John 6:41-58
Preached at New Hope Baptist Church on April 3, 2011
It is good to repeat the words of Jesus when we gather for the Lord’s Supper. He gathered the disciples around the table and served them bread and wine that night before he died on the cross. “This is my body,” he said. “This is the new covenant in my blood.” We need to hear those words often.
But today let’s think together about Jesus’ words in the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel. Jesus responds to the people who had wanted to make him king after they saw him feed the crowd with just five loaves of bread and a couple of fish from a little boy’s lunch sack. Jesus tells them, “You are interested in food that you can eat today, the kind that gives you some physical strength. But I know what you need. You need food that gives you life and lasts for eternal life.”
They talk to him about God having sent manna from heaven to feed their ancestors who wandered in the desert after escaping slavery in Egypt. They are saying, “You’re the new Moses. You give us a sign like that.” Jesus tells them, “That food was the kind that doesn’t last. You ancestors ate it and died. I am the bread of life. Anyone who eats this bread will live forever.” Then he says words that are hard to hear even though we know he doesn’t mean them literally. “My flesh is real food. My blood is real drink. Whoever continues to eat my flesh and drink my blood… will live because of me. . . will live forever.”
In Jewish law, there is direct prohibition against taking blood in with your food. Leviticus 3:17 says, “This is a lasting ordinance for the generations to come, wherever you live: You must not eat any fat or any blood.”
Of course Jesus is not talking about literally drinking his blood and eating his flesh. Then what is he saying? It is about the Lord’s Supper. Right?
No. What we will do with the bread and the grape juice in a few minutes is a way of making visible what Jesus is talking about. His teaching and his Spirit are the food we need to nourish us. In that sense, we take Him into our systems and receive him as food.
As we read Jesus saying, “I am the bread of life,” we need to look at the whole Gospel of John to understand the context of those words. When you read it, you see that Jesus is constantly saying, “I am.” He is using images to help us understand how he can help us to find our way and build a life on eternal principles.
Just listen to the list:
1. I am the Light of the World. John 8:12 and 9:5
2. I am the gate for the sheep. John 10:7
3. I am the Good Shepherd. John 10:14
4. I am the Resurrection and the Life. John 11:25
5. I am Teacher and Lord. That is what you call me, and you are right. John 13:13
6. I am the way, the truth, and the life. John 14:6
7. I am in the Father and the Father is in me and I am in you and you are in me. John 14:11 and 20
8. I am the vine and you are the branches. John 15:5
All of his “I ams” are about what he will do for us if we believe in him, trust him, have confidence in him, His teachings are what we are to do in our daily lives.
Let’s think about what Jesus has told us really is life giving for us? What gives us life that will last forever? What is it that will not perish?
Jesus talked about it in his sermon on the mount when he said, Don't worry and say, 'What will we eat?' or 'What will we drink?' or 'What will we wear?' The people who don't know God keep trying to get these things, and your Father in heaven knows you need them. Seek first God's kingdom and what God wants. Then all your other needs will be met as well.
If we will receive it, Jesus gives us his guidance and his direct spiritual help to build our lives. He dwells in us to help us and show us the way to eternal life.
Here is a way of looking at it that I found helpful. This is from Eugene Peterson. Suppose you decide you are going to build a house, but you don’t know how. You take a course in house building. You buy books and go to Internet sites that give you lots of training on the subject. You get the blueprints and buy the materials that you need for your house.
One day you begin. The lumber is delivered, and you lay the foundation. You struggle by yourself day after day. The walls begin to go up, and you start on the rafters. But as the house grows and as you start cutting openings for windows and setting partitions you find that there are some things you have forgotten or still don’t know. You go back more and more to your books. Things don’t seem to come out right. When you saw wood the cut is often not straight or comes up measured wrong. The wood splinters. You seem to be all thumbs.
Like all do-it-yourselfers, you have some neighbors who come by each day and stand around and make small talk. They have suggestions. “That wall seems to be out of plumb. Are you sure that is the way to set a window casing?” They make you nervous. Every time they shows up you are reminded of the badly cut boards, the bent nails, and the times you failed to follow the blueprint. One day you finally say what is on your mind, “I don’t need your advice. I need your help!”
Suddenly, they have busy schedules and things on their calendars that they just can’t miss.
