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The Word That Feeds Us
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis November 23, 2003, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Deuteronomy 8:11-20 John 6:25-35a
On this Thursday next, we will sit down to a table of abundance and bow our heads in thanksgiving. Most of us will eat our fill, perhaps drink a little too much wine, say more than we should have said to an irritating relative, justify ourselves at the end of the day by removing the whipped cream from the top of the pumpkin pie, linger over coffee and candlelight. We will push ourselves from the table declaring that we will never eat anything again. Then, mere hours later, we will stand in front of an open refrigerator seeking “just a little something” to hold us until the morning. Some would say this not only describes our Thanksgiving feast, but it is also a metaphor for the state of our souls. We fill up our lives with those things incapable of sustaining life’s meaning and purpose [gadgets and gurus, money markets and media, fast food and frivolous sex, shallow religion and narcissistic politics] only to find ourselves empty at the end of the day or the month or the year or the life. “Do not work for the food that perishes but for the food that endures to eternal life,” said Jesus. What did he mean? According to John’s narrative, the day before we encounter Jesus in our text on the other side of the sea, we meet him on a mountain and in anticipation of the impending Passover feast. In other words, we meet him as the priests are preparing the sacrifice and as God’s people are assembling to eat the unleavened bread and the flesh of an unblemished lamb in remembrance of their deliverance from Egypt. The time, in John’s mind, is the time between the Passover feast and the messianic banquet, when the lamb to be sacrificed, the flesh to be “crunched” if the word is translated literally, is God’s Word become flesh, the only Son from the Father. In order that the multitude might seek, in this time, that which is able to sustain them, Jesus gives them a sign meant to point them in the direction of the God-with-whom-in-Him they have to do. The sign is a meal whose meaning is about to be missed all around. “How are we to buy bread so that these people may eat?” Jesus asks the disciples. The question was a set-up. Oblivious to the truth staring them in the face, the pressing questions in the minds of the disciples were simply questions of quantity and cost: they are the questions in our minds as by our pledges we signify our understanding the ministry and mission of Christ’s church to be a matter of quantity and cost, oblivious to the God with whom we are now having to do. “How are we to buy bread, so that these people may eat?” Philip asks. “Two hundred denarii would not [even] buy enough for each of them to get a little.” In response to the disciples’ missed cue, Jesus acts, asking the people to sit down. He takes five barley loaves and two fish from a little boy, “and after giving thanks,” he distributes the food: “as much as they wanted” they ate. This is NOT an example of what happens when people share, sweet as that sentiment is in stewardship season: it is a sign pointing us to the power of the living God! Almost as an aside, John tells us “when people had eaten their fill,” when these five thousand men, women and children had pushed themselves away from the abundance Jesus had provided, he orders the disciples to gather up the leftovers so that nothing would be lost. That is to say, nothing given by God must be or can be lost. The twelve baskets filled with the food, with the word that endures, are ultimately gathered and given into the keeping of the twelve apostles, gathered and given now to Christ’s church, to us. What has this event meant to those fed by this sign? In a word: nothing much. The people think themselves in the presence of a prophet whom they immediately mean to make king. Utilitarian one and all, they reason that if he can feed a multitude, he can liberate a people from Roman rule. Jesus eludes their grasp and even slips from the sight of the disciples. “It was now dark,” John continues as he follows the disciples to the end of the day, “and Jesus had not yet come to them.” The sentence speaks a truth we know. They dare a stormy sea without him, but at the height of the storm, he appears on the water, landing them immediately on the shore at Capernaum. Here, at long last, our text begins. Now I tell you all of this because often a text cannot be heard apart from its context, a context that makes many believe this chapter to be the center of John’s gospel and, for John, the lynchpin in the story of God’s saving purposes from the Passover feast to the heavenly banquet, from exodus to resurrection, from the commandments to the Word made flesh! Once again, we are reading a story told on a story: a Midrash. Specifically, John is telling us the story of the exodus of God’s people in reverse! From the feeding of the people in the wilderness with bread miraculously provided and sufficient for the day’s hunger [“the one that gathered much had nothing over and the one that gathered little had no lack,” records Exodus, “each gathered according to what he could eat”], we page back to the crossing of the Red Sea [says Jesus to the frightened disciples, literally translated, “I am. Do not be afraid,” even as God said to Moses, “Tell them ‘I am’ will be with you”], turning then another page and another until