Jesus And The Challenge Of The Bread Business
Sermon
The Challenge of Starting All Over Again
A Sermon Series
Object:
The devil said to him, "If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread." And Jesus answered him, "It is written, 'Man shall not live by bread alone.' "
-- Luke 4:3-4
Not many of us have the opportunity to stand at the crossroads of history. Not many of us have the opportunity to stand at the threshold of a new era. Not many of us are able to witness the dawn of a new age. And only a few of us are destined to be a potential leader of a new advance in history. All of us have our destinies, of course, but only a few of us have a destiny potentially able to change the world.
History has had its great persons from Ramses II, Pharaoh of Egypt, to Cyrus, the noble Persian conqueror, enlightened and ahead of his time, to Alexander the Great of Macedonia, to Caesar Augustus of Rome and his notable eventual successor, the philosopher-Emperor Marcus Aurelius.
Others would point to Constantine or Charlemagne or to Lincoln or Napoleon or Churchill -- men with a destiny, men at the threshold of a new era, men with a chance to change history forever for better or for worse. Yes, the times do make the men, but the men also make the times. Yes, the forces of history do coalesce to form a new stage for a new historical drama to be enacted, but those forces nonetheless await a man or woman to seize the moment and to act with courage and vision and faith to inaugurate a new age.
The temptation crisis of Jesus described in our text was just such a time. Had you been there in that barren Judean wilderness at the time, you might not have thought a new era of history was in the making. Had you participated in the forty-day fast in that God-forsaken place, blazing hot in the day and freezing cold in the night, you might never have dreamed you were part of a watershed event that would eventually change the calendar into B.C. and A.D.
The insensitive, the boorish, the plodders, the skeptics and the cynics often miss the dramatic moment when all time is about to be changed. The provincially-minded, the arrogant and conceited, the ignorant and pleasure-seeking often do not see the potential glory of a given moment.
But not Jesus at this critical turning point in his life; not Jesus after leaving his carpentry business at age thirty to answer a deep call of God; not Jesus supercharged with an impelling sense of destiny and gripped by the compelling hand of God. Jesus knew it and the devil knew it: the world was at a crossroads and Jesus had the potential to take the world down the road less traveled to a new future.
I.
And the question is, what kind of new future? Of the three futures suggested in the temptations, a powerful and alluring future was that of the bread business. What the world needs now and will always need is bread, said the tempter to Jesus. Make the stones into bread. That will be a new era indeed.
The temptation was hard and real for Jesus. He had grown up in Nazareth, a small village slightly south and west of the Sea of Galilee. While he may have been more or less "middle class" in his carpentry trade, many of his fellow townspeople were poor. It is true that in certain periods of their history, the nearby plains had been productive and the hillsides had sustained abundant vines and olive trees.
And yet his heart went out to the poor, to the masses of impoverished Palestinian peasants merely subsisting, scratching out a poverty line living from a sometimes hard and intractable land. Even when the harvests might be fruitful and the harvest celebrations joyful, the Romans were always there with their occupation army to take more than their share of the production, and to tax others for the fruits of their labors in their trades.
Besides, the popular Jewish expectations of the time held out the hope for a Messiah, a liberating king, who would not only throw out the Romans; he would also introduce a new era of prosperity and plenty. Isaiah had promised that in the Messianic Age: "Thou shalt not hunger and thirst." And Amos predicted a sumptuous time:
When the plowman will overtake the reaper,
And the treader of grapes him who sows the seed.
-- 9:13
The Book of Enoch foresaw the new age when the vines would produce wine in abundance, seed a thousandfold, and olives would give vast quantities of oil. Most of Jesus' contemporaries very much expected a return to the power of King David and to the wealth and wisdom of King Solomon. So, Jesus, says the tempter to the would-be King, how will you make it happen? Why not change stones to bread? Introduce massive agrarian and economic reform. Feed the starving poor. Bring about a revolution with bread for all.
