The Bread from Heaven
Notes
Transcript
Welcome & Introduction
Welcome & Introduction
Good morning church! It is my delight and my privilege to be able to bring the Word of God to you this morning. Today we are going to be in the gospel of John, looking at the first of Jesus’ “I am” statements that he makes throughout the gospel. If you aren’t familiar with the “I am” statements, these are seven explicit metaphors that Jesus makes about himself throughout the course of John’s gospel that each tell us something specific about his person and his work. They are as follows:
I am the bread of life (John 6.35)
I am the light of the world (John 8.12)
I am the door of the sheep (John 10.7)
I am the good shepherd (John 10.11)
I am the resurrection and the life (John 11.25)
I am the way, the truth, and the life (John 14.6)
I am the true vine (John 15.1)
Each of these seven statements reveals crucial aspects of Christ’s character and of his ministry. My hope this morning is that as we work our way through Jesus’ claim to be the bread of life we will gain a better understanding of who he is and what he came to do, and that we will delight in the joy that comes with knowing Christ. So to start today, please open up your Bibles with me and turn to John 6.22-69:
On the next day the crowd that remained on the other side of the sea saw that there had been only one boat there, and that Jesus had not entered the boat with his disciples, but that his disciples had gone away alone. Other boats from Tiberias came near the place where they had eaten the bread after the Lord had given thanks. So when the crowd saw that Jesus was not there, nor his disciples, they themselves got into the boats and went to Capernaum, seeking Jesus.
When they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him, “Rabbi, when did you come here?” Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, you are seeking 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 to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you. For on him God the Father has set his seal.” Then they said to him, “What must we do, to be doing the works of God?” Jesus answered them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” So they said to him, “Then what sign do you do, that we may see and believe you? What work do you perform? Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’ ” Jesus then said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” They said to him, “Sir, give us this bread always.”
Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst. But I said to you that you have seen me and yet do not believe. All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out. For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me. And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day. For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.”
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’?” 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. 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. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. 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 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. 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. As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever feeds on me, he also will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like the bread the fathers ate, and died. Whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.” Jesus said these things in the synagogue, as he taught at Capernaum.
When many of his disciples heard it, they said, “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?” But Jesus, knowing in himself that his disciples were grumbling about this, said to them, “Do you take offense at this? Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before? It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. But there are some of you who do not believe.” (For Jesus knew from the beginning who those were who did not believe, and who it was who would betray him.) And he said, “This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father.”
After this many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him. So Jesus said to the twelve, “Do you want to go away as well?” Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.”
Before we begin this morning, let’s take a moment to pray:
Gracious God, we thank you for the revelation of yourself in your Word. We are grateful that you have revealed yourself to us both through the Bible and through the person of your Son, Jesus. As we examine his words today, we pray that your Holy Spirit will enlighten our hearts and give our minds clarity as to the purpose and the call of Jesus’ words, and that through studying this “I am” statement we will come to a greater appreciation and love of Jesus’ person and his work. Give us ears to hear, eyes to see, and hearts to respond to the message that you have prepared for us today. Amen.
Setting the Scene
Setting the Scene
As we begin this morning, it is important for us to properly set the scene so that we understand the immediate context of our passage. Our text today occurs directly after Jesus has preached the Sermon on the Mount (even though the specific text of the sermon is not mentioned in John’s gospel) and has capped off his teaching by performing a miracle and feeding the five thousand men (plus many additional women and children!) in the crowd. The crowd has seen the miracle and has recognized it as such and is ready to take Jesus by force and make him king. So Jesus withdraws to the mountain and then sends his disciples ahead of him across the Sea of Galilee, eventually catching up to them by walking across the sea (but that is a sermon for another time!). All that helps to set the context for what Jesus is about to teach in this passage, so I want us to keep it in mind as we begin to explore our passage today.
Today’s sermon will be divided up into three sections. The first section will cover v. 22-60 and will focus on the three “heart conditions” that we see among the crowd (and, at the end of the passage, even amongst some of Jesus’ followers) that ultimately prevent us from understanding the gospel and accepting the words of Christ. The second section will focus on the core of Jesus’ teaching in this passage, and will focus on the two major things that Jesus calls for his followers to do. Finally, we will spend the end of our time today talking about the proper response to Jesus’ self-revelation in our passage today.
