Reverend
Debbie Cato
John 6: 41-51
Fairfield
Community Church
August 18, 2024
Let us pray: Blessed
Lord, you caused all holy scriptures to be written for our learning. Help us to hear them, read them, learn them,
and inwardly digest them, so that we may embrace and hold fast to the blessed
hope of everlasting life, In our Jesus name. Amen.
Recipe
for Life
“If it’s true that you are what you eat,” said
a man in line at a burger joint, “then I must be fast, cheap and easy.”
He’s
not alone, of course. According to the National Center for Health Statistics,
more than 34 percent of Americans are obese, and another 32.7 percent are
overweight. We Americans are clearly good at eating what isn’t good for us.
You
might be interested to know that the two biggest categories of non-fiction books
are cookbooks and diet books. Doesn’t
make a whole lot of sense, does it? Hungrily, we page through cookbooks,
searching out the most tempting and succulent recipes. Then we race right over
to the diet books to find out why we can’t eat the stuff!
But
we shouldn’t seem too astonished by that. Food has always excited strong — and
sometimes contradictory — feelings in people. Most of the world’s peoples, in
fact, are preoccupied with food and with worries about having too much or too
little of it. In North America, most of us spend vast amounts of time, money
and energy devising new and better ways to eat less, while most people in Africa
and Asia spend a large portion of their waking hours finding
enough food just to survive.
This is the third week that the lectionary readings have us in John 6. It’s a clue that all this talk about food and bread is important. We need to listen. We need to get it. It’s that important.
John 6 starts with Jesus feeding the crowd and teaching his disciples that God is a God of abundance, not a God of scarcity. Then Jesus tells the crowd that the same God who multiplied the loaves and the fish so that everyone was able to eat until they were full, brings them bread from heaven that will satisfy their hunger forever! It will never perish, Jesus says. And the people cry out, “We want that bread!”
go hungry, and he who believes in
me will never be thirsty.”
I think if we’re honest, we’ll admit that’s a pretty good question. Do we really understand what Jesus means when he says that he is the bread of life? Does it really make sense to talk about eating Jesus’ flesh or drinking his blood? And imagine if Jesus grew up in your neighborhood and suddenly, he was saying these things! Can’t you hear yourself saying, “Hey, wait a minute! What are you talking about?! I know your mom and dad! You didn’t come from heaven. You came from around here! You are nothing more than ordinary.”
In response, Jesus continues to claim his heavenly divine origin, and he makes another bold claim. Jesus says that no one can come to him except by being led to him by the Father. No one can learn of him except by being taught by the Father. No one can see him except by revelation of the Father.
What Jesus is saying is SO important. It’s not up to us. It really isn’t our decision to follow Jesus. We like to think it is. We pat ourselves on the back because we are Christians. We shake our fingers at people who aren’t. But it really wasn’t our decision. We think we are superior. But it wasn’t our choice. We didn’t decide to follow Jesus on our own!
Jesus is telling the crowds that are following him, and he’s telling his critics, that whatever we need to understand Jesus; whatever we need to come to Jesus; to see who he is and what he means; whatever we need to believe that Jesus is the Christ, only comes to us as a divine gift – through revelation – not through our own efforts. It’s the working of the Holy Spirit. Revelation is not containable or controllable by us, nor is it programmed or predicted by us. Whatever we need in order to understand who Jesus is, comes as a gift from God. It comes down from heaven. We can’t take credit. Even our faith comes from God. We need to thank God for even our faith.
God himself came down from heaven. He became flesh and lived on this earth, among ordinary people. We don’t have to wonder how God acts or how God talks or what God is like. In the Christian faith, we do not have to climb up to the divine; God climbed down to us. And here is God in the flesh saying, “I’m your bread; feed on me.”[1]
Jesus gives and sustains life because he is the living bread, having within himself the very source of life – God Himself. The Father gave the Son and the Son gives Himself. When Jesus tells us to feed on him, he means that we are to take on Christ within ourselves; embody him. Take him all in.
We need our recommended daily minimum requirement of Jesus each and every day. He is nourishment for our soul. We need to consume him; devour him; ingest him into our inner being. Doing so will make us faithful and committed Jesus followers. Doing so will allow us to live as we are called. It allows us to believe that Christ is the very source of life.
William Willimon, a great preacher and theologian said, “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 satisfy our emptiness. Our culture is a vast supermarket of desire. Can it be that our bread, our wine, our fulfillment stands before us in the presence of this crucified, resurrected Jew? Can it be that many of our desires are, in the eternal scheme of things, pointless? Might it be true that he is the bread we need, even though he is rarely the bread we seek? Is it true that God has come to us, miraculously with us, before us, like manna that is miraculously dropped in our wilderness?”
“I am the bread of life,” Jesus said. “Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty”. All of our recommended daily minimum requirements of grace, love, forgiveness — the food of “eternal life”— are found in a life-giving relationship with Christ.
Indeed, said Jesus, “…all who see the Son and believe in him may have eternal life; and I will raise them up on the last day”. Believing in Jesus, following Jesus and relying on Jesus form the foundation of a healthy, whole and eternal life. This is something we have, not because we chose it; but because God chose it for us. It is His gift to us, not because we earned it; not because we deserve it; but because God is a god of grace.
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