August 8, 2021
First Lesson: Psalm 34:1-8
1 I will bless the Lord at all times;
his praise shall continually be in my mouth.
2 My soul makes its boast in the Lord;
let the humble hear and be glad.
3 O magnify the Lord with me,
and let us exalt his name together.
4 I sought the Lord, and he answered me,
and delivered me from all my fears.
5 Look to him, and be radiant;
so your[a] faces shall never be ashamed.
6 This poor soul cried, and was heard by the Lord,
and was saved from every trouble.
7 The angel of the Lord encamps
around those who fear him, and delivers them.
8 O taste and see that the Lord is good;
happy are those who take refuge in him.
Second Lesson: John 6:35,41-51
35 Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.
41 Then the Jews began to complain about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” 42 They were saying, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” 43 Jesus answered them, “Do not complain among yourselves. 44 No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me; and I will raise that person up on the last day. 45 It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. 46 Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father. 47 Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life. 48 I am the bread of life. 49 Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. 50 This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. 51 I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
Sometime this week you will probably make a trip to the grocery store to get a loaf of bread. It will be readily available on the shelf. There will be quite a variety to choose from. You won’t think much about it, except that it keeps getting more expensive. We take bread for granted. That is until we think about the many places that bread makes the difference between life and death.
When there is no staff of life there is suffering and famine. A simple loaf of bread: Something, which we do not give a second thought, but in certain parts of the world it means life itself.
One commentator writes, “It is only as we comprehend that situation that we can really begin to understand the importance of bread not only now but also in the time of Jesus. Just think for a moment how so many significant theological events in the Bible revolve around the subject of bread. The most important event in the Old Testament of course, was the Exodus, the trip from Egypt to the Promised Land. But what caused the Hebrews to be in Egypt in the first place? It was for want of bread, you will recall. The wheat crop had failed due to draught, and the Hebrews had migrated to the land of the Pharaoh because there was a surplus in storage there. It was bread, or the lack of it, that initiated this whole chain of events.
Later, when the Jews were on their way to the Promised Land, and they were facing starvation in the bleak wilderness, God rained down bread from heaven, as it was called, in the form of manna.
When Jesus began his ministry, he went into the dessert where he was tempted. As the hot sun braced down upon him, he looked out with sweaty eyes at the round white rocks, and we are told that they took on the appearance of loaves of bread. Satan was tempting Jesus to give bread to the people and end the suffering of world hunger. Yet, Jesus spurned that temptation because, he said, that man cannot live by bread alone.
One day Jesus was praying by the roadside when the disciples walked up and saw him. They were so impressed by the genuine nature of his prayer that they implored him: Master, teach us how to pray. It was in the midst of the Master’s prayer that he reminds us of the importance of the staff of life. He prayed: Give us this day our daily bread.
Bread is central to the major stories of the bible but…
To satisfy your hunger for heaven you cannot eat the bread of earth.
To satisfy your hunger for heaven you must eat the bread of heaven.” (Brett Blair Sermons.com)
Today Jesus declared himself the bread of life, sent down from heaven. In the first of seven “I Am” statements Jesus makes, he starts with the basics, “I am the bread of life.” This is such a profound statement we will be talking about it for two weeks. It follows after Jesus feeds the 5,000 and people are seeking more bread. Jesus is reframing this understanding from the daily bread to eternal bread, the bread from heaven.
Before we can even get to this, the Jews limit their understanding based on their history, what they think they know. They wonder how Jesus can be the bread of heaven since they know his father and mother. He can’t be anything special because we know where he came from. I wonder how we limit our understanding too? How we try to put God in a box because we cannot see things any other way. Maybe by being sure we know what God is up to or know that some new thing can’t be happening. All this transition to online worship and learning hybrid technology has humbled me into knowing I know very little about what is next for us as a congregation. We take it day by day and learn and adapt as we go. I trust that God is with us on the journey.
God was also with the Israelites on their journey to the Promised Land when manna became their bread. There was an expectation that the Messiah would bring manna, hence all the talk about it here. This story is as much about bread as it is about the one who provides it: God in the wilderness and Jesus now. Then Jesus redefined the whole conversation. Three things to note about Jesus being the bread of life: Manna teaches trust. Jesus is the new manna, the living bread. Living bread brings salvation.
Manna teaches trust. For God’s people to be fed, they needed to depend upon God and the instructions given. They had to trust God would provide. Manna was given each day, and none could be stored. Talk about “daily bread.” They were taught (to trust) by God (v. 45). Susan Hylen writes, “Deuteronomy summarizes it this way: ‘Remember the long way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, in order to humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart… He humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna, with which neither you nor your ancestors were acquainted, in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord’ (8:2-3). The memory of the manna story was not simply that God fed Israel, but that eating manna was akin to learning God’s wisdom and abiding by God’s law” (Working Preacher). Living by manna meant living by God’s word. Jesus being the bread of life extends that lesson to trusting Jesus is the one who God sent.
Secondly, Jesus is the new manna, the living bread. Zoe is the Greek word for living and the bread of life in the first verse. Zoe means life. But there are three words for life used in the New Testament. Bios from which we get biology, means living thing. Bios refers to the life of the physical body. Psuche means soul-life. “For whoever wants to save his soul-life shall lose it; but whoever loses his soul-life for My sake shall find it” (Mt. 16:25). We get the word psychology from this. Then we have Zoe which refers to the uncreated, eternal life of God, the divine life uniquely possessed by God. So Jesus saying he is the living bread is claiming the divine life, the eternal life of God. Then Jesus shares this life with us. No longer will we hunger and thirst because we have a life that is beyond the daily struggle for bread. Jesus is the living bread, the new manna. The best way to think about this is hearing Jesus familiar words later in John. “I have come that they may have zoe and may have zoe abundantly” (10:10).
Finally, Jesus the living bread brings salvation. Jesus declares, “Those who believe have eternal life. I am the bread of life (47-48). The promise here is that Jesus who gives up his life, both bios and zoe life on the cross, grants eternal life to us as believers. We no longer have to struggle for daily bread because we have the living bread in Christ. There is much discussion about the Lord’s Supper and the body of Christ, and we will discuss that next week. One commentator writes, “Jesus’ final words “The bread I will give for the life of the world is my flesh” are both a revelation and a promise. This sentence reveals what is to happen before this gospel story is complete. Jesus will give his body literally. The promise is that this giving up will be for the life of the world (Working Preacher, Ginger Barfield). May we live in the reality of this revelation, with the comfort of Jesus’ promise to be our bread of life. Amen.