The Three Heart Conditions
The Three Heart Conditions
Our passage opens on a mountain beside the Sea of Galilee, where the crowd that had been listening to Jesus the day before realizes that he is no longer there. They come to the conclusion that he must have crossed the sea, so a number of them load into boats and sail all the way across to the other side. When they reach the shore, they find Jesus and ask him: “Rabbi, when did you come here?”. Jesus does not directly answer their question, but instead responds in a way that reveals the heart behind why they have followed him, highlighting the first of the three heart conditions that we are going to examine this morning. Jesus tells them:
English Standard Version Chapter 6
Truly, truly, I say to you, you are seeking me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. 27 Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you. For on him God the Father has set his seal.”
The fact that they are only here because they ate their fill of the loaves shows that they view their relationship with Jesus (and therefore with God) as transactional - if they only do what Jesus wants, then he will be obligated to give them provision for their physical needs and provide for the things that they want. They are following Jesus because they think that they can derive material benefits from him. They come to him not for the salvation of their souls, but instead to improve their current material situation. Sadly, this heart condition continues to run rampant in the world today, and we especially see its expression in cultural Christianity here in the United States. Think about the “prosperity theology” that is so deeply embedded into our cultural zeitgeist! Just as an aside here, I think it’s useful to call it “prosperity theology” instead of the “prosperity gospel” as it is better known - mostly because there is no “good news” in prosperity theology! But inherent to prosperity theology is this idea that if we worship God and we come to Him that He “owes” us something. There’s this idea that if we give money to the church that God will give us back even more money, that if we just have enough faith and just pray hard enough that God is obligated to give us good health or cure us from terminal conditions. There’s this mentality that God is just going to give us everything in abundance, even though that is not specifically what he promises! Think about what Jesus has actually just preached in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 6.19-34:
“Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
“The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!
“No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.
“Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.
“Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.
Jesus does not promise us abundance, he does not promise us material wealth and happiness. He simply promises that if we seek the Kingdom of God and his righteousness that he will provide us with exactly what we need. But it is this transactional approach to God that Jesus immediately recognizes in the hearts of the people who have sought him out, and he immediately issues them a correction in John 6.27:
Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you. For on him God the Father has set his seal.”
What Jesus is doing here is turning the focus from the temporal to the eternal. Friends, our salvation is not primarily a matter of providing for our material needs and blessing us in this life - rather it is about reconciling our sinful selves to the Holy God so that we can enjoy His presence and love for eternity. If our spiritual eyesight is so myopic that we are only considering the comfort and the pleasure of our lives in this world, then we have not truly understood the gospel! We do not primarily need material provision - what we truly need is spiritual food.
The people then respond: “What must we do, to be doing the works of God?” Jesus responds by telling them: “believe in Him who He has sent”. The response from the crowd brings us to the second heart condition that keeps us from understanding the gospel - a desire to cling to our own passions and our own convictions over seeing and believing in who Jesus is. The crowd has their own pre-existing framework for how they see the world, and Jesus does not fit neatly into that framework! He does not fully comply with their own expectations. This is why they ask Jesus what sign he brings - they want him to “prove” himself and conform to their own expectations. This is one of the moments when I most clearly see the ways that I am not like Jesus, because if I were in his sandals I would probably have thrown up my hands in exasperation and exclaimed: “Didn’t you all eat your fill of the loaves yesterday?” The crowd expects Jesus to comport himself in a way that they expect of the prophets. This is one of those moments when it is especially helpful to remember the context of this passage and how Jesus has just finished delivering the Sermon on the Mount. During the sermon, Jesus constantly challenged the prevailing wisdom of the people. Think about how many times he told them “You have heard it said, but now I say to you...” The gospels often note about how Jesus taught with authority - when they say that, this is what they mean - he challenged the conventional wisdom of the day. He challenged the interpretations of the religious leaders and demonstrated that they often fundamentally misunderstood what was intended in the Law. This is part of the reason that the religious leaders of his day saw him as being so dangerous! They had a pretty good system going for themselves where they were very content at the top of the proverbial totem pole. Jesus was a threat to their authority because he taught with his own authority and showed that their understanding and their interpretations of the Law were not authoritative.
