- Sermon - Mickey Anders

“Bread or bread?"
By Dr. Mickey Anders
South Elkhorn Christian Church
Lexington, Kentucky
August 2, 2009

Text: John 6:24-35

About this time of year, I always have church members teasing me about “having to go to sailing camp.” And I always reply that it is tough service, but somebody has to do it. Sure, I love the sailing, and we do teach kids how to sail. But the camp really is so much more than that.

We spend our time talking about the wind, the spirit, and the breath of God. Jim McLean always begins Sailing Camp with these words, “You are not at sailing camp. You are at a Church Camp that uses sailing as a metaphor for the Christian life.” In morning watch, Carol Pike leads discussions on the wind imagery in popular songs. Jerry Johns gives his Vespers presentations on the spiritual meanings of the four winds – north, south, east, and west. And on Friday, I always give my sermon from Acts 27, explaining the spiritual metaphors in heavy weather tactics, how to cope with the storms of life.

Sailing Camp is lived on two levels, as is much of life. On the surface, it’s sailing camp. But at a deeper level, it is very much church camp, where our relationship with God is the heart of the matter.

In our lives, there is the surface level of things, and then there is the deeper meaning. The surface level will only go so far. It’s the deeper meanings that really matter, but not everybody understands that level.

In an old 60 Minutes interview, Paul Simon of Simon and Garfunkel fame was interviewed by Mike Wallace. In the course of the interview, Paul Simon made reference to their famous song with the words, "Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you. What's that you say, Mrs. Robinson? Joltin' Joe has left and gone away."

In the interview, he told Mike Wallace that some time after the song was released, he received a letter from Joe DiMaggio in which DiMaggio expressed his befuddlement at what in the world that song could mean. DiMaggio wrote, "What do you mean 'Where have I gone?' I haven't gone anywhere! I'm still around. I'm selling Mr. Coffee." Then Paul Simon smiled wryly at Mike Wallace and remarked, "Obviously Mr. DiMaggio is not accustomed to thinking of himself as a metaphor!"

Margaret Lovelace was a brilliant high school English teacher in the first church I served as pastor. She encouraged me in my beginning, stumbling efforts at learning to preach. She loved to say to me, “You must understand poetry in order to understand the Bible.” She said that to emphasize that the meanings of the Bible often lie somewhere beneath the words. The poet plays with words and combines them in unusual ways so that the rhyme and the rhythm present multiple layers of meaning.

This is never more true than when we read from the Gospel of John. The first thing we note is that this writing is very, very different from Matthew, Mark and Luke. We must remember that John is writing many years later than the other gospel writers. He is not writing a daily diary. He doesn’t tell us “what I did with Jesus today." Nor is he trying to present a historical biography entitled, "Jesus: The Man, His Times, His Achievements."

Instead, John is a theological poet, interweaving multiple layers of meaning in every story. This explains why John is so hard to read and difficult to understand at times.

John loves to play with words and mingle metaphors with deeper meanings. That’s why it seems in John that Jesus is incapable of giving a straight answer. In fact, it seems that Jesus never really responds to the question he is asked. Like any good teacher, Jesus had a way of giving better answers than the questions called for.

We get that sense in this chapter. When Jesus speaks and acts, the people hear him at one level while he seeks to move them to a deeper level. When Jesus feeds the 5,000, Jesus wants the hungry fed, but he is deeply aware of a deeper hunger and a better bread.

I want to go through the conversation step-by-step and show how the crowd and Jesus put entirely different meanings on the same words.

In our story, the crowd pursues Jesus and finds him on the other side of the sea in Capernaum. John has placed the story of Jesus walking on the water just after the feeding of the 5,000. But the crowd does not know that he has crossed the lake without a boat, and they ask, "Rabbi, when did you get here?" What they are really asking is, “How did you get here?” But Jesus doesn’t answer that question either.

Jesus replies, “Very truly, I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.” As always in John, Jesus ignores the question and gives the answer to an entirely different question. He answers the question, “Why are the crowds following you?”

Then he immediately moves into the metaphorical meanings of the loaves, “Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For it is on him that God the Father has set his seal.” Jesus tells of a metaphorical food that brings eternal life. He is trying to get them to think of the deeper things, of food for the heart, and of the spiritual aspects of life.

