The Bread Of Life
Sermon
The Feasts Of The Kingdom
Sermons On Holy Communion And Other Sacred Meals
Compared to the Palestine of Jesus' day, America is a veritable paradise of physical comfort and a bountiful land overflowing with milk and honey. If a first century Galilean peasant farmer could see the amber fields of waving grain on America's Great Plains, he surely would think he had died and gone to heaven, or that the Messianic Age had arrived in all its glory and splendour. Or if he could watch the huge freighters at Duluth, Minnesota, being loaded with ton after ton of golden grain, he would rightly think he would never again have to worry about his daily bread.
Think of it. If only a few years ago our population was seventy percent agrarian, now only three or four percent of our population provides food not only for us, but for much of the world. America is indeed the breadbasket of the world, and few of us ever seriously worry about our daily bread.
Indeed, our worry is not about daily bread, but daily diet. Doctors, food nutritionists, and authors have made millions on advising how to cut down on our intake of daily bread. Exercise programs from jogging to swimming to weight lifting have been devised to help us burn off the calories. We worry not so much about the availability of food, but about how well it is prepared.
Not only would the Galilean farmer of Jesus' time be amazed at our abundance; so would most of the people of history. Visit the ruins of ancient Greece or walk in the banqueting halls of medieval kings, and it will become apparent that most Americans live far better than royalty of the past. We are better dressed, better clothed and housed, better transported, and in many ways healthier than the majority of people of history.
Bread, you say? Bread for living? Prosperity and affluence for living? We have it and have it in abundance.
Therefore, perhaps this story of Jesus and the feeding of the 5,000 and their subsequent search for more bread is especially significant for us. For if Jesus could urge those first-century peasants to search for the bread of life which gives life indeed, how much more might he urge us, in all our abundance, to look beyond the physical bread to the spiritual food which nourishes the soul toward eternal life.
I.
Look again at the setting. On the previous day Jesus had fed the 5,000 by encouraging them to open up and share what they had, rather then hoarding it for themselves. They all had brought breadbaskets for the day, but were afraid to open them fearing there would not be enough for them and their neighbors. But following Jesus' example, they opened both their hearts and their baskets and there was food left over.
Eventually Jesus and his disciples crossed the Sea of Galilee to Capernaum and the next day the crowd followed. They were amazed at his teachings but also impressed with the miracle of the feeding and were now looking for another free meal. They dreamed of a Messiah who would care for their physical needs without personal toil.
Most all of us are looking for a free meal just as those Galilean peasants used to. Even well off people are always looking for a free lunch. For example, I once belonged to a club which gave away, by drawing, free hams and turkeys three times a year. Attendance at club meetings tripled on those days, because those well-dressed, well-paid business and professional men, who could well afford turkeys and hams, hoped to win a free meal. So it was with those peasants who had just had a free meal at Jesus' feeding of the 5,000. No wonder they looked for him the next day. It sure beat working.
Jesus understood, of course, their physical hunger and needs, but he was disappointed they had not looked beyond to their deeper, spiritual, intellectual, emotional needs, which his teachings could satisfy. As Jesus said to them. "You seek me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves." And he went on to make his point: "Do not labor for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life, which the Son of man will give to you ..." (John 6:27).
Jesus knew, as we all know, that after the body has been fed, there remains a hunger of the soul, which only food for the soul can satisfy. Jesus knew that what truly gives us zest for living is not just well-stocked deep freezes and full stomachs, but a heart and mind full of purpose for living and a philosophy of life which inspires the heart and mind toward their eternal goal.
The ancient Romans, in their power and prosperity, often could find nothing else to do but to stuff themselves at feasts, go outside and use an emetic, and then go stuff themselves again. Through gluttony and drunkenness they presumed to find life. Through over-indulgence in bread, they presumed to have arrived at the pinnacle of human experience. But as Matthew Arnold put it:
In his cool hall with haggard eyes,
the Roman noble lay;
He drove abroad in furious guise
Along the Appian Way;
He made a feast, drank fierce and fast;
He crowned his hair with flowers;
No easier nor no quicker passes
The impracticable hours.
The Roman noble has his counterpart in many contemporary Americans who go from feast to feast to forestall a satiated dreariness and blasé boredom. We often have bread in abundance, but not the Bread of Life.
The truth is that life is more than food and drink. Or as Paul put it, the Kingdom of God does not consist of food and drink but of peace and joy in the Holy Spirit and in power (Romans 14:17). Well-fed, we seek, nevertheless, for food for the mind and soul.