This, unfortunately, is also an attitude that we often see today. It is very easy for us to become so enamored with our own opinions and our own policy positions that instead of allowing the truth of the gospel to change our minds, we demand that the gospel adapt itself to meet our own expectations. Far too many people have moved away from the faith because their political convictions were stronger than their spiritual convictions. Far too many people have re-made Jesus and his teaching in their own likeness because his actual teachings offended them. This is something that we as Christians must always do our best to guard against. Some value their bodily autonomy more highly than they value the gospel, so they reject the clear teachings of the Bible on abortion and murder. Others value their country more highly than the gospel, and so they make all sorts of additions to the gospel to reflect their view of America as God’s new chosen people. Some value their sexual identity more than the gospel, and therefore demand that the clear teachings of the Bible on homosexuality and transgenderism must be ignored. Some value their possessions, some their political power, some their comfort, some their jobs, some their understanding of what God is like that they were taught when they were little. At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter what it is that we value more than Jesus. The only thing that matters is that he is not the thing that we value the most.
Friends, I encourage all of us today to examine our hearts. Is there something that we hold more highly than Jesus? Is there something that we cling to so tightly that it gets in between us becoming closer to Christ? Is there a teaching of Jesus (or of Scripture more generally) that challenges us to the point that we refuse to accept it and assume that we simply must know better because it doesn’t feel right? There are many people who leave healthy, biblical churches over this heart condition, only to seek out another gathering that affirms whatever particular point of view that they have rather than the truths of the gospel. And there are a great many churches that have sprung up to cater to people of a particular point of view - you only need to read the news about one of the many denominational splits to see that! It’s enlightening to see that this is not a new phenomenon - it is something that existed all the way back during Jesus’ ministry, but that should help to underscore to us how seriously we must take the task of examining our own hearts. Friends, let us pray that we do not fall to the temptation of pride and seek to remake Jesus in our own image!
The last heart condition actually occurs at the end of the passage, and we are going to jump down there now before returning to the bulk of what Jesus has to say in our second point. We see the final heart condition most clearly in John 6.60-66
When many of his disciples heard it, they said, “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?” But Jesus, knowing in himself that his disciples were grumbling about this, said to them, “Do you take offense at this? Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before? It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. But there are some of you who do not believe.” (For Jesus knew from the beginning who those were who did not believe, and who it was who would betray him.) And he said, “This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father.”
After this many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him.
We’ll talk in more detail about what specifically was such a hard saying in a moment. But the heart condition that we need to see here is that these people have seen and have understood the demand that Jesus is placing upon them and have decided that it is too much to bear. This is, perhaps, the saddest of the heart conditions that we see this morning, because it implies that the person has genuinely heard and understood what Jesus is asking them to do. Jesus himself speaks directly to this situation in Luke 14.26-30, saying:
“If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish.’
If we truly understand what Jesus is calling us to, we know that it will be difficult. As we talked about earlier, Jesus does not promise us sunshine and rainbows as long as we trust in him. On the contrary, he tells us in John 16.33:
I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.”
Jesus promises trouble in this world. He asks us to do difficult things, like love him more that we love our mother and father and sisters and brothers. He asks us to follow him when we know that the world will despise us because of it. He asks us to “take up our cross” and come after him, to follow him even to death. These are hard things to do, to be sure. And for anyone but Jesus, it would be folly for us to do them. At its most fundamental level, the heart condition that we see here is simple - the people who say “this is a hard saying; who can listen to it?” ultimately don’t believe that Jesus is worth it. They have understood what he is asking, they have counted the cost, and they have determined that the cost is too high.
I have a dear friend from high school who is in exactly this situation. He grew up in the church, he grew up hearing the gospel. One day years later we were talking about Jesus, and he told me: “Jon, I’ve counted the cost, and I know what we are called to do...I just don’t think that it is worth it.”
Friends, if we look at God as the cosmic vending machine in the sky, the one who will fulfill all of our material needs and bless us with abundance just because we believe in him, we won’t truly believe that Jesus is worth it. When we expect that God will conform to our own expectations, that he will change his mind so that he fits our own priorities and our own agendas, we won’t truly believe that Jesus is worth it. If we don’t value Jesus above everything else in this world, when we take the opportunity to count the cost we won’t truly believe that Jesus is worth it. To follow him costs too much. It might cost your comfort. It might cost your reputation. It might cost your job. It might cost us your family. And, in certain situations, it might cost your life. For a great many, those costs are too much to bear.