But the crowd responds as if they never heard a word Jesus said. They make no connection to the food that perishes, the food that endures or the Son of Man. Out of the blue, they ask another question, “What must we do to perform the works of God?”

Perhaps they were already thinking that Jesus was like Moses, when the people of Israel received manna in the wilderness. Maybe they are thinking, “Moses gave us the Ten Commandments. If this is the new Moses, what will be the new law that he requires.” Perhaps they were remembering the verse from Micah 6:8, “What does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with your God?” What works will Jesus expect?” “What must we do to perform the works of God?”

In the other gospels we would expect an answer in keeping with the question. In Luke, Jesus tells the rich young ruler to sell all the he has and give to the poor. In Mark, Jesus tells the disciples to do unto others as they would have them do unto them. In Matthew, Jesus tells the story of the separation of the sheep and the goats, and concludes, “Inasmuch as you have done it unto the least of these, you have done it unto me.”

But in John, Jesus responds by focusing the whole debate on his person, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” John has already told us of the importance of belief in the conversation with Nichodemus, when Jesus says, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life.” Here, once again, John says the main work of life is to believe in Jesus, the one God has sent.

The crowd seems not to hear Jesus at all. They are still thinking on a different level from Jesus. Instead of “believe in him” they hear “believe him.” If Jesus is to be the new Moses, they think, then he should perform some signs like Moses did. Isn’t it ironic that Jesus has just performed a spectacular sign in the feeding of the 5,000, but they still cannot connect the dots. They ask, “What sign are you going to give us then, so that we may see it and believe you? What work are you performing? Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’”

Jesus quickly corrects them, “Very truly, I tell you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives…” Jesus makes an important switch in the verb tense here. Proper grammar would require Jesus to say, “It was not Moses who gave, but it was my Father who gave.” Instead Jesus says, “It was not Moses who gave, but it is my Father who gives.”

Jesus recognizes that the crowd has jumped track again. Instead of hearing him, they have moved back to a historical discussion about Moses and the manna, a safe rabbinical discussion of the past. They understand about Moses, they understand about the manna, but they have no clue as to the metaphorical meanings of Jesus’ statements.

Jesus jerks them back to the present by mixing the verb tenses. He moves them from “gave” to “give,” by saying, “but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”

John is always moving one from fact to faith, from the temporary to the eternal, from doubt to belief, for whoever believes in Jesus Christ may have eternal life. John finds the purpose of life wrapped up in allegiance to the Christ.

Jesus is not talking about historical and factual manna, but he is talking about the metaphorical “true bread from heaven… that gives life to the world.” He is talking about himself, but the crowd still doesn’t get it.

They said to him, “Sir, give us this bread always.” The discussion has been far too abstract for them. They hear the word bread, and they remember that Jesus gave them a free meal. It was like the manna that came from Heaven and fed the people in the wilderness. Free food sounds good to them. They want Jesus to give that free food always. They can only think of bread for their stomachs, not bread for their souls.

Jesus once again ignores what they say. His next sentence has nothing to do with the comment from the crowd. It is as if he gives up on them and lays out his metaphor as clearly as he can, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” Finally, John makes it clear the metaphor uniquely applies to Jesus.

Jesus had a similar problem when he met the woman of Samaria at Jacob’s well in John 4. Jesus spoke to her about the spiritual water that he came to give: “Everyone who drinks of (the water from this well) will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” But the woman understood it in terms of ordinary water and replied, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”

In that case, it was the metaphor of the water. In this case, it is the metaphor of the bread. But they both are saying to us the same thing. We tend to think only of the satisfaction of our physical needs, but the hunger that really matters is not the hunger of the body, but the hunger of the heart. We miss the real meaning. Jesus is the bread of life and the water that gushes to eternal life.

Jesus gave the crowd bread for their bellies, but even more he gave them himself. Like bread that must be broken and torn apart so that it can sustain life, so would Jesus be broken on the cross so that those who believe in him would have eternal life.

Only Jesus can fill the emptiness within us. Only Jesus can satisfy the hunger in our hearts. As the bread of life, he is the one who can feed us “Till we want no more.” Only Jesus, the crucified and risen Christ, can offer us grace enough, love enough, life with God enough, to fill that deeper hunger in our hearts.

If we can move from the belly to the metaphor, from the bread to the Bread, then all that can all be ours. We must simply live trusting and believing in Jesus.