But then one day, by chance, a skilled helper comes along. He rolls up his sleeves and gets to work actually helping you and sometimes saying, “If you do it this way, it will work better.” You find yourself enjoying his company and learning more than you ever thought possible. He is not there to give you condescending advice. He comes alongside you to help and teach.
His presence doesn’t mean you don’t make any more mistakes. You still feel the tension of what the house could be and the imperfect outcome of your efforts at building it. But it goes way better and you are happy and at ease, because someone who can help you has come not to say, “That doesn’t look right to me. You better go back to the blueprint. You’ve got that out of line there.”
No. He has come to help and to teach.
That is what Jesus does as the giver of food that lasts. He will come into the mess and scramble of lumber in our lives and work with us. He doesn’t stand to one side saying, “You’re going to have to do better than that.”
If you trust him and align with him, he will work beside you and help you to build your life.
Here is another image Jesus uses: Water. He said to a woman standing at Jacob’s well in Samaria, “"Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give will never be thirsty. The water I give will become a spring of water gushing up inside that person, giving eternal life." (John 4:14)
I was shopping for a few groceries the other day, when one of our younger members called me back. I had just called a couple of hours before that to check on him. We had a brief conversation in which he really accepted the fact that I care about him. I put my phone back in its holster and I thought, I feel really happy about the way that went. I feel energized. I went up to the check out and saw those little bottles of stuff called “5 Hour Energy.” I thought, I’ll bet I have gotten more energy from the conversation I just had and a few others in the last 24 hours than is in that little bottle.
While Jesus was talking to the woman at the well in Samaria, his disciples had been off buying something to eat. He offered her the living water that would quench her thirst forever. He talked with her about her life and the mistakes she had made. He talked with her about God. Another way to say it is he loved her. She went back to her town to tell her people about this man.
When the disciples got back with the Publix subs they urged Jesus, “Rabbi, eat something.”
But Jesus replied, “I have a kind of food you know nothing about.”
“Did someone bring him food while we were gone?” the disciples asked each other.
Then Jesus explained: “My nourishment comes from doing the will of God, who sent me, and from finishing his work. (John 4:31-34)
That is the nourishment Jesus was talking about when He said, “I am the bread of life.” He will give it to you.
It is up to you to take him at his word, put our confidence in his love for you, get involved doing God’s will, putting God’s kingdom first, paying attention to what God is doing right now in your life.
A man went to an African country to be a teacher in a missionary school. He had been a track and field athlete in high school and college, so he was made the track coach. He has a young man on the track team who was his best runner. His speed won a number of races. But one day when they were competing against another school, this one who normally won, looked like he had his feet in cement. He was running a 400 meter race and was falling far behind. But just as the runners were coming around the last lap, he put on an amazing kick. It looked as if he found energy that had just not been in him that day.
After the runner got his breath, the coach asked him, “What happened? You looked like you were about to lose and then you got this amazing spurt of energy. Where did that come from?”
Looking at his coach and teacher, he said, “You know how you always tell us that Jesus is available to help us if we just call on him? Well, I thought of that as I was falling behind in the race. So I just started saying to Jesus, “You pick ‘em up and I’ll lay ‘em down. You pick ‘em up and I’ll lay ‘em down.”
Here is the deal: You can’t buy the pure love of God that gives you energy. Jesus is offering it to you in all of these images and figures of speech. God loves you today and wants to give you
guidance where you don’t see the path,
security when you feel threatened,
truth about what can hurt your relationships and what can make your relationships more loving,
truth about how to treat people,
love that you can give to others,
spiritual energy, an amazing supply of it that comes from being loved and loving others,
and
life that lasts forever.
You can have all of that, but not if you are trying to deserve it trying to get other people and God to think you’re wonderful. Either you receive it as a gift because you put your confidence in what Jesus says and does or you can’t have it at all.
Once you put your confidence in Jesus, you will have times when you are amazed at how much energy the Bread of Life gives you. Obeying his teachings and receiving his love won’t make you perfect or make you feel energetic all the time, but you will know that it nourishes you every day like daily bread and gives you life forever.
So now we take the bread, bless it, break it, and give it to each other. This is Jesus body and blood. It is the nourishment of life. Whoever eats this food will have eternal life beginning now and forever.
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