
ventually will hunger
and thirst once more, just as we do, no matter how
good the meal before us is. In fact, I dare say that our age, our spiritual
condition in our culture, is not that we are somehow
less spiritually hungry than ages that have gone before, but that we have become
particularly adept, in our culture, at
pouring into our lives a constant stream of foods and beverages and drugs
and sexual encounters and idolatrous beliefs
and social media posts and political activism and h
ighly produced
entertainment such that we simply feel
hungry less often. We are still on our way
to dying. It's just that us wealthy Westerners
feel better fed as we go. And that's the rub. We can eat all the food
this world has to offer and we will still die. Or we can eat the
food that heaven has to offer and we will live. That's what Jesus says
in the last verse of your reading, "Whoever
eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give
you, the life of the world i
s my flesh." And that takes us to next
week, "Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood..." But really, we've got to save
that part for next week. Amen.
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