"Sharing in the Life of Christ"
John 6:35, 41-51
We’ve been
spending some time in the sixth chapter of John’s gospel. A few weeks ago, we heard the story of how
thousands were gathered to hear Jesus teach.
The people in the multitude were hungry, and the disciples told Jesus
they needed to care for them. All they could come up with was a little boy with
five loaves and two fish. It must have been an amazing sight as Jesus took that
little bit of food, gave thanks, and everybody gathered there had enough to
eat, with baskets of food left over. It was such an amazing thing that people
wanted to make Jesus their king.
Jesus
had provided for the people beyond belief. So, they went looking for him. When they found them, Jesus told them that the
bread of God is the bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the
world.”
The people said, “Give us this bread always.”
That’s when Jesus declared to them, “I
am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever
believes in me will never be thirsty.
The
people in the crowds who had made such efforts to find Jesus after he’d crossed
the lake began to grumble about him because he said, “I am the bread that came
down from heaven.”
They said, “Isn’t this Jesus, the son
of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I came down
from heaven’?”
Jesus
answered them: “Stop grumbling among yourselves. No one can come
to me unless the Father who sent me draws them, and I will raise them up at
the last day. It is written in the Prophets: ‘They will all be taught by God.
Everyone who has heard the Father and learned from him comes to me.
The people in the crowd don’t get it.
They were trying to fit Jesus into their frame of reference. The crowd’s
misunderstanding is understandable enough if they thought of Jesus as the
prophet like Moses. There was a popular
belief that God would provide manna again in the final days. This was connected with the hopes of a second
Exodus. Many people thought that the
messiah would come on Passover, and that manna would begin to fall again.
The
people in the crowd are stuck in their faith development. They have hopes, based on their traditions,
and they want Jesus to give them what they want: manna from heaven, and a political leader to
overthrow the Roman oppressors in a new Exodus.
In the
first six chapters of John’s gospel, Jesus has encounters with several people
and groups. Needy, troubled people come to Jesus, and they fail to
comprehend. Nicodemus thought Jesus was
talking about being born again from his mother’s womb, when Jesus was talking
about spiritual rebirth, being born from above.”
The
woman at the well thought Jesus was talking about a drink of water from the
deep well, when Jesus was talking about his presence that fills a thirst no
earthly water can quench.
The man
by the pool thought Jesus was talking about healing that would come from
bubbling water stirred up by an angel, when Jesus was telling about healing
that would come from him.
Jesus’
detractors think because they know who Jesus’ father, Joseph, was and where he
came from, that he couldn’t be bread from heaven or give life to the world.
The
crowd that followed Jesus regarded him as a teacher. They witnessed his
miracles. They also knew him as one of their own, a man from the old
neighborhood. Some of them had watched
him play as a child and learn his trade. In other words, they know him. He’s a lot like them, so they can’t see how he
can be all that special. They can’t believe he could be the one God sent to redeem them.
Now,
when we read about people in Scripture behaving badly or failing to act
faithfully, our first impulse may be to judge them. We tend not to identify
with them. We’d like to think that we would have known better than they did…that
we would have done better.
And yet, consider the audacious claim
that Jesus is making. Who ever heard of a God having anything to do with the
ordinary, the mundane. If we believe in an all-powerful God who lives up in the
clouds, it’s hard to believe in a God who is willing to suffer the pains and
problems, the humiliations of human life. No wonder the crowd grumbles against
Jesus’ words.
No wonder the leaders of the Jewish
religious establishment was offended. To them, Jesus was making an audacious
claim. Claiming that he was the source
of eternal life? They thought that was blasphemous. Claiming to be living bread
that came down from heaven? Ridiculous! They can’t understand how he can make
these kings of audacious claims about himself any more than they can understand
why anybody would believe him.
Can we relate to any of this?
I hope we’ll ponder this prayerfully: can we be bold
enough, audacious enough, perhaps
even foolish enough, to confess that
God uses ordinary people and ordinary things to accomplish God’s will and to
bring the world to God’s amazing love and God’s justice?
The bread Jesus is talking about is
God’s gift. But we can only be nourished
if we accept the bread that is offered.
Like the people in today's gospel story, we have a decision to make. We can decide to follow Jesus and let God's presence and power direct our lives... or we can ignore Jesus and spend
our lives on other things.
We make this decision in big ways at confirmation... or when we decide to join the church. But we also make it every day in lots of little
ways.
We make a choice every time we decide
to listen to God's voice or ignore it
when it tells us that we're special...
God's beloved children… called as partners in Christ’s service. We make a choice every time we hear God's
voice calling us to love everyone---those who are close to us…and even strangers... even our enemies.
Throughout the sixth chapter of John,
in all the talk about bread, something has been said over and over which is the
real offense behind all the other offenses.
In fact, it's the offense of the Gospel: we have life by grace. The bread God gives from heaven gives life to
the world.
The conflict of the gospel is in how we
choose to respond to God's gift. The
question we have to answer is this: Do we
determine our own lives... or does God?
In every paragraph of this chapter of John,
it's clear that the people around Jesus want to be in charge. They demand that Jesus do what Moses
did. They demand signs. They want proofs so that they'll have
adequate reasons to decide that Jesus is really from God. They want Jesus to be king-- the kind of king they
wanted.
But, over and over again, Jesus keeps
saying one thing: life from heaven is a gift. Trust
this, and life is yours.
The message of the gospel really isn't
so hard to understand. It's hard to accept, because
it cuts across all the calculations and achievements that we want to do to earn our
salvation.
Every day, we need to choose.
Standing before God's amazing grace, how do we respond?
The good news in the gospel story is
about grace... about God's gift to us. The bread in the wilderness was a gift. The bread as word from heaven is a gift.
From the very beginning, God has been
giving us of God’s self and inviting us to take this sustenance and use it as a
source of being the light of the world on behalf of God’s kingdom. God calls us to go out from our gatherings of
prayer and praise to work in partnership with Christ to feed a hungry, hurting
world. There are so many who are hungry…many who are hurting… many who are
searching.
May we become a people that begin to
extend life eternal… a people who live out the meaning of sharing in the life
of Jesus to a hungry world.
May it be so!
Rev.
Fran Hayes, Pastor
Littlefield
Presbyterian Church
Dearborn,
Michigan
August
12, 2018
