Deuteronomy 8: 1-3; John 6:24-35
A small-sized congregation in a college town near the Hudson River
wanted to attract more college students for weekly worship attendance and other
activities. So, when someone donated a few boxes of New Testament books, that church
decided to pass them out to the college students on the campus nearby.
But they did something interesting — they placed a slip of paper in
each New Testament with a brief invitation plus the church name and address on
it, and a coupon for a dollar or even maybe five dollars in random copies of
the books.
When I heard about this way of doing “evangelism,” I felt it was a
mere gimmick to get younger people to attend church if they knew they could get
cash as they redeem this certificate. And this brings us full circle to our
Gospel incident today, where a crowd anxiously searches for Jesus to see if
they could get another free lunch, literally.
***
A little earlier, some five thousand men and their families had
been fed by Jesus just when they were getting hungry and had very little to eat
with them. A friend of mine who is a declared agnostic insists that the
miraculous feeding of the multitude by the lake was a Jesus’s gimmick to pack his
own church, a sort of political transaction: “I give you something you covet, like
food, then you make me a king.”
“You are dead wrong,” John will soon argue (10:10), “Jesus fed
that multitude was ‘that they may have life and have it abundantly’.” Notice
the word life –here the Greek word life implies a forward moving
existence with real personal growth that begins today and continues all the way
into God’s eternity.
Here life here means much more than mere survival – it means
quality life, abundant life, the kind of life we can truly enjoy once we let
the Risen Christ become “bread” to us. You may want to know that “bread” as life is another metaphor for Jesus in John’s gospel.
And this shouldn’t surprise us, for many significant events in the
Bible revolve, precisely, around bread. I’d like to highlight two of them.
***
The Exodus, for instance, perhaps the
most important event in the Old Testament –that endless, dramatic journey from
captivity in Egypt to freedom and abundant “bread” in the Promised Land. Remember?
When the Hebrew tribes in Palestine were
stricken by drought and famine, their only option was to migrate to Egypt
because there was a surplus of food in that lands, but Egypt kept them captives
for a long, long time. Eventually those tribes were able to leave Egypt.
But their promised land was not next door – a huge, scorching desert came
first, and on one occasion when they were about to starve, God rained down
bread from heaven, as it was called, in the form of manna.
Another well-known illustration about the critical role that bread plays
in our lives brings us to Jesus’s praying by the roadside. When his disciples
saw him, they were so impressed by the genuineness and the intensity of his
praying that they implored him: “Jesus, teach us how to pray.”
It was in that prayer that Jesus reminds us of the importance of the
staff of life. For he also prayed, “Give us this day our daily bread.” Here is
a word of caution, my friends, for there is big difference between feeding
people as a gimmick to secure their loyalty and feeding people to help them
meet their most basic needs. Mahatma Gandhi said it so well: “There are people
in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of
bread.”
***
Now we are better equipped to deal with “bread” in our gospel lesson
today, where John narrates an incident that happened shortly after the
miraculous feeding of a multitude by the lake – remember that extraordinary
moment?
How a crowd had gathered around Jesus, but when his teaching and
preaching time went by, his disciples began to worry about how to feed so many
people
How a kid offered Jesus a meager lunch box with some tuna sandwiches that
Jesus prayerfully transformed in plenty of food to feed a multitude. And how
thousands walked away that day with the blessed assurance that Jesus was indeed
the bread of life sent by God.
Yet his miracle generated controversy among the scribes. The scribes were
a highly educated class of people, for they studied the Law of Moses,
transcribed it, and wrote commentaries on it. But over time they became
professionals at spelling out the letter of the law while ignoring the spirit
behind it, and that’s why they often accosted Jesus and even threaten him.
Quite impressed with what they have seen around the lake that day, several
scribes approach Jesus and say, in effect, “if you are the Messiah, prove it.” They
point out that when the Hebrews were in the wilderness, Moses was able to bring
bread from heaven.
Since that time there had been a strong rabbinic belief that when the
Messiah came, he too would bring manna from heaven –this had been the superman
act of Moses and surely, they reasoned, the Messiah could surpass that. See? The
scribes are challenging Jesus to substantiate his claim of Messiahship by
raining bread from heaven.
But was not the feeding of the 5000 a miracle in their eyes? Yes and no. They
are impressed, but, you see, Jesus’s critics argue that he merely fed 5000
whereas Moses had fed a nation.
“Jesus,” they say, “you have fed these people for one day, but Moses did
it for 40 years — what you have done is multiply a few earthly loaves of bread
and fish, but Moses made it appear from out of nowhere.” The scribes believed
and taught that the true Messiah would outperform the signs of Moses.
How does Jesus respond? That they had misinterpreted the Moses event. In
the first place, Jesus reminds them, the manna in the wilderness had not come
from Moses but from God — Moses had been the facilitator, but not the
originator.
In the second place, Jesus tells them that they failed to see that the
real bread from heaven was not manna at all – that the mana given during the
exodus was only meant to be a symbol of the true bread.
The real bread from heaven, Jesus tells them, comes down and feeds not
only our physical needs but also our spiritual hunger as well. It was at this
point, and please, please, don’t miss the significance of this, that Jesus finally
says: “I am the bread of life. He who comes to me shall never hunger and he who
believes in me shall never thirst.”
***
Jesus never, never says that our daily bread, the bread on our table, is
insignificant! What he says is that while life in its most elementary form
depends upon bread, bread only sustains life, for it is just one side of the
slice, so to speak.
Bread can buy you land but not love; it can buy you bonds but not
brotherhood; gold but not gladness; silver but not sincerity; hospitals but not
health; 3 karats but not character; houses but not homes. You can trade bread
for commodities but not comfort, real estate but not righteousness, hotels but
not heaven.
When we welcome a little one into our lives, we provide them with all the
physical needs that they could have — we feed them, we cloth them, we give
them warm beds (by the way, I became fairly proficient in changing diapers).
But soon we discover that their needs go so much deeper than these
physical needs — our children want to be loved and held; they want to play,
and to play with us too; they have a desire for knowledge and hunger for new
experiences; in short, our children desire quality of life, not mere existence.
That is what Jesus Christ ultimately provides for us — quality of life,
abundant life — a way to get beyond ourselves and mere existence and
experience life and an intensity of life that we have never experienced.
***
Oooops! I almost forgot to finish the story about our sister congregation
by the Hudson River. Many college students did return their coupons for the
dollar bills, but they were also welcomed and pampered.
The students were invited to share their concerns, their joys, and their
dreams, and were invited to church members’ homes for a meal or two as well as for
special family and holiday occasions.
They were given phone numbers and email addresses to call in the event
they were lonely or anxious about something, since it was the first time away
from home for many of them. And both church families and college students
enjoyed abundant life in Christ. And all of this happened even though our
sister congregation knew very well that none of those young students might stay
forever with them because their future lay elsewhere in God’s world.
Thanks be given to God who nurtures our bodies and our souls every day,
also the ties that keep us together in Christ as we welcome and learn to love
everyone around this table.