What is spiritual bread?

Jesus says “I am the bread of life” (John 6.35). And this morning we’re back in John 6 where Jesus unpacks what this claim means. The significance of this image can be lost on us today. We have lots of choice when it comes to food and we can choose not to eat something. Some of us are possibly even “carb free”. When I first moved to Newcastle, I was eating a perfectly respectable meal when a friend said “What are you doing? You’ve got potatoes and bread on your plate...That’s double carbs you can’t do that”. Well where I come from double carbs is not just accepted, it’s celebrated. You couldn’t avoid carbs in the ancient world, because bread was the staple food. And there weren’t varieties of bread. Focaccia - at the risk of sounding even more uncultured, it was only introduced to me five or six years ago. Focaccia is a genius invention - carbs plus a load of salt! Aren’t the Italians wonderful?

In the 1st century you needed bread to survive. Jesus was saying “I am spiritual bread. You need me in order to survive”. And many of his hearers just couldn’t cope with that. We see this clearly at the beginning of next week’s passage, John 6.60, where some of Jesus’ followers say “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?” or “...who can accept it?” They find Jesus’ teaching intolerable. They can’t accept his claims. That’s the tension of our passage this morning: on one hand life-transforming teachings of who Jesus is, but on the other his exposure of what failure to accept him looks like. We’ll see both of these this morning. Let’s pray:

Heavenly Father, your son Jesus is the bread of life. Please show us more of who he is this morning. For his name’s sake, Amen.

Do please have John 6.41-59 open in front of you, it’s on page 892. And here’s our first point:

1. Hard teaching number 1: Jesus came from heaven for us (John 6.41-51)

Reading from John 6.41-42:

So the Jews grumbled about him, because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” They said, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How does he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?”

So, the Jewish leaders were saying, “what’s Jesus doing? We know who he is. He’s from Nazareth. He’s Mary and Joseph’s boy. He can’t possibly have the right to claim to come from heaven!” They’re offended by Jesus’ personal claim – his claim to be bread, his claim to come from God - a claim of divine heritage. The Jewish leaders did not believe Jesus because he wasn’t living up to their expectations. Wrong credentials. Wrong message. In our world today, lots of people are happy to believe in a god, but what they want is a God who matches their expectations. Maybe you’ve been there yourself, or maybe you have friends or family who are happy to say they’re spiritual (they’re happy to say they believe in God) but when we talk about Jesus coming from heaven to personally expose and deal with individual sin – no thank you! The idea of a God who calls us to turn from the way we want to live to follow him as Lord – definitely not! That’s a hard teaching. An unacceptable one. God, the one true God of the Bible, is not the god for them. But the Bible really isn’t interested in the kind of god we’d like to believe in. It’s interested in the God who is there. The God who, in Jesus, came down from heaven for us. Jesus, as always, cuts to the heart of the issue – John 6.43-46:

Jesus answered them, “Do not grumble among yourselves. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day. It is written in the Prophets, ‘And they will all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me—not that anyone has seen the Father except he who is from God; he has seen the Father.

For Jesus, the issue isn’t us evaluating his claims. That’s important to do. So, if you’re here this morning and you’re not yet a Christian, we want to help you look into Jesus and, without any pressure, make a decision about him. For Jesus, the issue is comparing him against our own ideas of who we want God to be. Because when someone places their trust in him he says it’s not because they’ve weighed him up and decided he’s the kind of God they can live with. It’s because they’ve accepted Jesus on his terms. And John 6.44, it’s because God has drawn them to him. John 6.45 describes the kind of drawing that God will do in people’s lives. Jesus quotes Isaiah 54.13:

and they will all be taught by God.

Which is a picture of the people of God standing in God’s presence, being taught his truth. The true family of God with God forever. Jesus is fulfilling this. So the drawing of John 6.44 involves the giving of a teaching, or an insight. I remember a friend telling me that before he became a Christian he felt like he was stumbling around in the dark trying to make sense of himself, his life, his surroundings. And he said that becoming a Christian was like someone turning on the lights. He began to make sense of everything and best of all he came into relationship with God because for the first time he could really see and accept who Jesus is. And that’s a great way of explaining the kind of drawing work of God that Jesus is describing here. Because left to our own devices, we are all stumbling around in the dark when it comes to who Jesus is. We just can’t see and accept it. But becoming a Christian is like God himself reaching into our lives and turning on the light. It’s like him taking the truth of who of Jesus is and all he has done, and through his Spirit, and planting it deep in us so that we see it and believe it. And can say “Jesus is what I need. He is the bread of life! I want to live for him.” No one can become a follower of Jesus without God doing that miraculous “drawing” within them.

So, does someone need to decide for themselves to follow Jesus, and actively put their trust in him? Yes. Is God behind, through, and in that decision doing the Spiritual work, drawing them to Jesus and into relationship with him? Yes. Is getting our heads round how both these things can be true at the same time hard to understand? Yes. But the Bible says both are true and run in parallel together. Like the two rails down at Jesmond metro station they’re always together and always need to be held together, or else everything goes wrong. Put together they show us the real need for individual, personal, trust in Jesus (which is why our part is to keep speaking to people about Jesus). But faith is given to us: it’s put by God within us and it’s sustained by him. Which is why we need to pray for God to give, and if he has already, to sustain faith in us. And that’s always the most important thing we can pray for each other. The Jewish leaders were trusting in their lifestyle and their works. They didn’t think they needed anything, and they certainly didn’t think they needed Jesus. But Jesus said they needed saving from death. Look down to John 6.47-50:

“...Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die.”