Had I been there, I might have been tempted to do just that. Viewing pictures of the emaciated in Rwanda and Somalia and Ethiopia, I might want to say fervently that what the world needs now is bread and economic reform to produce it abundantly and to distribute it equitably. We need to put an end to these pathetic cycles of pain and starvation and deprivation and malnutrition and disease and death. Let the Messianic powers be used to crush the Palestinian rocks into productive soil for abundant amber fields of waving grain for the peasant poor.
One of my heroes who has done just that is Norman Borlaug, Nobel Prize winner -- Norman Borlaug, a scientist, botanist and agronomist, who developed and introduced a new strain of wheat which was highly productive in India, virtually eliminating starvation there. He's now come out of retirement at age eighty to develop grain for other Asian countries to fight starvation. Jesus could have been a first century Norman Borlaug. But he wasn't.
Another unsung hero is the American farmer. Over time, he has so modernized and developed his agricultural skills that only four percent of our people produce food for the remaining 96 percent of us. In addition to that, we send food all over the world to supplement failed agronomies and dismal harvests. Jesus could have been a first century agricultural hero. But he wasn't.
II.
"Well, what was he then?" we might ask. Could he not see the pain in the sunken eyes and exposed rib cages of the world's perpetually hungry poor? Could he not see the age-old exploitation of the poor by the rich? Did he have no sympathy for those who just never seem to get ahead in life? Did he not understand that what most people want is a piece of the action now, bread now, not pie in the sky?
Oh yes, he saw all that -- all that and more. But, as usual, Jesus saw deeper than most. So he answered the tempter, "Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word which proceeds from the mouth of God." Jesus might have exchanged his carpenter's bench for a massive bread business, but he did not. Instead he answered his critics by saying that his "bread" was to do the will of God, to speak the liberating word of God to the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
To be sure, he knew the power of bread to get a following just as surely as present-day politicians know the power of pork to get re-elected. Recall the story of his feeding of the 5,000 one evening from the five loaves and two fishes of the little boy. They took up twelve baskets full of leftovers.
Is it any wonder the crowds came looking for him the next day? They thought at last there was such a thing as a free lunch. Jesus sighed when he saw them coming, because he wanted to give them the bread of true life, the bread of the soul, the bread which never perishes, the bread which penetrates the deepest reaches of mind and heart with its nourishment.
Some of my fondest memories are of freshly baked bread, yes, like that my mother used to make; or like the hot bread from the brick oven in Bergama, Turkey, near the ruins of Pergamum; or like that of San Francisco's sourdough baguettes with cheese and wine in the shaded glen of a Napa Valley vineyard; or of semolinas or pumpernickels or kaisers from New York's unparalleled bakeries. Would that all famished peoples of the world could share these breads, and I pray someday they shall.
And yet, and yet, once having feasted on these and more, there is a sense in which we can say the mind and soul are hungry still. Delightful as these treats are, and as pleasant as our gourmet foods and wines can be, we still know in our hearts, with Saint Paul, that the kingdom of God does not consist in food and drink, but in love and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.
You shall not live by bread alone, but by every word which proceeds from the mouth of God. You need your daily bread, and you should work and pray for it, but my job, says Jesus, is to give you eternal bread, words of life, nourishment for mind and spirit and soul.
And it worked, of course. Millions upon millions have drawn nourishment from those words ever since, and even now over a billion people in the world look upward from their banquet tables of temporal bread for the ideas and concepts and principles which last forever. Had Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, and Brahms gone into farming in place of music, how much more impoverished would be the world. Had Shakespeare neglected his gifts or Michelangelo or Monet theirs, the heart and soul of the world would have been less filled.
And had Jesus given himself to the bread business on a massive scale of political and economic reform, we might have had better-fed peasants for a decade or two, but we might not have had the Sermon on the Mount and the Golden Rule and the unforgettable parables. Had Jesus concentrated on the seeds and the soils and harvests of this world, we might have lost our focus on the seeds and soils and harvests for the world to come. And Isaiah's warning of not working for bread which perishes would have been lost on us.
Oh yes, we need enlightened, creative, altruistic people in the bread business in a massive way, worldwide, people like Norman Borlaug with his Asian "Green Revolution," and American farmers with their amazing production skills. The bread business was, and is, a noble challenge.
