Come with an Appetite
Notes
Transcript
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.” Jesus answered them, “Did I not choose you, the twelve? And yet one of you is a devil.” He spoke of Judas the son of Simon Iscariot, for he, one of the twelve, was going to betray him.
Scripture: John 6:41-71
Sermon Title: Come with an Appetite
Brothers and sisters in Christ try and imagine yourself in this scenario. Yesterday, the man who you’ve heard called the Messiah and who you’ve seen perform miracles was teaching and he hosted a lunch of bread and fish. As you were sitting on the hillside, you and your neighbors talked about how he must be “the Prophet who is to come into the world” and you even heard some people talking about making him your king, which brought back memories of Israel’s glory days. But when it started to get dark, you noticed that the teacher left, taking a different route from the boat which his closest disciples had taken. However, the next day he is still gone. You talk among yourselves, His teachings are in line with ours, and we got a free meal, let’s go look for him. So you get in a boat, take a short trip to Capernaum, and you find him. When you ask him when he got there, it’s almost like he’s rebuking you. He says you’re not here for a miracle but for bread. Wait a minute, you think to yourself, did I miss something? You don’t understand what Jesus is talking about, and really wish he would do a miracle right now in front of you, like when God gave manna to the Israelites. This man starts talking about how he is the bread of life, come down from heaven. That doesn’t make any sense to you or anyone else around you, and he doesn’t stop there but he’s telling you what’s on the menu is different from yesterday. Today’s menu items are his flesh and blood, real food and real drink.
Flesh and blood. Take a moment and let that sink in. We’re not with Jesus in the upper room with the 12 disciples where he has bread and wine and he says this is my body given for you, my blood poured out for you, do this in remembrance of me. There it’s pretty easy to make the connections, to see the symbolism, but these people in the passage we read are just looking for a simple meal like was provided them the day before. Jesus offers something different from what they are looking for, his flesh and blood. The messages being sent between taste buds, smell sensors, and the brain reveal this meal to be unpleasant. The crowd of disciples comes to the conclusion, This is a hard teaching. From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him. You walk away. Maybe this man is a prophet, but you don’t want any part in that meal that he’s serving, you’ve lost your appetite.
Brothers and sisters, while we are people who have the luxury of having the whole Bible, of being able to read the whole story as it has been recorded including seeing the flesh and blood in the signs of bread and wine, I want to push us to maybe think a bit deeper. In the formulary for the Lord’s Supper that I’ll read in a little while, one of the things we are promised by our Lord is that as we eat and drink, we are fed with his crucified body and shed blood. To this end he gives us his life-giving Spirit, through whom the body and blood of our Lord become the life-giving nourishment of our souls. Thus he unites us with himself and so imparts the precious benefits of his sacrifice to all who partake in faith. While maybe this doesn’t seem like a big deal, it’s along these lines that some of the greatest confusion and division in the church over the last 2000 years has occurred.
There were officials and opponents to the early church who heard about the “feast of flesh and blood,” and as the Jews in our passage had struggled to understand, so too the early Christians were accused of being cannibals. Fast-forward about 1500 years to the time of the Reformation, and communion is one of the major issues. The Catholic Church claimed that the bread and wine literally became Christ’s flesh and blood. The protesting theologians argued that this needed to be re-examined; we don’t eat Jesus. However, when push came to shove no matter how much those calling for reform could agree on, one of the things they could not agree with one another was certain issues surrounding the Lord’s Supper. So what happens is not only a split of the Catholics and the Protesting Reformers, but we end up with the split of the Catholics, the Lutherans, the Calvinists, the Zwinglians, and other camps. That’s the kind of weight that we’re talking about when we say the meal is a memorial but it is more than that. It is a sign and seal of the covenant Christ has with us, but there’s some spiritual mystery involved.
As we are nourished physically when we take the bread and wine in our hands and eat them, the Belgic Confession says, so truly we receive into our souls, for our spiritual life, the true body and blood of Christ, our only Savior. We receive these by faith, which is the hand and mouth of our souls. The crowd that comes to Jesus is looking for something they can grasp, for simple bread to eat. Jesus, however, offers life everlasting, which they recognize to be of greater importance but they can’t make sense of it. The crowd proposes the metaphor of the grumbling Israelites receiving manna in the desert which fed their physical hunger, but the alternative Jesus offers seems almost to bring them back to the garden. Instead of grumbling, the approach of those coming to eat is answering an invitation; instead of a crafty serpent beckoning towards fruit which bears death, Jesus the one prophesied about offers bread of true life.