Following the Exodus, God provided manna (bread) for his people in the wilderness. It was a huge miracle but eventually the people who ate it died. It did not keep them alive forever! So Jesus is saying that it’s going to take something new, a far greater miracle, a better bread to sustain people forever. He is the bread that can sustain life not just day to day, year by year, but forever so that whoever believes in him can have eternal life. Nothing and nobody else but Jesus will do. He came from heaven to show us that without him we are all hungry and desperate. And he came to meet that need. The point is, even if you kid yourself and act like you’re ok right now. What are you doing to do about death? What will you do about eternity?

Our works, our lifestyle, our religious observance, “being a good person”. It’s not enough. Our friends, however respectable their lives may be - if they don’t trust Jesus it’s not enough. Jesus alone is the bread of life. And without a work of God in us, none of us can see that because the world tells us that we can live our lives the way we want, and that what we do defines us. There probably isn’t a God. But if there is, he’ll forgive us anyway won’t he? After all, isn’t that’s his job? Isn’t that what most people believe? Jesus is saying “No. I came from heaven for you. You need to see that, and it’s going to take a work of God to open your eyes to it.” It’s a hard teaching, but there’s more to come. So, secondly and lastly:

2. Hard teaching number 2: Jesus came to die for us (John 6.51-59)

John 6.51-52:

I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live for ever. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”

So Jesus further unpacks how he is living bread by explaining that it is his flesh, his life, which he will voluntarily give for the life of the world (i.e. anyone) by dying on the cross. And the Jewish leaders say “Now he’s saying he’s going to give us his flesh to eat? What on earth is he talking about?” They don’t understand. It’s a hard teaching. But Jesus doubles down on the imagery (John 6.53):

So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.

Unless someone depends on his death they have no life. But, positively, John 6.54-56 he says:

Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him.

So, if we feel peckish we go to Tesco: we select the food we want, we pay for it, and we go home and eat. Or we go a restaurant and order whatever we fancy on the menu – steak, chips and bread. That’ll do. We don’t think much about the whole process. Our modern world hides it from us, but the truth is, when we eat, we eat because something has died for us to eat. I do eat healthily really. But fruit I ate this morning was not attached the tree. The meat we eat is eaten because was reared to be killed and then eaten. Jesus is saying “you live because I die. You take your sustenance from me or you’re dead. If you want eternal life it’s because I will die for you”.

That first Easter Jesus died the death we deserved, so that we might live. He bore our sin: the way we treated God, the way we’ve treated others. He bore it all on the cross. And, defeating it, he rose again. And we can taste eternal life with him by feeding on him – taking him in. Which means believing him, abandoning all that we are to him, and relying not on ourselves but on his forgiveness today and all our days. That is the life that Jesus offers to you. It’s a hard teaching. It’s an impossible teaching to accept unless you admit you need him. But who else guarantees that they he can sustain you in this life and bring you through it into the world to come? What’s absolutely amazing is that when we trust Jesus John 6.56 is what’s true of us. We abide in him. We follow him, and we keep doing so – feeding on him, relying on him today and for all our days. And he abides in us. He helps us. He blesses us. He transforms us. He’s with us, intimately. He lives in us by his Spirit because he’s taken up permanent residence in our lives. And when life gets tough us being in Jesus and Jesus being in us makes all the difference in the world because Jesus is with us. And one day, he will bring us into eternity with him.

This morning is a Communion service and later on we will pray these words together:

We do not presume to come to this your table, merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in your manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under your table, but you are the same Lord whose nature is always to have mercy. Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of your dear Son Jesus Christ and to drink his blood, that we may evermore dwell in him and he in us.

And the feeding language in this prayer is not related to the bread and the wine but (metaphorically) to the death of Jesus which the bread and wine of communion represent. Or as someone once said “John 6 is not about the Lord’s Supper, rather, the Lord’s Supper is about what is described in John 6”. Really, physically, Jesus is only in heaven. Figuratively, Jesus is in the bread and the wine. But spiritually, he is in us as Christians who eat and drink it. The bread of life died so that we could live forever. He paid for our sins, so we could be free from him. We feed on him. We live off him. We trust that we’re safe in him and that he’s at work in us. Communion isn’t magic. But it is, as the Reformers put it, a “means of grace”. It’s a spiritually powerful, physical, unique way of remembering with humble thankfulness all that Jesus has done for us and all that he one day will do.

So, brothers and sisters, as we eat the bread and drink the wine this morning together we do so expressing our wonder, our thanks, our amazement and our utter dependence on Jesus Christ...The bread of life. Let’s pray:

Heavenly Father, we are needy and we need Jesus. He is the bread of life. He’s who we need to keep going, and he’s who we need to enjoy eternity with you. Please open our eyes to the truth. Show us our need of him. Help us to trust him, to rely on him and to feed on him in faith. For your glory and honour we ask it, Amen.