But even more, we need Jesus, the true bread of life, from which eating, we shall live forever! How well Jesus knew it. Even though we live by bread, we do not live by bread alone, but by every word which proceeds from the mouth of God. And Jesus, thank God, devoted himself to just that -- giving us words from the mouth of God.
Prayer
O Eternal God, our Father, who has so ordained the world that birds of the air find food for their young, and the children of men receive sustenance from the bounty of the earth; we praise you for the mystery and miracle of life. We thank you for the fecundity of the earth, for life-giving food bursting forth in green fields and fruit-laden orchards. Praise be to you for a well-ordered world wherein we receive our daily bread.
Nevertheless we are conscious of those millions of our fellows malnourished and underfed. We pray for the poor and destitute of our land and lands abroad, that the hungry might be fed and that the thirsty might have drink. We pray for reform in political and economic systems which oppress peoples and breed poverty. We pray inspiration for researchers, that new crops and methods might ensue for hunger-stricken nations. Show us new ways politically and economically to share and distribute the surplus we often enjoy. Well-sustained in daily bread, open our hearts to those less fortunate and grant us wisdom and willingness to share.
But life is more than meat and drink. How often, O Lord, we have come to prosperity and yet have felt empty, as though we had missed something along life's way. Well-fed and sometimes overnourished in body, there often remains a hunger of the soul, a longing of the mind and heart for food not of this world.
Loving Father, whose promise and pleasure it is to nourish those who come to you in faith, fill us today with insight into ourselves and your purposes for our lives. If we have been wayward and wanton, by your mercy, call us back to your banquet table of grace and love. If we have been willful and stubborn, deliver us from the stale breads of our intellectual sustenance to feast upon the Living Bread. If like medieval kings we pride ourselves upon the dainty morsels of our manufacture, but neglect the solid food of your Eternal Word, call us to repentance and to the spiritual nutrition which gives life eternal. If we have grown content with material satiation and are bloated with the conceit of this life, awaken us anew to your Eternal Wisdom, and puncture our pride, that we may again enter the narrow gate into your banquet of life. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
-- Luke 4:3-4
Not many of us have the opportunity to stand at the crossroads of history. Not many of us have the opportunity to stand at the threshold of a new era. Not many of us are able to witness the dawn of a new age. And only a few of us are destined to be a potential leader of a new advance in history. All of us have our destinies, of course, but only a few of us have a destiny potentially able to change the world.
History has had its great persons from Ramses II, Pharaoh of Egypt, to Cyrus, the noble Persian conqueror, enlightened and ahead of his time, to Alexander the Great of Macedonia, to Caesar Augustus of Rome and his notable eventual successor, the philosopher-Emperor Marcus Aurelius.
Others would point to Constantine or Charlemagne or to Lincoln or Napoleon or Churchill -- men with a destiny, men at the threshold of a new era, men with a chance to change history forever for better or for worse. Yes, the times do make the men, but the men also make the times. Yes, the forces of history do coalesce to form a new stage for a new historical drama to be enacted, but those forces nonetheless await a man or woman to seize the moment and to act with courage and vision and faith to inaugurate a new age.
The temptation crisis of Jesus described in our text was just such a time. Had you been there in that barren Judean wilderness at the time, you might not have thought a new era of history was in the making. Had you participated in the forty-day fast in that God-forsaken place, blazing hot in the day and freezing cold in the night, you might never have dreamed you were part of a watershed event that would eventually change the calendar into B.C. and A.D.
The insensitive, the boorish, the plodders, the skeptics and the cynics often miss the dramatic moment when all time is about to be changed. The provincially-minded, the arrogant and conceited, the ignorant and pleasure-seeking often do not see the potential glory of a given moment.
But not Jesus at this critical turning point in his life; not Jesus after leaving his carpentry business at age thirty to answer a deep call of God; not Jesus supercharged with an impelling sense of destiny and gripped by the compelling hand of God. Jesus knew it and the devil knew it: the world was at a crossroads and Jesus had the potential to take the world down the road less traveled to a new future.
