3 August 2024 Pentecost 11
2 Samuel 11.26-12.13a Psalm 51.1-12 Ephesians 4.1-16 John 6.24-35
Are you hungry? If you are, what are you hungry for, if you are not, what has made you full. Jesus says ‘Eat me’, and never be hungry again. What is at stake in this statement is whether we are ready to move beyond self-sufficiency into a whole of life dependence on a God we can taste but never control. It is said that we become what we eat, so if Jesus is the living bread, the bread of life, and we ‘eat of this bread’, what are we becoming.
Today we continue Jesus’ extended story about him being the ‘bread of life’. And we will continue to explore this theme for the next 4 weeks. Last week Jesus fed a huge crowd with little more than a few rolls and a couple of fish. Now the crowd are asking for more. But Jesus challenges their motivations. He basically tells them they are just following him because they want to see ‘the show’. And he tells them rather than food that fills today and leaves you empty tomorrow, they need food that will feed them for eternal life. And the crowd respond by asking for a ‘sign’ of this. They have just seen him feed the huge crowd with a few rolls and they want ‘more proof’ so they can believe in him. Sound familiar?
When Jesus tells the crowd that to do the work of God they need to ‘believe in him who he has sent’, they ask Jesus for signs like Moses did when he provided ‘whatsit’ in the wilderness for the people of Israel. Now I use the word ‘whatsit’ because that really is what manna is. The Israelites didn’t know what this ‘white substance’ on the ground was and when they saw it they asked - ‘what is it’, the word manna means ‘what is it’ – whatsit. And Jesus puts them straight when he tells them it was not Moses but God who fed the hungry in the wilderness, and it was God who fed the multitude in the wilderness on the other side of the lake the day before. And the bread that God provides will give life to the world, to which they respond, ‘Sir give us this bread always’. This statement reminds me of the woman at the well, when Jesus tells her that he is the ‘living water’ and those who drink this water will never be thirsty, she too asks for it so she will not keep having to come to the well every day. Whoever comes to Jesus will never be hungry and whoever believes in him will never be thirsty.
Bread is the basic staple of our existence. We all have hungers, things that we crave to complete us. Maybe we hunger for love, for connection, for communion, to know and be to known, for joy, or delight. Maybe we have an ongoing hunger for wholeness, and redemption, and courage. But do we trust that Jesus will satisfy those hungers. We can be very adept at finding substitutes for communion with God. We fill our lives with busyness, with friends, with social occasions, with food, with exercise, with habits. But do we really trust that Jesus is our bread, our essential sustenance. And sadly, the answer is often, no. Jesus becomes for us just an ‘abstraction’. A set of Sunday rituals, a creed. Why? Maybe because we are not ‘ravenous’ when we approach Jesus. We do not recognise our daily, our hourly, dependence on his generosity. Put simply, I do not expect to be fed by him. I will hide my hunger because I am ashamed to want and need too much. And sometimes it is hard for us to accept, not just that God welcomes me to the table, but that God welcomes all of me. That God welcomes those bits of me that I keep hidden, those bits of me that I may be ashamed of, those bits of me that I wish I could change. We may wish that Jesus had the good sense to not welcome all of these parts of us as we come to the table to taste and see that the Lord is good.
And having named our desires and hungers, having got a bit closer to trusting God with all the scary bits of our hearts, where do we go next. Maybe into contemplation. Maybe into meditation. Maybe into silence and openness and vulnerability. Hopefully into a willingness to truly ‘eat’ Jesus – to take Jesus into ourselves, moment by moment, day by day, using whatever spiritual practices work best for us. Jesus wants to be a whole lot more than just a creed, or good example, or teacher, in our lives. So, am I hungry for God. Do I feel, at the bottom of my stomach, that Jesus is ‘basic provision’; that he is the everyday food without which I will starve and die? Jesus wants to be food. He is food. So are you hungry for him; will you allow his substance to become your substance. The bread of heaven is ours for the tasting. May we absorb it. May we share it. May we desire it beyond all other things. May its nourishment seep through us until we, like Jesus, become life-saving bread for the whole world.