Tenth Sunday after Trinity 2024

John's account of the feeding miracle leads James to explore the Bread of Life discourse — Jesus's astonishing claim to be the bread that comes down from heaven, given for the life of the world. What does it mean to feed on him?

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

And so, Heavenly Father, as we come now to reflect on your words together, by your Holy Spirit, would you reveal to us the living word, the word made flesh? Amen. Twice in that passage we just read, a word was used that I'd like us to spend the majority of our time this morning reflecting on, and that's the word sign. What is a sign and what does it signify? I'm sure you, like me, have been watching non-stop the Olympics that have been going on in uh in Paris. I mean, I'm I'm amazed at myself every time this happens because I have very, very little interest in any of those sports. And then as soon as the Olympics come on, I find myself uh uh armchair warrior wanting to watch everything and kind of having all these opinions all of a sudden. But it's left me wondering what is it that these competitors are competing for? What exactly, why are they there? What do they want? Well, the obvious answer is that they want to win. They want to win a gold medal. But let me suggest it's slightly more complicated than that. Because if all they wanted was to win a gold medal, then they could just box it to them and send them home. Why would they need all this fanfare, all this hullabaloo? If all you wanted was the gold medal, when to win, you wouldn't have to travel across to Paris. You could just go swimming in your local swimming pool, do the time trial, make sure that it's verified, submit your results, and then the Olympic Committee could send you a gold medal in the post. Or if all they wanted was the gold medal, then there are plenty of other ways to get gold medals. You could buy enough gold and then smelt it down and create your own gold medal. I'm sure there are Olympians who have sold their medal on the eBay, you could go and buy one. Or, and actually plenty of Olympians have tried this, you could cheat and make sure that you get the gold medal by doping or some other means. Why do the friends and family have to be there? Why does all the crowd have to be there? You finish running the 10 100 meters, you do it in under 10 seconds, someone throws you the gold medal and you go home. We're here to win, aren't we? We want to get the gold medal. Why do we need everything else? Now, I'm asking a series of very stupid questions to pull apart something that is obvious and something that we take for granted. It's not just about the gold medal. The gold medal signifies a whole lot of other meanings that are kind of embedded in what it is to gain a gold medal. For the person who wins, they are now an Olympian. They have represented their nation at the highest level. Everyone knows that they have trained really hard for years and made a huge sacrifice. Their friends and their families have made a sacrifice with them, supported them through tough times, spent lots of money. It means that they're recognized by their colleagues in the field and the rest of the world as being the greatest at something, and that they stand in a long tradition that comes before them and on whose shoulders they stand. The gold medal itself is a touch point, is a sign of a whole set of other things that it means, that it signifies, and it works the other way around. Having all of those things in and of themselves is all well and good, but it's a bit nebulous without this central symbol, the gold medal, to hold all of those meanings together. In our gospel reading, I think what we what what we witness is a conversation between Jesus and the crowd, where Jesus, in effect, says to the crowd, you want the gold medal divorced from all the things that it means. Let me offer another picture to say the same thing, but slightly differently. If you've ever been driving down the motorway in France, you'll know that they do something slightly different to the UK motorway system, which is as you're coming up to a town, they have a brown sign that kind of gives some of the history of the place or offers a bit of the essence of the place. So if it's a town that's famous for its fishing, then the brown sign would have a sailboat with some nets, or if it's a town that's got a particularly uh industrious crockery industry, then you might see a potter's wheel on the sign. The sign is, you guessed it, a sign. And behind that sign is what it signifies: the town. Now, no one would say that they've been to the town just because they've looked at the sign. Hopefully, what the sign does is give a foretaste of what the town is like, the essence of the town. And hopefully, the point of that sign is to entice you further in, to draw you in, to go and visit the place for yourself, maybe to make your home there. Without the sign, you might never know that the town exists. You just completely miss it and drive down the motorway. But it would be completely to miss the point, to focus on the sign and not see what the sign was pointing to. In our gospel reading this morning, the conversation between Jesus and the crowd goes like this: You are in love with the sign, but you don't want to actually visit the town that it represents. We're in the Gospel of John, chapter six. The lectionary is going to give us five weeks on this chapter. This is week number two. We're going to slow down and go through chunk by chunk this whole chapter. It starts last week, you'll remember Peter was preaching on the feeding of the five thousand. And then the rest of the chapter is John describing first the crowd's reaction to Jesus feeding all of those people, and then, secondly, the theological implications of what it might mean. Firstly, that Jesus feeds the 5,000, and secondly, that Jesus is the bread of life. And this week we're going to focus on the crowd's reaction. I think as modern 21st century people living in Blackburn, we find it quite hard to emotionally engage with what's going on in