II.
But bread is not just a matter of banqueting. It has to do with how we organize our lives.
Consider the ways in which we imitate the peasants of Galilee in seeking physical bread more than spiritual, in laboring for bread which perishes, in place of food which endures to eternal life.
Our higher educational system is largely designed to prepare people to earn a good living -- and it should do that, of course. But at the same time, courses in philosophy and theology and literature and psychology often are avoided. We tend to be strong on the practical, but weak on the philosophical and specialize and intensify our abilities to make bread, but minimize or neglect the questions of why we live or for what we live. We know well how to provide for the health and comfort of the physical body, but often avoid or neglect the health and well being of the mind and soul.
Consider, too, our personal and family life. Most of us live reasonably well, strive to make sure our children eat properly, sleep and exercise well, dress appropriately, and behave in a manner suitable to our lifestyle. But we too easily neglect discussions of spiritual matters at home. We shy away from family prayer or Bible reading. Church is forsaken for physical pleasure. Philosophical and theological questions are avoided. Personal feelings are neglected or thwarted and we feel lonely or bored or depressed or ignored. While physical bread and comfort are important and essential, we often forget that spiritual bread and nourishment are even more important and infuse our daily lives with meaning and purpose.
Or consider our economic and political systems. C. G. Jung, the well-known psychoanalyst, has written that "a clever European is convinced that religion and such things are good enough for the masses and for women, but are of little weight compared to economic and political affairs" (Man in Search of a Soul, p. 252, quoted in Interpreter's Bible, Vol. 8, p. 563).
Of course politics and economics are important for providing our daily bread. But eventually cultures must ask why they exist and what ultimate values undergird their political and economic system. Totalitarian regimes exploit the masses and oppress the individual. But when the gospel of Jesus and the high sense of individual worth and dignity of man taught by Paul come into play, the deeper questions of economics and politics are raised.
Oppressive political systems want to avoid revolutionary ideas of freedom and private property and individual initiative and incentive. Ancient Rome gave the masses bread and circuses so as to forestall the deeper questions regarding the true life for all people. Oppressive regimes in every century usually are pleased to have religion as an opiate or sedative or tranquilizer or rationalizer of the status quo. But they rightly fear the revolutionary message of Jesus which has to do with the soul and spirit of human beings, not just their bodies and bellies. Most economic and political systems want us to concentrate on working only for the bread that perishes. Jesus forever calls us to the larger question of working for the bread which gives eternal life, life with purpose and meaning, here and forever.
III.
But finally the question of the Bread of Life comes down to you and me personally. Very often we fall into the trap of wanting to use religion to acquire free bread or to accomplish our own goals and purposes, rather than have religion be the means whereby we submit our minds and wills and lives to be used for God's goals and purposes. Like the Galilean peasants, we want Jesus to submit to us rather than submit ourselves to him to be used by him.
But it is in that submission, in that faith, that we find the Bread of Life. The Galileans asked Jesus what work they should do to acquire the Bread of Life. He replied that the Bread of Life was a gift of God's grace which could be attained only through the "work" of faith, through the "work" of believing in him. We are to have faith in him for the eternal life, rather than just the temporal. We are to work toward the qualitative life, not just the quantitative. We are to realize that life does not consist in the abundance of our possessions but in the knowledge of God's love and grace. While we do live by bread, we do not live by bread alone, but by the Word which proceeds out of the mouth of God.
In his book, Man in Search of a Soul, psychoanalyst C. G. Jung has written that of the many, many people he has counseled from all over the world, one of the basic needs he uncovered was that of "finding a religious outlook on life." That was especially true of people over 35. And said Dr. Jung, "none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook" (p. 264, quoted in Interpreter's Bible, Vol. 8, p. 564).
Jesus was calling the Galileans to decide then and there for God's Kingdom. It was already present among them. The manna from heaven which they expected in the Messianic Age was coming down in the teachings and person of Jesus. By believing in him as God's Son with God's stamp of approval, they would find bread for their souls which would feed them for eternal life. By believing in him, they would find those deep meanings of life, and be infused with the confidence that life was not futile, but was coming to a glorious climax in the banquet feast of God for all who believed.
And so it is today, through the agency of the Church, Jesus is calling not the ancient Galileans, but us. The manna, the Bread of Heaven, the Bread of Life has come and is coming. But it is required of us to partake of it in faith, to believe on Jesus as God's unique Son through whom we receive not only the gift of a life full of meaning and purpose now, but through whom we also receive the gift of life everlasting.
