Sermon, John 6:24-35 ‘Bread Of Life’

Here is tomorrow’s sermon.

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Introduction
She was the most severe manager I ever had at the office, and the only one who didn’t let her staff address her by Christian name. Mrs A D Freeman. She never let on what the A, let alone the D, stood for. A rumour went round that A was for Agnes, and she didn’t like the name.

She lived to work, and expected her staff to do the same. The idea that many people didn’t live to work but worked to live was foreign to her. It was probably dishonourable in her view.

And our passage today raises that kind of question: what do we work for? Not necessarily in the sense of paid employment and careers but in this sense: where do we put our energies? What matters to us? What are our deepest values and most precious concerns? What are we devoted to?

For the crowd catches up with Jesus after the feeding of the five thousand. You may recall from last week that Jesus knew they wanted to make him king by force, and so he slipped away. But when they find him and ask him when it was he had got to Capernaum [verse 25], he replies:

‘Very truly, I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For it is on him that God the Father has set his seal.’
[verses 26-27]

What food are you working for? asks Jesus. Food that perishes or food that endures for eternal life? Food that spoils or food that satisfies? It’s a question that bears asking today. And it bears asking of us.

1. Food That Spoils
The crowd had been fed from the five barley loaves and two fish. They took it as a sign that here was their military Messiah. This prophet would free them from the Romans like Moses who gave the manna had freed their ancestors from the Egyptians.

But Jesus resists. He knows that their ambition is for food that spoils. This ‘food’ of a military Messiah came with a use-by date. That date proved to be AD 70, when the Jewish uprising was ruthlessly crushed by Rome.

And it was ‘food that spoils’ in a spiritual sense. This might have brought political freedom had it worked, but with it would have come the poisons of vengeance and hatred.

So what has a ‘use-by date’ today? Well, just working for food and the basics does: not that it’s unimportant, but only to do that reduces us from abundant life to mere existence.

Others work for the weekend. It isn’t just young people who do so and go clubbing, only to be poisoned by alcohol and drug abuse. It’s also the middle-aged whose weekend is consumed by DIY, as if the beautiful home they create is an oasis or a sanctuary. Yet even a place like Broomfield has social problems. Just read the latest issue of the Broomfield Times and how Police Community Support Officer Lucy Smith reports on the level of nuisance behaviour and criminal damage. When the English make their home into a castle it’s food that spoils.

Or similarly, what about working for possessions? You just need a fire or a burglary or suffer a reduction in your income to know that this too is food that spoils.

Making career advancement our goal is of the same ilk. It can make us into ugly characters. We distort our identity when we are defined by our work. And it’s all vulnerable to failing at interview or redundancy. It has a use-by date.

Some may pour their energies into sexual pleasures, but the phase of a relationship that is established by the heady feeling of being ‘in love’ passes and then the relationship requires hard work. Alternatively it’s one night stands and treating people as disposable objects. Hardly ‘food that satisfies’ – it’s dehumanising, behaving as no more than an animal.

All of these and more are lifestyles that Christians have regularly exposed as not being what God wants for human beings. But how often do we settle for ‘food that spoils’ in church life? More often than we care to admit, I suggest.

We are contaminated by the consumerism of our society and if we’re not careful it affects the way we express our faith. Every time we use the expression ‘my church’ we need to walk a tightrope. Those of us who now worship in a nice building face particular dangers here. If we mean, ‘This is where I belong and is the base from which I work out my discipleship’, we remain balanced on the tightrope. If we say ‘my church’ as if in some sense we own it, then we fall off. It is Christ’s church and he wants it back. Unless our words and deeds acknowledge Jesus as Lord of the church we have settled for food that spoils.

My teenage description of the church was that it was ‘a God-club where God had been voted off the committee’. And God Club is what we have often made church. We make it the centre of our social life. We like church, because it is full of ‘people like us’. We exclude others on social grounds.

The desire for status infects the church, too. I don’t just mean ministers who think it’s their call to climb the greasy pole of the hierarchy and attain greater position and power. The same happens in the local congregation, where individuals enjoy power, don’t let go of jobs, dominate committees to the point that others are afraid to disagree, and generally behave like big fish in a small pond. Isn’t that altogether too pathetic to be food that satisfies?

If we ever wanted a prophetic warning that so many of our church habits have a limited shelf life, it came many years ago in Henry Drummond’s nineteenth century book ‘The City Without A Church’. This title is inspired by the text from Revelation where John says of the new Jerusalem, ‘I saw no temple therein’. Thus he says,

John, in his Revelation, holds up to the world the picture of a city without a church as his ideal of the heavenly life.

There is no temple in heaven. Its temple is the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb [Revelation 21:22]. Do we need any further proof that all our church games will not satisfy spiritual hunger?