But friends, I promise you this - if you see and know and understand who Jesus is, if you have deep and intimate communion with him, if you experience the grace that he has to offer, then no price is too high to pay. No call is too great. No challenge is too much. No sacrifice is too overwhelming. Because, at the end of it all, you will have Jesus himself.
What Jesus Calls us to Do
What Jesus Calls us to Do
This now brings us to our second point - what does Jesus call us to do? We have seen the heart conditions that get in the way of us truly following after him. But what exactly is it that Jesus asks of us? What is the demand that he makes upon us that causes those heart conditions to rear their ugly heads and prevent people from responding as they rightly should? In our passage today, Jesus asks us to do two things. First, he asks us to believe in Him. Second, he asks us to subsist on him and rely on him for everything. What does it mean for us to do these things? Let’s start with the first thing that Jesus asks: to believe in him.
Let’s turn back to our passage and look at John 6.28-34:
Then they said to him, “What must we do, to be doing the works of God?” Jesus answered them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” So they said to him, “Then what sign do you do, that we may see and believe you? What work do you perform? Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’ ” Jesus then said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” They said to him, “Sir, give us this bread always.”
The work of God, what God requires, is faith in Jesus. We see that specifically in 6.29, where Jesus tells us that we need to “believe in him whom he has sent”. This is not some abstract faith in a principle or a concept. This is faith in a specific person, Jesus, the one sent by the Father. We are supposed to put our trust exclusively in Jesus. We are supposed to know him and believe in him because he is the one that has come from the Father. The request that the people make for a miracle is made because they want proof of who Jesus is (as though the proof offered in him feeding the five thousand was not enough!). They demand that he provides a sign like the provision of manna, which they attribute to Moses. But the truth is that it was not Moses who provided the manna - it was God. Jesus directly points this out to them, reminding the people that “it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”
Let’s take a moment to unpack this statement because it is vitally important. Jesus challenges the assumptions of the crowd by telling them that it wasn’t Moses that gave them the bread, it was God. But furthermore, the bread in Moses’ time ceased, but now God “gives” the true bread in the person of Jesus. Jesus makes this explicit a moment later when the crowd asks him to give them that bread always, and he responds in John 6.35-39:
Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst. But I said to you that you have seen me and yet do not believe. All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out. For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me. And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day.
In other words, if you want a sign, Jesus himself is your sign! The first thing that we must do is believe, and if we do that, Jesus will satisfy every spiritual hunger and spiritual thirst that we might have.
The second thing that Jesus asks of his followers is that they subsist on him. This is the “hard saying” that we alluded to earlier when we spoke about the heart conditions that prevent people from drawing near to Jesus. We see the struggle that the people have when they grumble about who Jesus is in John 6.41-51:
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’?” 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. 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. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
The people grumble because they already think that they know who Jesus is. He is, as they assume, the son of Mary and Joseph, so how could he possibly come from heaven? The last line of Jesus’ words, however, is the one that pushes them over the edge. They then ask: “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”, and Jesus responds in John 6.53-58:
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. 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. As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever feeds on me, he also will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like the bread the fathers ate, and died. Whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.”
This is the part that the crowd finds truly offensive. To be fair to them, the fact that they respond negatively to Jesus’ statements makes a lot of sense in light of what they have been taught through the Law. After all, the Law teaches that drinking blood is something that should be abhorrent to a practicing Jew. Leviticus 17.10-12 reads:
“If any one of the house of Israel or of the strangers who sojourn among them eats any blood, I will set my face against that person who eats blood and will cut him off from among his people. For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it for you on the altar to make atonement for your souls, for it is the blood that makes atonement by the life. Therefore I have said to the people of Israel, No person among you shall eat blood, neither shall any stranger who sojourns among you eat blood.
The idea of drinking blood and eating flesh was an abomination to the Jews, and for good reason. When we consider the context of the Old Testament, we get more clarity as to why this would have been such a challenging statement for the people. In the OT, this imagery was associated with slaughter and utter desolation. Consider, for example, Ezekiel 39.17-20:
“As for you, son of man, thus says the Lord God: Speak to the birds of every sort and to all beasts of the field: ‘Assemble and come, gather from all around to the sacrificial feast that I am preparing for you, a great sacrificial feast on the mountains of Israel, and you shall eat flesh and drink blood. You shall eat the flesh of the mighty, and drink the blood of the princes of the earth—of rams, of lambs, and of he-goats, of bulls, all of them fat beasts of Bashan. And you shall eat fat till you are filled, and drink blood till you are drunk, at the sacrificial feast that I am preparing for you. And you shall be filled at my table with horses and charioteers, with mighty men and all kinds of warriors,’ declares the Lord God.