Lord, we believe. Help thou our unbelief.
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 beauty 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 in 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 people 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 strength 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 over-nourished 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 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 Kingdom and puncture our pride that we may again enter the narrow gate into your banquet of life. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Think of it. If only a few years ago our population was seventy percent agrarian, now only three or four percent of our population provides food not only for us, but for much of the world. America is indeed the breadbasket of the world, and few of us ever seriously worry about our daily bread.
Indeed, our worry is not about daily bread, but daily diet. Doctors, food nutritionists, and authors have made millions on advising how to cut down on our intake of daily bread. Exercise programs from jogging to swimming to weight lifting have been devised to help us burn off the calories. We worry not so much about the availability of food, but about how well it is prepared.
Not only would the Galilean farmer of Jesus' time be amazed at our abundance; so would most of the people of history. Visit the ruins of ancient Greece or walk in the banqueting halls of medieval kings, and it will become apparent that most Americans live far better than royalty of the past. We are better dressed, better clothed and housed, better transported, and in many ways healthier than the majority of people of history.
Bread, you say? Bread for living? Prosperity and affluence for living? We have it and have it in abundance.
Therefore, perhaps this story of Jesus and the feeding of the 5,000 and their subsequent search for more bread is especially significant for us. For if Jesus could urge those first-century peasants to search for the bread of life which gives life indeed, how much more might he urge us, in all our abundance, to look beyond the physical bread to the spiritual food which nourishes the soul toward eternal life.
I.
Look again at the setting. On the previous day Jesus had fed the 5,000 by encouraging them to open up and share what they had, rather then hoarding it for themselves. They all had brought breadbaskets for the day, but were afraid to open them fearing there would not be enough for them and their neighbors. But following Jesus' example, they opened both their hearts and their baskets and there was food left over.
Eventually Jesus and his disciples crossed the Sea of Galilee to Capernaum and the next day the crowd followed. They were amazed at his teachings but also impressed with the miracle of the feeding and were now looking for another free meal. They dreamed of a Messiah who would care for their physical needs without personal toil.
Most all of us are looking for a free meal just as those Galilean peasants used to. Even well off people are always looking for a free lunch. For example, I once belonged to a club which gave away, by drawing, free hams and turkeys three times a year. Attendance at club meetings tripled on those days, because those well-dressed, well-paid business and professional men, who could well afford turkeys and hams, hoped to win a free meal. So it was with those peasants who had just had a free meal at Jesus' feeding of the 5,000. No wonder they looked for him the next day. It sure beat working.
Jesus understood, of course, their physical hunger and needs, but he was disappointed they had not looked beyond to their deeper, spiritual, intellectual, emotional needs, which his teachings could satisfy. As Jesus said to them. "You seek me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves." And he went on to make his point: "Do not labor for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life, which the Son of man will give to you ..." (John 6:27).
Jesus knew, as we all know, that after the body has been fed, there remains a hunger of the soul, which only food for the soul can satisfy. Jesus knew that what truly gives us zest for living is not just well-stocked deep freezes and full stomachs, but a heart and mind full of purpose for living and a philosophy of life which inspires the heart and mind toward their eternal goal.
The ancient Romans, in their power and prosperity, often could find nothing else to do but to stuff themselves at feasts, go outside and use an emetic, and then go stuff themselves again. Through gluttony and drunkenness they presumed to find life. Through over-indulgence in bread, they presumed to have arrived at the pinnacle of human experience. But as Matthew Arnold put it:
In his cool hall with haggard eyes,
the Roman noble lay;
He drove abroad in furious guise
Along the Appian Way;
He made a feast, drank fierce and fast;
He crowned his hair with flowers;
No easier nor no quicker passes
The impracticable hours.
The Roman noble has his counterpart in many contemporary Americans who go from feast to feast to forestall a satiated dreariness and blasé boredom. We often have bread in abundance, but not the Bread of Life.
The truth is that life is more than food and drink. Or as Paul put it, the Kingdom of God does not consist of food and drink but of peace and joy in the Holy Spirit and in power (Romans 14:17). Well-fed, we seek, nevertheless, for food for the mind and soul.
II.
But bread is not just a matter of banqueting. It has to do with how we organize our lives.
Consider the ways in which we imitate the peasants of Galilee in seeking physical bread more than spiritual, in laboring for bread which perishes, in place of food which endures to eternal life.
