Pentecost 12 Year B
Sermon Preached by Reverend Michael Hillier on Sunday, 11 August 2024.
John 6.35, 41-51
Over the past couple of weeks, we have been looking at aspects of the story of the Feeding of the 5,000. We have looked at the movement of the people around and across the lake.
Following the feeding, we saw how they wanted to make Jesus their king and how they generally misunderstood who Jesus was and what He was really saying.
Now we come to today’s gospel, which is, we could say, at the heart of the feeding miracle.
Jesus interprets this for them very explicitly, saying He was ‘the bread of life’ and that whoever comes to Him will never be hungry or thirsty (v.35).
The first thing we need to note is how deeply shocking it was for the Jews to hear this. Leviticus 17.10–14 is quite explicit: Jewish people should not eat flesh where the blood is still in the flesh ‘because the life of the flesh is in the blood’ (v.11). And any form of cannibalism was considered outrageous, shocking and dreadful as it is for us.
And so they were deeply offended by His words.
We have heard this phrase, ‘the bread of life,’ so many times over the years that it ceases to shock us as it did these Jews. However we choose to understand this, we need to realise that Jesus was making a very profound claim for Himself, and it is central to our understanding of who He is and the claims of the gospel.
The Jews were not slow to notice this and how Jesus deliberately linked Himself with the Father, and these verses have been left out of our gospel reading today. It was the ‘tall poppy’ syndrome. They quickly pointed out to each other, ‘We know His lineage, who His parents were and where He came from. He is utterly deluded if He expects us to believe these claims’ (v.42).
In saying this, they were being snobbish. The story is told how T.E. Lawrence, also known as Lawrence of Arabia, who was a close personal friend of the novelist Thomas Hardy, sometimes visited Hardy and his wife when he was a serviceman in the Royal Air Force and wearing his uniform.
On one occasion, the Mayoress of Dorchester was also visiting and was very annoyed that she had to share afternoon tea with a soldier of the Other Ranks. In French, she said to Mrs Hardy, never before had she had to share tea with a common serviceman.
There was silence until Lawrence said in perfect French, ‘I beg your pardon, Madame, but can I be of any use as an interpreter? Mrs Hardy knows no French’.
Her poor behaviour was because she judged by worldly standards.
You and I need to be careful that we don’t sometimes reject God’s message because we dismiss or despise how the message is coming to us. God has many messengers and ways of reaching out to us to capture our attention. What a tragedy that the Jews rejected Jesus in part because they knew His lineage.
‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty’ (v.35). It’s interesting, isn’t it, that Jesus personalised this? It would have been so much easier for Jesus to have said after the Feeding, ‘Now that I have fed you, I will give you a lecture on the key points of the Christian faith, the things that you need to know’.
That approach would mean to keep it in the head rather than personalise it. But Jesus didn’t. He said that they are to eat Him and feed on Him.
Perhaps Jesus realised that it is much more difficult to dislike someone and even mock them if you know them personally and have a relationship with them.
Maybe Jesus realised that, in the end, it is all about relationships and not about causes and ideas. Perhaps this is why God, in His wisdom, has made the universe all about love—that love lies at the centre of the universe. And to the hardhearted and the hardheaded, that is mere nonsense to be easily dismissed as fairy floss.
But we must realise that Jesus seriously said He was the bread of life. In writing this gospel, John also recognised this phrase was so important that he repeated it twice more within a few verses (v.48, 51). Clearly, John is saying to us, ‘Pay attention to this!’
Our gospel for today is a reminder that the Christian Faith is more than a set of beliefs or interesting, intellectual ideas. For each of us, it is a reminder that it is about a personal encounter with Jesus, who wants to engage with and possess us.
The tragedy is that we often want to keep Him at a distance. We can recognise His claim on our lives in our heads but struggle to give Him a place in our hearts. In that sense, we are all the same. It is because the Christian faith is more than a set of beliefs or intellectual ideas. It is also about having a relationship based on love.
But you might say to me, ‘Michael, you are wrong, for v.47 says, “Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life. ‘ Surely, the word ‘believes’ points to an intellectual dimension? And yes, there is truth in that, but it is not the whole story.
Belief is a much richer term than simply reducing it to an intellectual dimension. A story helps make that clear.
John Paton was a doctor working in Melanesia who also translated the Gospel of John. ‘Belief’ is a crucial word in John’s Gospel, but Paton could not find an appropriate word in the local language and had to set aside his translation work. (v.35)
One day, one of the locals came into his office, sat down, leaned back, and rested his feet on another chair. He then used a word in the indigenous language that implied he was trusting his whole weight to this chair. Then, Paton knew he had his word.
Belief is trusting your entire weight to something, in this case, Jesus.
And that is what belief is for you and me. It is being willing to trust Jesus with your whole weight, your whole being. It is making Him central to our lives and everything we do. And that can be scary, for you can think, at times, that you are in free fall. It is no wonder some turned back from following Jesus then and those who still turn back today.
But taking that risk of believing in its most profound, richest sense also means that we receive eternal life as a gift from God. So what might that mean? This is often reduced to just more of the same forever after, for eternity. People also think of life beyond death as a disembodied spirit. It is not.
The truth is we don’t know what eternal life might mean, for our imagination does not stretch that far. It is beyond our comprehension. As the poet John O’Donohue once said, ‘We stand on the shoreline of the invisible’. Or, as St Paul wrote, ‘Now we see through a glass darkly’ (1 Corinthians 13.12). But we do know that eternal life has already begun for us.
As we come to the altar to receive the bread of life, the Body and Blood of Christ, we do it communally, but it also needs to be deeply personal for you. I hope that Christ’s Body and Blood will mystically penetrate every fibre and pore of your being, and I hope that your transformation in Christ will continue and deepen.
Jesus said, ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes me will never be thirsty.’