2. Food That Satisfies
So what does Jesus say? He says,

‘This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.’
[verse 30]

Not exactly work, is it? He calls people to feed on ‘the bread of God that God sends’ [verse 33] and then says, ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.’ [verse 35]

Believing in Jesus provides eternal, satisfying sustenance. But what does this believing in Jesus involve?

Well it clearly means more than believing in his existence. The crowd know he exists and no sane historian ever troubles to doubt that. Jesus is attested to outside the Gospels by chroniclers of first century life. He’s not an invention. It has to be more.

It has to be a matter of believing in Jesus in the sense of trusting him – in fact, of entrusting our lives to his care and his direction. When we do that, we shall no longer be empty inside:

‘Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.’
[verse 35]

The ‘food that spoils’ leaves us empty inside – it cannot satisfy, it cannot fill or fulfil. But faith in Jesus means

‘there is no longer that core emptiness that the initial encounter with Jesus has met.’
[D A Carson, The Gospel According To John, p 288]

Our hunger for acceptance is met in the forgiveness of our sins at the Cross. No more need we wonder whether we are loved when we receive the gift of God’s forgiveness through repentance and faith.

Our hunger for relationship is met in being connected by the living God. There may be an ache in our hearts for certain human relationships but none can surpass the astonishing interest that the God of the universe takes in us.

Our hunger for purpose is met, too. For Christ brings us in on the divine enterprise of the kingdom of God. We are partners with him in bringing all things under the loving and compassionate reign of God. We do that not only in our church roles, but in every part of the world that we occupy, even when doing the most ordinary of jobs. Hear Henry Drummond again from ‘The City Without A Church’:

When Christianity shall take upon itself in full responsibility the burden and care of cities – the Kingdom of God will openly come on earth. People do not dispute that religion is in the church. What is now wanted it to let them see it in the city.

…

 

In every city throughout the world today, there is a city descending out of heaven from God. Each one of us daily building up this city – or helping to keep it back.

Now what better purpose could we want for our lives than that? It’s a majestic mountain in contrast to the ant hills of human ambition. And it’s open to people of all backgrounds. Take this story that Brian McLaren tells in his recent book ‘The Secret Message Of Jesus’ about a man named Carter, a seventy-five-year old African-American taxi driver in Washington, DC:

Back in 1994, Carter served as taxi driver for a man from Malawi, Africa. Because Carter wasn’t “just a taxi driver” but instead was “a taxi driver in the kingdom of God”, he treated his guest with special respect as only a taxi driver in the kingdom of God can. The guest introduced Carter to some other Malawian friends, and soon Carter the taxi driver was invited to visit Malawi, which he did, in 1998.

There, Carter saw poverty he had never before imagined. He prayed, “Lord, help me bring some joy to this village.” And God answered his prayer. First, Carter realized that there was no road in the village – just a narrow path, rutted and muddy. … With a proper road, people could get around better, and elderly and sick people could be transported to the hospital. He had brought some money, so he offered to pay for gas and oil and drivers if the people of the village would do the work. Soon Carter’s generous spirit – the spirit of the kingdom of God – became contagious, and someone provided a grader and then more and more people volunteered to help. Three days later, they had built a proper road a mile and a quarter long.
 

A year or so later, he returned to the village. A young man had been falsely accused of stealing and was stuck in jail. Since Carter seeks the kingdom and justice of God wherever he goes, he got involved, and soon the young man was set free. On this same visit, Carter met a boy who needed medical care that was available only in a distant city. Carter made it possible for the boy to get treatment on a regular basis by finding and convincing – who else? – a driver to take him.
 

The next year, he went back again and this time helped some young men improve their farming. (Carter is not an agriculturalist, but he used money he had saved from his job as a taxi driver for the kingdom of God to buy them some additional seeds.) He made connections and got twenty-six soccer balls donated to the children of the village, because in the kingdom of God, fun and play are important things. Carter knew this. He even helped them get uniforms, because in the kingdom of God dignity and pride are also important things.
 

On another trip, Carter the taxi driver’s generosity inspired a shopkeeper in the village to donate money to help some sick children get treatment for ringworm. Soon a Bible school was launched, and it grew from seventeen to eighty-five students quickly. No wonder – when you see signs of the kingdom of God coming to your village, you want to learn all about it!
 

Roads, rides, seeds, ringworm medicine, soccer balls and uniforms, a Bible school – these are all signs of the kingdom of God in that little village. Carter told me, “I don’t do any of this myself. God is doing it through me.”
[Brian McLaren, The Secret Message Of Jesus, pp 87-89.]

Carter. Just a humble taxi driver in the world’s eyes. Which do you suppose he is eating – food that spoils or food that satisfies?

And which are we eating?

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