Our higher educational system is largely designed to prepare people to earn a good living -- and it should do that, of course. But at the same time, courses in philosophy and theology and literature and psychology often are avoided. We tend to be strong on the practical, but weak on the philosophical and specialize and intensify our abilities to make bread, but minimize or neglect the questions of why we live or for what we live. We know well how to provide for the health and comfort of the physical body, but often avoid or neglect the health and well being of the mind and soul.
Consider, too, our personal and family life. Most of us live reasonably well, strive to make sure our children eat properly, sleep and exercise well, dress appropriately, and behave in a manner suitable to our lifestyle. But we too easily neglect discussions of spiritual matters at home. We shy away from family prayer or Bible reading. Church is forsaken for physical pleasure. Philosophical and theological questions are avoided. Personal feelings are neglected or thwarted and we feel lonely or bored or depressed or ignored. While physical bread and comfort are important and essential, we often forget that spiritual bread and nourishment are even more important and infuse our daily lives with meaning and purpose.
Or consider our economic and political systems. C. G. Jung, the well-known psychoanalyst, has written that "a clever European is convinced that religion and such things are good enough for the masses and for women, but are of little weight compared to economic and political affairs" (Man in Search of a Soul, p. 252, quoted in Interpreter's Bible, Vol. 8, p. 563).
Of course politics and economics are important for providing our daily bread. But eventually cultures must ask why they exist and what ultimate values undergird their political and economic system. Totalitarian regimes exploit the masses and oppress the individual. But when the gospel of Jesus and the high sense of individual worth and dignity of man taught by Paul come into play, the deeper questions of economics and politics are raised.
Oppressive political systems want to avoid revolutionary ideas of freedom and private property and individual initiative and incentive. Ancient Rome gave the masses bread and circuses so as to forestall the deeper questions regarding the true life for all people. Oppressive regimes in every century usually are pleased to have religion as an opiate or sedative or tranquilizer or rationalizer of the status quo. But they rightly fear the revolutionary message of Jesus which has to do with the soul and spirit of human beings, not just their bodies and bellies. Most economic and political systems want us to concentrate on working only for the bread that perishes. Jesus forever calls us to the larger question of working for the bread which gives eternal life, life with purpose and meaning, here and forever.
III.
But finally the question of the Bread of Life comes down to you and me personally. Very often we fall into the trap of wanting to use religion to acquire free bread or to accomplish our own goals and purposes, rather than have religion be the means whereby we submit our minds and wills and lives to be used for God's goals and purposes. Like the Galilean peasants, we want Jesus to submit to us rather than submit ourselves to him to be used by him.
But it is in that submission, in that faith, that we find the Bread of Life. The Galileans asked Jesus what work they should do to acquire the Bread of Life. He replied that the Bread of Life was a gift of God's grace which could be attained only through the "work" of faith, through the "work" of believing in him. We are to have faith in him for the eternal life, rather than just the temporal. We are to work toward the qualitative life, not just the quantitative. We are to realize that life does not consist in the abundance of our possessions but in the knowledge of God's love and grace. While we do live by bread, we do not live by bread alone, but by the Word which proceeds out of the mouth of God.
In his book, Man in Search of a Soul, psychoanalyst C. G. Jung has written that of the many, many people he has counseled from all over the world, one of the basic needs he uncovered was that of "finding a religious outlook on life." That was especially true of people over 35. And said Dr. Jung, "none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook" (p. 264, quoted in Interpreter's Bible, Vol. 8, p. 564).
Jesus was calling the Galileans to decide then and there for God's Kingdom. It was already present among them. The manna from heaven which they expected in the Messianic Age was coming down in the teachings and person of Jesus. By believing in him as God's Son with God's stamp of approval, they would find bread for their souls which would feed them for eternal life. By believing in him, they would find those deep meanings of life, and be infused with the confidence that life was not futile, but was coming to a glorious climax in the banquet feast of God for all who believed.
And so it is today, through the agency of the Church, Jesus is calling not the ancient Galileans, but us. The manna, the Bread of Heaven, the Bread of Life has come and is coming. But it is required of us to partake of it in faith, to believe on Jesus as God's unique Son through whom we receive not only the gift of a life full of meaning and purpose now, but through whom we also receive the gift of life everlasting.
Lord, we believe. Help thou our unbelief.
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 beauty 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 in 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 people 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 strength 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 over-nourished 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 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 Kingdom and puncture our pride that we may again enter the narrow gate into your banquet of life. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