we arrive at the beginning of the story of the Passover [a lamb without blemish sacrificed, its blood put on the doorposts as a sign to the Lord to pass over, its flesh eaten with unleavened bread as a feast to the Lord is kept to this day]. What John is trying to tell us is that in Jesus, we are having to do with the God of the exodus, with the God who delivers God’s people now not from the political slavery of a tyrant, but from physical and spiritual slavery to that which perishes: in him God has heard our cry and has come to save us from death and deliver us to a table where we will hunger and thirst no more! In that context, we come at last to our text. “Rabbi,” the people say to Jesus when they finally find him again at Capernaum, “when did you come here,” or more accurately translated “Where did you come from?” Like the disciples worried about quantity and cost, the people think they are asking for Jesus’ “trip tic,” or asking again, a few verses later, after his biological origin, “Is he not the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know?” This question, of course, is the question we are about to ask of him in the season ahead, the mystery of his origins eluding us still. Seeing through their literal question to the question upon which our lives hang as on a gossamer thread, Jesus says, “You have come after me not because you saw signs [not because the power of the living God revealed yesterday was noticed as you stuffed yourself full], but because you want another happy meal.” In other words, you are still dealing in death, in that which cannot sustain, in that which perishes. “Fair enough,” they say, “then what do we have to do (in essence) to get God?” He tells them to do the one thing they cannot do for themselves, the thing only God can work in them: “Believe,” he says. Put your life and [in the case of the subject at hand this Sunday] your money on the truth that in Him the word God speaks has become flesh and stands before you. We cannot believe and, like those crowds of old, we ask for something more to hang our reasonable heads upon. A sign, they say, give us another sign like the manna Moses gave to the Israelites in the wilderness. What the crowd demanded was that “they should see food actually falling from heaven as their fathers had seen it falling in the desert.” [Hoskyns] The rabbis had asked, “What did the first redeemer? He brought down the manna. And the last redeemer will bring down the manna.” But the answer we are being given in this story is simply and profoundly this: He is the bread of God come down from heaven to give life to the world. He is the sign, the miracle, the Word. Still the perishable categories of death persist in the heads of the people and no doubt in our own heads too: “Lord give us this bread always,” they demand, as if to say, give us a lifetime supply of this bread and perhaps then we will trust that you are able to take care of us for the foreseeable future. “I am the bread,” says Jesus speaking in the category of eternal life. “The one who comes to me shall never hunger, and the one who believes in me shall never thirst.” My friends, this is the word that feeds us and is the word we have been given for the sake of the world God so loved. To hear it and understand it and trust it requires work on our part: a responsible and disciplined listening. As one commentator put it, “If the only way one can learn how to respond appropriately to God’s grace is by listening, one had better learn how to listen carefully! One’s relationship to God may depend on how carefully one listens and understands what is being said…Hearing is the key to trust in God.” You cannot imagine the pressure to make the proclamation of God’s word an easy word, an entertaining word, an emotionally pleasing word, a cheap word. God knows my life would be simpler and we would get along much better. But then, you would go hungry in the world and be vulnerable to every so-called truth that will perish with the next spiritual fad. Hard as it is, I would rather send you away angry because you have had to chew hard and long on the meaning of this Word given to us in Him. As was the case then, so it is now that “many drew back and no longer went about with him saying, ‘This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?’” As was the case then, so it is now that those who work at it also are given to believe there is no other truth worth their lives. “Lord,” said Peter at the chapter’s end, “to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” So we listen, and “God speaks to each of us as God makes us, then walks with us, silently, out of the night. These are the words we dimly hear: You, sent out, beyond your recall…Do not let yourself lose me. Nearby is a country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness. Give me your hand.” [Rilke] Therefore let the hungry multitude assemble on this Thursday next, but by his grace may we be those at the feast who are given to trust that, no matter the turkey sliced or the stuffing consumed, no matter the number at the table or the silence of one dining alone, no matter the accumulated grief or the hidden woes, we shall be fed by the God whose Word made flesh in Jesus Christ has delivered us from that which perishes, has freed us from all that cannot sustain our lives, has brought us out of our slavery to death and has promised to sit us down together, that all may feast on a Word so rich and abundant that none will ever go hungry again. Thanks be to God. |