this passage, the emotional implications of Jesus feeding 5,000 people with just a young boy's lunchbox. We find ourselves tempted to ask interesting academic questions. How is it physically possible that Jesus fed that many people with just a lunchbox? But what we see in the passage is not an academic series of questions, but a guttural emotional response from the crowd. There was no modern farming practices, there were no modern crop rotations. Most people lived on the land and ate the food that they could make. And so they were very familiar with the annual cycle of feast and famine, of the annual anxiety of wondering, will my crops last me to feed me and my family until the next harvest time? Very familiar with wondering, can the land sustain me and my family? And so Jesus comes along and he feeds thousands of people with a little boy's lunchbox. And how do the crowd react? They say, This guy can feed us, we won't ever be hungry if he's around. Let's make him king. One of the verses that we read last week. When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force and make him king, he withdrew to the mountain by himself. We ask an academic question. How is this possible? They ask a guttural question, how do we make him king? He should be in charge. If he can feed us when we live in this constant anxiety of being hungry, he should be the one in king. So the crowd start to swarm and they're about to revolt, and Jesus has to leg it out of there and escape to a solitary place. And so this week we have a fascinating interaction between Jesus and the crowd. The crowd eventually find Jesus after he's crossed over the lake to the other side. They walk round the outside of the lake, they come to him and they say, Where have you been? And he says, You guys are only interested in the foods that I can give you. But what I'm trying to point to is not food that can perish, but food that will last for eternity. And the crowd say to him, What must we do to perform these works for ourselves? Here's the modern translation of that line. Teach us how to do the magic trick that you did. How can we turn a lunchbox of food into feeding the five thousand? Which is why Jesus responds by saying, That's the wrong kind of work. We're not interested in magic tricks. The only work you should be focused on is following me and believing in me. So the crowds try another tactic to get Jesus to feed them. He says, Well, you do the work then, Jesus. You know Moses gave our ancestors manna in the wilderness. Hint, hint, he did it for 40 years, Jesus. Can you be like Moses and feed us for 40 years? You'd better feed us again. Jesus says, Again, he says, You're focused on the wrong thing. It wasn't Moses who gave you the bread anyway. It was your father in heaven. That was heavenly bread itself. And it was only a foretaste. It was only a sign of the one to come. Me, the real bread. Again, the crowd still not getting it. Oh, that sounds really tasty, Jesus. Give us some of the real bread. To which Jesus replies, that famous line, I am the bread. I am the bread of life. Jesus makes it very clear. The crowd wanted the food, but they didn't want the giver of the food. The crowd wanted the physical food, but they weren't at all interested in the food from heaven. The crowd wanted the gold medal, but they couldn't care less about all the things that it signified, and they didn't want to do the work that leads to it. They wanted to cheat. The crowd found themselves enamored by this brown sign on the side of the motorway. They thought, this is all we need. This will keep us sustained. But they weren't interested in following Jesus into the place where he lives to make their home with him. The crowd wanted someone to feed them, but they weren't at all interested in being sustained by the bread of life. So, what does all of this mean for us in the 21st century today in Blackburn? Let me offer two small things and then we'll be done. Firstly, it is still very easy to make the same mistake that the crowd made in Jesus' day. It's so easy to get focused on the sign and miss what it signifies. So we find ourselves debating over the Bible and getting so focused on this book and its pages that we forget that it's there to point us to the living word, the word made flesh. We get so focused on the music of our worship. Oh, I didn't like that hymn. Oh, I'm not sure about that. The organ was too loud or too quiet or not loud enough. That we forget that all of those things are just an aid, just a tool in worshiping the living God. We can get so focused on this building. That piece of furniture should be there. That piece of furniture. I remember when it used to be like this, so focused on this beautiful building that we forget that it's just a place where the Holy Spirit resides, one place among many. So don't let the sign become so enticing to you that you forget what it's trying to signify. All the trappings of our worship services, which we work hard to make right and do as beautifully as possible, they are just signs that point to a heavenly reality. So that's the first thing I'd like to say. And here's the second. Please, when you come forward for communion this morning, come forward recognizing that you are a starving person. You are malnourished, and you need to be sustained by Jesus Christ. When Jesus said, I am the bread of life, he was speaking to people who knew what it is to starve. Jesus fed thousands of people, and the mob tried to make him king. Now I think, and rightly so, understandably so, we struggled to engage with this because about a hundred meters that way, there was a supermarket with 20, 30 different types of bread. I've never struggled to get bread in my life. And so my physical cessation makes me feel emotionally sated, spiritually sated. I am a starving man. And so are you. Jesus, friends, is the only one who can sustain us, the only one who can nourish us. When he offers us the bread of life, he knows, even if we don't, that without him we will starve. And so would we remember that this morning as we come forward for communion? Amen.