The fact that Jesus is telling the people that they need to eat his flesh and drink his blood tells them that they need to participate in the suffering that he is going to experience. That is, in fact, what Jesus is calling his people to. He calls us to subsist on him, to depend on him wholly, to share in his sufferings and to follow him unto death. This is why the saying is a “hard saying” for the people. They are not prepared to give themselves wholly over to Jesus. They are not prepared to follow him on the path that he must walk. They are not willing to endure the sufferings that he will be subject to for their sake.
Jesus’ call, however, is quite simple. He asks us to ultimately be dependent on him. He wants us to trust in his finished work. He wants us to know and to understand that despite everything that might happen in this world, we can rely on him. We may lose a great amount in the eyes of the world, but as long as we have Jesus we have not in fact lost anything. The early church fathers understood this point emphatically.
John §16 Jesus the Bread of Life (John 6:26–59)
Ignatius, bishop of Antioch in the early second century, seems to have understood the metaphor along similar lines. As he sailed toward Rome, and martyrdom, he wrote: “I want the bread of God, which is the flesh of Jesus Christ, who was of the seed of David, and for drink I want his blood, which is uncorruptible love”
As Christians, we are called to rest wholly in Jesus. We are called to subsist entirely upon him. We are called to trust him for our daily needs and for our eternal provision. We are called to follow him wherever he may lead us. And, if necessary, we are called to give our life for his sake. This discussion about eating the flesh and drinking the blood points to the fact that we may be called to share in his sufferings. In the same way that the OT prophets used these metaphors as examples of sharing in the judgment of God, so we may be called to share in the sufferings of Christ. It is, indeed, hard to accept this call. But if we truly believe that Jesus is worth more than everything we possess, we can respond as Ignatius did. We can fully and completely subsist on the finished work of Christ, and even though we might face trial and tribulation in this world, we can cling to him. This is what our Savior calls us to do. He calls us to believe, and he calls us to rely on him, completely and totally, even if the world would tell us that such reliance is foolishness.
The Proper Response
The Proper Response
And this brings us to the end of our passage today. We see that these demands of Christ are challenging. There are those who had followed him previously who are no longer willing to once they understand the measure of devotion that is ultimately required. In verse 66, we read that many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him from this point onward. They understood what Jesus was calling them to do, and they were unwilling to suffer with him unto death.
Our third point today will be brief. What is the proper response to what Jesus has asked of us? What ought we to do when we follow him and trust in him? The answer is found in John 6.67-69:
So Jesus said to the twelve, “Do you want to go away as well?” Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.”
Peter gets a lot of grief in the gospels, but here he has responded in the best way possible. This is the only possible response that we can have to the call of Jesus. We can only recognize that he has the words of eternal life. We can only recognize that only through him can we ultimately be reconciled to God. If we have any other response, we are lost in our sin and our shame. If we have any other response, we cannot have hope that we will be redeemed. The only thing that we can do is cling to Jesus. The only thing that we can do is believe and subsist on him. Peter has correctly understood the call of Jesus, and he has responded in the only appropriate way - complete submission to Christ.
Shortly we are going to take communion and then we are going to close with a hymn - Jesus I My Cross Have Taken. The song is a beautiful expression of trust in Jesus, an expression of what it may mean to leave the comforts of this world behind and follow after him. It is my prayer for us all today that we can sing this hymn with all of our hearts, trusting that Jesus does indeed have the words of eternal life, and that no matter what the earthly cost, it is only gain to follow him.
Let us pray.
Gracious God, we thank you for your Son, Jesus. We thank you that you have provided for us the only one whom we need in order to be saved. Help us to see the glory of Christ clearly. Help us to examine our own lives and identify those areas in which we have placed our trust in things other than Jesus. Help us to see them, to repent of them, and to turn away from them so that we might follow after you wholly and completely. Let us trust completely in you, subsist completely in you, and give everything that we have over to you. Amen.
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