It’s that invitation, come to eat, come with an appetite, that I think is one of the most significant parts of our celebration of the Lord’s Supper. We see something important happening, but we don’t always make sense of it. Jesus tells the crowd there is nothing they can do to earn this bread, it’s offered freely to those who have listened to the Father and understand what Jesus is doing. We too get invited to join this dinner, not just a meal but a banquet, eating with others in memory and celebration of Christ has done and does for those who are his. We come to eat the bread and drink the wine, which has already been prepared for us. I find that to be a significant practice, to have the table ready when we gather to take part in this meal. We as individual church members don’t have to bring our own bread and juice. But it’s also not just the church calling those who have listened to take part, but the Spirit has brought us by the calling of the Father to the nourishment provided in Jesus. We come with appetites that need to be fed, not in the sense of physical hunger, but the appetites of our souls desiring to be nourished. Just as in a tangible eating of the bread and drinking the cup we acknowledge physical nourishment leads to strength and wellness, so with faith the Spirit gives to us what is contained in the flesh and the blood of Jesus Christ.
What do we mean by nourishment though? The simple answer is that when we eat this meal, it’s not a ritual ceremony, but we take to heart that in our participation our faith is to be strengthened, our hope to be nurtured, our identity to be assured. All of these enter into from outside, and the Spirit does the work of digesting. We look back at John 6 where Jesus is blunt in telling the Jewish crowds in the synagogue, Eat my flesh and drink my blood. I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. When they express their struggle, he asks them, Does this offend you? I’m speaking of spiritual things, not fleshly things, Spirit gives way to life, flesh to nothing. We could say, well these disciples were ones obviously not called by the Father and maybe that’s right. But why doesn’t Jesus cut them some slack, show them some grace, and foreshadow his death? Why can’t Jesus just say, I’m going to be crucified; in remembrance of me but also to receive full life, eat bread symbolizing my flesh and drink wine symbolizing my blood?
I can’t guarantee that I know Jesus’ thoughts, but I believe part of his mission while he lived on earth was to renew creation’s trust in the miraculous and unseen, those things which are accomplished by God. For so long, the Israelites, the Jews had a visible relationship with God. They were led by him, commanded by him, and made sacrifices to him. As Pastor Jeff preached this morning, the attempt to put God in a box is something our world tries to do now, but it’s nothing new. What happens with Jesus is not a changing of who God reveals himself as or what he does, but might Jesus’ calling to redeem creation bring a shock to the mindsets of believers who had fallen into a lifestyle that the only things that matter are what we can control and what happens to us here in this life. Might part of Jesus’ calling have been to resurrect faith? Yes, this is a hard teaching, the invitation being offered to those who follow is that they stick around for more than just a simple meal.
In explaining what it means to be nourished in the Supper, the Heidelberg Catechism says that it is to accept with a believing heart the entire suffering and death of Christ and by believing to receive forgiveness of sins and eternal life. But it means more. Through the Holy Spirit, who lives both in Christ and in us, we are united more and more to Christ’s blessed body. And so, although he is in heaven and we are on earth, we are the flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone. And we forever live on and are governed by one Spirit as members of our body are by one soul. Brothers and sisters, to eat the bread and to drink the cup as we will in a few minutes, the Reformed tradition says that we are involved in a mystery. When we listen to the words of the formulary and share this meal, we’re not going out for dinner and a movie or in this case dinner and a story. We’re not to come and eat the small pieces of bread and drink the little cups filled with wine like we’d eat pizza for dinner and drink a cup of refreshment. Without faith, there’s nothing supernatural happening! But with faith, we hear the gospel. With faith, we come as Pastor Jeff mentioned in contact with real things, thing we can touch, and smell, and taste. These elements are not Jesus’ body or blood, but they point to the fact that Jesus’ sacrifice was a real history-changing event. Our faith is the opening of our mouths for the Spirit to go to work in our souls. Our hearts are opened to believing in Christ and his resurrection as what grants us salvation and hope in this life and into the next. We’re called by Jesus to recognize that something greater is happening, that there a life-giving nature as part of this meal. Our souls need to be fed in this life and this is a special way by which God provides not just daily physical needs but for our whole being.
Brothers and sisters, I know it can be easy to tune out when it comes time for communion. Some of you have heard the words and taken the elements hundreds of times, others of you are still young in this part of your spiritual walk. Maybe you pay close attention to all the words and movements, but maybe this is a time when you tend to zone out until the dishes get passed in front of you. Tonight we’ve encountered just one of the promises that Scripture teaches about the Lord’s Supper, but if our minds can begin to change to approaching the table as if we were attending a banquet we were invited to... The celebration goes from just something to check off in the worship service to something we look forward to, something we come ready with an appetite to... We can come with the basic mindset, which is the straightforward do this in remembrance of me, but we’re called to mature. That’s where the transition happens for our souls which once they receive a taste of the bread of life. Never again are they starved! But it is necessary that they continue to be nourished, strengthened, and comforted. We finally are reminded that we do this; we live in faith and remembrance of Christ’s death and resurrection, not just for the sake of this life alone, but for that on which we will raised up for eternal life! Christ, our living risen Savior, continues to work, uniting us with his body, a union which will be perfect when he comes again. Brothers and sisters, let us join together at the table as those who have been called and sent for with appetites desiring to be nourished by the Spirit in the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, Amen.