Prayer:- Through the written word, and the spoken word, may we know your living word, Jesus Christ our Saviour. Amen
I think, most of you know that we have twins-a boy and a girl and they are 19 months old toddlers and nowadays they want almost everything and want to handle on their on..but as parents we know we know what to give them or what to remove from their sight.
Sometimes, it is the same with adults….
We tend to say we need things that we don’t actually need. For example, we say we need a bigger house, a new mobile phone or newer car or some other thing.
We define needs not just physically but also relationally. People say they need a more loving spouse, a more obedient child, or a more respectful boss. But the Bible never promises those things.
We have lots of wants, don’t we? But “want” is different than “need.” And maybe we spend too much time thinking about our wants and not enough thinking about what we really need.
That is the case in today’s Gospel.
A quick Recap…
Remember where we are in the Gospel of John. Jesus has miraculously fed five thousand people with just a couple of loaves of bread and two fishes-a miracle that makes Jesus so popular that the whole crowd wants to make him king! . Then he has crossed the Sea of Galilee, and the crowd has followed him. Jesus has accused them of following him simply to get more of the magic bread,(we heard it last Sunday from John) when they have missed the point. The bread they truly need is the sustenance that Jesus can offer if they believe in him and in his heavenly father. He is the bread they need.
Today, once again, he says, “I am the bread of life.” And once again, they don’t get it. He is promising them eternal life, eternal sustenance, and they don’t take it.
Those people who dismissed Jesus as a magic trickster, a riddle-maker whom they could not understand were so focused on what they wanted – a conquering king-who would rule with the sword – that they missed that he was in fact what they really needed.
They wanted a king, but what they needed was someone who would repair their broken relationship with their God, who would feed them and sustain them and give them eternal life. And eternal life doesn’t look like earthly political or military victory.
That is the difficult, confusing lesson that Jesus is trying to teach here. That is why, in John’s version of the story, Jesus keeps saying over and over again “I am the bread of life.”
Because with this humble metaphor, he is trying to get the people who are stuck in a sea of wants to look at what they really need. Not a meal. Not a conquering king. No, what they need is what really endures forever.
The Old Testament reading from the 2nd book of Samuel tells us that The long, conflict between David and Absalom has finally run its course.
Absalom is dead. David’s kingdom is again secure. And David pours forth his grief: “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!” (33).We, too, should hear the layers to David’s speech, even in the song of verse 33. He sings not only of grief, but also of guilt. And he is not only sad, but also satisfied — after all, Absalom wanted to kill him. ‘The king is grieving for his son'” not because Absalom was a very good son but David missed his presence.
‘Presence’ – it is the basic building block of all meaningful human relationships, and it is what we grieve when we loose a loved one. At one level it’s a hundred little things: the way we used to laugh and sing together, the way he used to tell jokes around the dinner table, the apple pies she used to bake, the stories he used to tell about the war…. all those things. And yet at another level it’s none of those little things but just one thing that we miss so much. We miss them. We miss their presence with us. It is the most basic gift that we have to offer one another and, perhaps, I think it is also the key to understanding John chapter 6.
In the dialogues recorded in John, Jesus regularly speaks in metaphor, and He is regularly misunderstood.
In John 3 for instance, Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night, and Jesus says to him, ‘You must be born from above’, but Nicodemus misunderstands him, and thinks he is talking about being reborn to his mother all over again!
In John 4, Jesus encounters a woman at the well, and Jesus tells her that ‘she who drinks of your water will thirst again’, and offers her ‘living water’ instead, but she thinks he is talking about some underground spring that he has found.
And so likewise in John 6, where Jesus is dealing with a whole crowd of people, He says to them, ‘work not for the bread that perishes, but for the heavenly bread that endures for eternal life’, but the crowd thinks that he’s talking about some special organic- health- food, similar to that which Moses sourced for them back in the days of old. Jesus says, I am the bread! My flesh is the food. What you need is ME!’
You see, it is His presence that we need in this life is the presence of Jesus with us.
This is what Nicodemus didn’t understand when he came to see Jesus. He thought he needed wisdom, insight, and a better understanding of God’s law. ’No’, said Jesus, ‘what you need is to be born from above! What you need is to have the Spirit of God within you!’
This is the same thing the woman at the well in John 4 couldn’t grasp. She knew she needed water to live, but Jesus tells her, ‘No, it’s not physical water that you need, but the presence of the Spirit of God living within you that you need – the living water that wells up to eternal life!’
This is what the crowd we read about in John 6 didn’t understand. The crowd came looking for bread, but Jesus tells them, ‘It’s not ordinary bread that you need. You need the living bread. You need the presence of the living God in your life. You need to move beyond ‘me’ to ’we’! You need my flesh and blood within you. You need me within you!’
A few years back when I was still in the Himalayas, a young man approached me, right after the Sunday service, stating that he had read all the religious scriptures of the major religions of the world and finds no difference in the teachings of any them. He asked me,”What, according to you, is different about Christianity?”. I replied back to him that, ”To understand the difference you need to have the Revelation from God. And that Revelation is Jesus Himself. You can reach that state only through prayers.”.
Like Nicodemus, like the woman, like the crowd, I think that most people who turn up to church out of the blue are likewise looking for one of two things: they are looking for answers or they’re looking for a miracle!
We pray for miracles, as we pray for wisdom, but we know full well that sometimes the miracles just do not happen, and sometimes things just won’t make sense!
What we can always offer people though, and what we can always guarantee for people who come genuinely searching, is that Christ will give to them what he told us is far more important than either a miracle or an explanation – He will give them His presence if they are open to it.
No we can’t always guarantee the healing and we can’t always guarantee the explanation, but we do know that He will always do that which He has always promised to do – which is that which we most need Him to do. ” I will be with you always’. He has promised to be with us, His presence with us, His body and His blood within us!
This morning our epistle speaks of the way in which the life of the Church is both fed and shaped by this sacrificial offering.
This is the essence, I believe, of John Chapter 6, and it is certainly the essence of Christian spirituality according to the New Testament.
What does it mean to live a ‘Christian life’ according to the New Testament? It means living a life in union with Christ.
‘To live is Christ’ says St. Paul – notably not to understand Christ, or to know more about Christ or even to serve Christ, but simply ‘to live is Christ’.
This is the same Paul who says of his own ministry ‘Jews demand a sign, and Greeks desire wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified’ (1 Corinthians 1:22). It is not the miracles. It is not the wisdom. It is Christ Himself.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen