John 6:35, 41-51
Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”
Then the Jews began to complain about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” They were saying, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?”
Jesus answered them, “Do not complain among yourselves. No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me; and I will raise that person up on the last day. It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father. Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
It’s worth knowing – or remembering, if you’ve learned this before – that Jesus is mad today. It’s hard to tell from here – sitting like we do, in this time and place – so far removed from that moment with him, but it matters that he’s angry.
We’re listening in on a hard conversation – an argument, even, some might say – between Jesus and the crowds who have been following him, and challenging him, and questioning him for quite awhile now. Someone smarter than me, has even suggested that when Jesus says, “do not complain among yourselves,” that what he really means is “shut up;” maybe, “quit your whining.”
And that side of Jesus matters to me – the human, frustrate-able side of Jesus, I mean, who must have gotten mad more often than we hear about. Mad, here, because he’s trying to “bring the kingdom” to the people around him and they just don’t see it or get it or want it or know what that means. Mad because he’s been having this same conversation for at least, like, 6 chapters and 51 verses, if the Gospel text is any kind of measuring stick for that sort of thing. And after all this time, they’re still just bickering over the details and not believing or receiving what they’ve seen or experienced or heard about Jesus.
So, I’ll come back to the Gospel in a minute but first, I hope we can have a little laugh.
I can’t decide if that dog is really smart, or very well-trained – BOTH, maybe – or just really likes cheese. None of this really matters.
Because, my point is that I kind of think Jesus is just trying to get the people in this morning’s Gospel to eat their theological vegetables. And more than vegetables, or cheese, even – but “the bread that came down from heaven.” And he had to be so frustrated and angry, and sad, I imagine, that they just didn’t get it, or want it, or understand it, or whatever.
Because what matters in all of this back and forth between Jesus and those people of faith is that it took place very near to the festival of the Passover, the great national and religious holiday for the Jewish people. The Passover was where they celebrated their release from slavery, their Exodus from Egypt, their journey toward the Promised Land. We heard last week about how the people of Jesus’ day complained to him for not giving them signs like the ones their ancestors had received in the wilderness back in the days of Moses – after some grumbling of their own. They complained, remember, that their ancestors got that miraculous manna in the wilderness – actual bread from heaven – and they thought they deserved – and so were looking for – something like that kind of a miraculous sign, too; to feed them, to fill them, to fix them, to SAVE them.
And now, along comes Jesus, claiming to be that bread from heaven. He’s claiming, not just that he was there to deliver the bread from heaven they were looking for, but that somehow he was, that he would be, that he is, this bread from heaven – this miracle – that gives life and hope and salvation to the world. Which would sound ridiculous, you have to admit, since to so many of them, Jesus really was just the son of Joseph and Mary, from down street, or that kid from the other side of the lake, or that carpenter from Capernaum.
And since most of us know the rest of the story, we know how this ends – with Jesus crucified and raised to new life. And we can read this little bit of it all as a preview of sorts. Jesus was really hinting, if not declaring outright for those who could read between the lines – that he was the new Passover Lamb, with that national holiday just around the corner, come to take away the sin of the world.
Jesus … from Nazareth … this son of a carpenter, this boy born of a peasant girl – this neighbor kid whose parents they knew – was claiming to have come down from heaven with this monumental, holy task of giving up his life, in the flesh, for the sake of the world.
Which means, Jesus was messing with their tradition. Jesus was undoing what they expected. Jesus was replacing the old with something new. And he was inviting them to live and believe something altogether different because of it. He was like Elijah in that first reading, who had challenged everything the people believed could be true about their God. He was moving their cheese and replacing it with broccoli. He was replacing their bread with his body.
That what Jesus was up to with all of his talk about the bread of life and the bread from heaven; about eternal life and about giving his flesh for the sake of the world. He was undoing everyone’s expectations for who God was, for how God could be, for what God might be up to in the world and for how their relationship with God was about to be utterly changed from anything they had ever known and everything they were used to.
Everything old was becoming new. Everything they were familiar with was changing. The very kingdom of God was, all of a sudden, alive and well and under their feet in a way they had never expected, experienced, or believed was even possible. And what woulda, coulda, shoulda been a feast of beautiful, hope-filled, life-changing news was, unfortunately, all being received with as much joy and gratitude as a plate full of boiled brussels sprouts.
And whether it’s eating our vegetables or doing our homework… whether it’s ending a bad relationship or putting down the bottle… whether it’s showing up for worship, giving our offering, reading more Scripture, or saying our prayers… whether it’s finally forgiving that someone, extending that grace, or making that sacrifice for the sake of the greater good… haven’t we all tried to convince someone – or be convinced, ourselves – to do or believe or behave in some way that we knew to be good and faithful and righteous, but that was also really hard to make happen?
What Jesus was inviting people to see and to receive – what God is calling us to, still – is to open ourselves to the new ways of God’s kingdom among us: things like grace and forgiveness; things like humility and generosity; things like peace and love for the “other” and love of our enemies, too. But we’re just not always so great at that, if we’re honest. Our necks are stiff and our hearts are hard and we are stuck in our ways, too much of the time. Just like the Jews of Jesus’ day, the Church as we know it is notorious for “complaining against each other.”
So we get this bread from heaven, in Jesus, who offers us forgiveness, who fills our hearts and minds and lives with the same kind of mercy, love and promise we’re meant to share. We get this bread from heaven, in Jesus, broken and shared with such abundance that our hands and our hearts can’t hold it all.
And this bread from heaven, like Jesus says, isn’t really bread – or brussels sprouts – or broccoli – after all. It is the very life and death and resurrection of God, in Jesus Christ, broken and shared for you and for me. It is something altogether new and better and different. It can be hard to believe, this bread from heaven. For some this kind of grace is hard to swallow. For too many, it’s difficult to share.
But this bread from heaven, in Jesus Christ, is for all people. It is meant to feed and fill every body. It saves and redeems all things – and all of us – by God’s grace, for the sake of the world.
And it changes everything – and will us, too – if we let it.
Amen