I.
And the question is, what kind of new future? Of the three futures suggested in the temptations, a powerful and alluring future was that of the bread business. What the world needs now and will always need is bread, said the tempter to Jesus. Make the stones into bread. That will be a new era indeed.
The temptation was hard and real for Jesus. He had grown up in Nazareth, a small village slightly south and west of the Sea of Galilee. While he may have been more or less "middle class" in his carpentry trade, many of his fellow townspeople were poor. It is true that in certain periods of their history, the nearby plains had been productive and the hillsides had sustained abundant vines and olive trees.
And yet his heart went out to the poor, to the masses of impoverished Palestinian peasants merely subsisting, scratching out a poverty line living from a sometimes hard and intractable land. Even when the harvests might be fruitful and the harvest celebrations joyful, the Romans were always there with their occupation army to take more than their share of the production, and to tax others for the fruits of their labors in their trades.
Besides, the popular Jewish expectations of the time held out the hope for a Messiah, a liberating king, who would not only throw out the Romans; he would also introduce a new era of prosperity and plenty. Isaiah had promised that in the Messianic Age: "Thou shalt not hunger and thirst." And Amos predicted a sumptuous time:
When the plowman will overtake the reaper,
And the treader of grapes him who sows the seed.
-- 9:13
The Book of Enoch foresaw the new age when the vines would produce wine in abundance, seed a thousandfold, and olives would give vast quantities of oil. Most of Jesus' contemporaries very much expected a return to the power of King David and to the wealth and wisdom of King Solomon. So, Jesus, says the tempter to the would-be King, how will you make it happen? Why not change stones to bread? Introduce massive agrarian and economic reform. Feed the starving poor. Bring about a revolution with bread for all.
Had I been there, I might have been tempted to do just that. Viewing pictures of the emaciated in Rwanda and Somalia and Ethiopia, I might want to say fervently that what the world needs now is bread and economic reform to produce it abundantly and to distribute it equitably. We need to put an end to these pathetic cycles of pain and starvation and deprivation and malnutrition and disease and death. Let the Messianic powers be used to crush the Palestinian rocks into productive soil for abundant amber fields of waving grain for the peasant poor.
One of my heroes who has done just that is Norman Borlaug, Nobel Prize winner -- Norman Borlaug, a scientist, botanist and agronomist, who developed and introduced a new strain of wheat which was highly productive in India, virtually eliminating starvation there. He's now come out of retirement at age eighty to develop grain for other Asian countries to fight starvation. Jesus could have been a first century Norman Borlaug. But he wasn't.
Another unsung hero is the American farmer. Over time, he has so modernized and developed his agricultural skills that only four percent of our people produce food for the remaining 96 percent of us. In addition to that, we send food all over the world to supplement failed agronomies and dismal harvests. Jesus could have been a first century agricultural hero. But he wasn't.
II.
"Well, what was he then?" we might ask. Could he not see the pain in the sunken eyes and exposed rib cages of the world's perpetually hungry poor? Could he not see the age-old exploitation of the poor by the rich? Did he have no sympathy for those who just never seem to get ahead in life? Did he not understand that what most people want is a piece of the action now, bread now, not pie in the sky?
Oh yes, he saw all that -- all that and more. But, as usual, Jesus saw deeper than most. So he answered the tempter, "Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word which proceeds from the mouth of God." Jesus might have exchanged his carpenter's bench for a massive bread business, but he did not. Instead he answered his critics by saying that his "bread" was to do the will of God, to speak the liberating word of God to the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
To be sure, he knew the power of bread to get a following just as surely as present-day politicians know the power of pork to get re-elected. Recall the story of his feeding of the 5,000 one evening from the five loaves and two fishes of the little boy. They took up twelve baskets full of leftovers.
Is it any wonder the crowds came looking for him the next day? They thought at last there was such a thing as a free lunch. Jesus sighed when he saw them coming, because he wanted to give them the bread of true life, the bread of the soul, the bread which never perishes, the bread which penetrates the deepest reaches of mind and heart with its nourishment.
Some of my fondest memories are of freshly baked bread, yes, like that my mother used to make; or like the hot bread from the brick oven in Bergama, Turkey, near the ruins of Pergamum; or like that of San Francisco's sourdough baguettes with cheese and wine in the shaded glen of a Napa Valley vineyard; or of semolinas or pumpernickels or kaisers from New York's unparalleled bakeries. Would that all famished peoples of the world could share these breads, and I pray someday they shall.
And yet, and yet, once having feasted on these and more, there is a sense in which we can say the mind and soul are hungry still. Delightful as these treats are, and as pleasant as our gourmet foods and wines can be, we still know in our hearts, with Saint Paul, that the kingdom of God does not consist in food and drink, but in love and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.
You shall not live by bread alone, but by every word which proceeds from the mouth of God. You need your daily bread, and you should work and pray for it, but my job, says Jesus, is to give you eternal bread, words of life, nourishment for mind and spirit and soul.
And it worked, of course. Millions upon millions have drawn nourishment from those words ever since, and even now over a billion people in the world look upward from their banquet tables of temporal bread for the ideas and concepts and principles which last forever. Had Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, and Brahms gone into farming in place of music, how much more impoverished would be the world. Had Shakespeare neglected his gifts or Michelangelo or Monet theirs, the heart and soul of the world would have been less filled.
And had Jesus given himself to the bread business on a massive scale of political and economic reform, we might have had better-fed peasants for a decade or two, but we might not have had the Sermon on the Mount and the Golden Rule and the unforgettable parables. Had Jesus concentrated on the seeds and the soils and harvests of this world, we might have lost our focus on the seeds and soils and harvests for the world to come. And Isaiah's warning of not working for bread which perishes would have been lost on us.
Oh yes, we need enlightened, creative, altruistic people in the bread business in a massive way, worldwide, people like Norman Borlaug with his Asian "Green Revolution," and American farmers with their amazing production skills. The bread business was, and is, a noble challenge.
But even more, we need Jesus, the true bread of life, from which eating, we shall live forever! How well Jesus knew it. Even though we live by bread, we do not live by bread alone, but by every word which proceeds from the mouth of God. And Jesus, thank God, devoted himself to just that -- giving us words from the mouth of God.
Prayer
O Eternal God, our Father, who has so ordained the world that birds of the air find food for their young, and the children of men receive sustenance from the bounty of the earth; we praise you for the mystery and miracle of life. We thank you for the fecundity of the earth, for life-giving food bursting forth in green fields and fruit-laden orchards. Praise be to you for a well-ordered world wherein we receive our daily bread.
Nevertheless we are conscious of those millions of our fellows malnourished and underfed. We pray for the poor and destitute of our land and lands abroad, that the hungry might be fed and that the thirsty might have drink. We pray for reform in political and economic systems which oppress peoples and breed poverty. We pray inspiration for researchers, that new crops and methods might ensue for hunger-stricken nations. Show us new ways politically and economically to share and distribute the surplus we often enjoy. Well-sustained in daily bread, open our hearts to those less fortunate and grant us wisdom and willingness to share.
But life is more than meat and drink. How often, O Lord, we have come to prosperity and yet have felt empty, as though we had missed something along life's way. Well-fed and sometimes overnourished in body, there often remains a hunger of the soul, a longing of the mind and heart for food not of this world.
Loving Father, whose promise and pleasure it is to nourish those who come to you in faith, fill us today with insight into ourselves and your purposes for our lives. If we have been wayward and wanton, by your mercy, call us back to your banquet table of grace and love. If we have been willful and stubborn, deliver us from the stale breads of our intellectual sustenance to feast upon the Living Bread. If like medieval kings we pride ourselves upon the dainty morsels of our manufacture, but neglect the solid food of your Eternal Word, call us to repentance and to the spiritual nutrition which gives life eternal. If we have grown content with material satiation and are bloated with the conceit of this life, awaken us anew to your Eternal Wisdom, and puncture our pride, that we may again enter the narrow gate into your banquet of life. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
