13th August 2006Ninth Sunday after Trinity
Fr Julian Browning
I Kings 19 : 4 – 8 ; Ephesians 4 : 25 - 5 : 2 ; John 6 : 35 & 41 – 51
Jesus said 'I am the bread of life' John 6.35
Bread from heaven, bread of God, bread of life. Give us this day our daily bread.
This is about preparing ourselves to be taught by God
Bread from heaven, bread of God, bread of life. Give us this day our daily bread.
These are words about God feeding his people. But Jesus says that he is
the bread of life, the food which does not perish, but endures for
ever. I am the bread that came down from heaven; I am like manna,
manna, those little bits of bread that came down from the sky and fed
the Israelites when they were wandering hungry and lost in the
wilderness as those years ago. But better than manna, because manna was
only ordinary food in the end. Whoever comes to me will never be
hungry. Why did the local intelligentsia find this so very irritating?
Because it blew away all their high faluting ideas about how to get
through to God, and with their pretensions to know it all go our
pretensions too. Here's an ordinary fellow, whom we know, and he's cut
the corners, gone over our heads, and says that he has come down from
heaven.
As Jesus became more conscious of his mission, he tried to spell it out
for his followers in a series of extraordinary statements, all of which
begin I AM. I am the bread of life. I am the light of the world. I am
the good shepherd. I am the gate. I am the truth. I am the vine. I am
the way. I am the resurrection and the life. Now this is a challenge
because to understand what he means, we have to do something. Yes, do
something. Bread doesn't do anything on its own. We are invited to eat
the bread. We are invited to drink the fruit of the vine, the wine of
life maybe, but also the cup of suffering. We have to follow the way.
We have to enter the gate. We have to search for the truth, and so on.
It's a challenge all right. And all the greater challenge today when we
expect everything we want and all the answers to land on the desktop,
neatly Googled. This is about preparing ourselves to be taught by God,
taught by God through Jesus.
Jesus tells us what we can do. 'Whoever eats of this bread will live
for ever.' The day before Jesus spoke these words, he had performed the
miracle of the feeding of the five thousand. The miracle had been such
a success that the people wanted to make Jesus a king right then and
there. So he had to explain that they had not yet got the right
message. All they were thinking about was earthly success and the
worldly benefits, like us most of the time, and so they did not see
that God had come down from heaven to save his people. God comes
in all these ways: the manna which comes from heaven, the feeding of
the five thousand with the twelve baskets left over, I am the bread of
life, the grain of wheat which has to die to bear fruit, the bread
which Jesus breaks at the Last Supper, his body broken for us, and the
bread which we break today, His body given for us, shared out in memory
of him. That is how God comes to us, in what is ordinary, in what is
common to us all, in suffering, and in joy.
Bread is the necessary food, which stops us getting hungry. There are
all sorts of spiritual foods available today, a whole religious
supermarket full of them, some quite nourishing, some attractively
packed and well advertised, some well past their sellby date, and some
downright poisonous. Jesus is the living Bread, he feeds our spiritual
life today at this service and every day. Bread is a daily food. We eat
it every day. So with the bread of life. Jesus is daily food for
our souls. You do not eat the bread of life once and that's it. It is
helpful to see Jesus as the bread of life, our daily bread, because
then we begin to see why it's worth coming to communion regularly even
if we're not feeling particularly religious, and also why more and more
people today can be seen reading their Bibles on the daily Underground
trip to work.
It's a very good place actually to take in half an hour's nourishment.
Get yourself a pocket bible and a pair of glasses. Your religion is
supposed to be a way of life. Jesus is daily food. We need a
daily supply of his grace, we need nourishment for the soul, or we go
hungry.
When Jesus on that day long ago said I am the Bread that came down from
heaven, his words were misunderstood. How can he now say, I have come
down from heaven? Well, at least they asked a question. The subject
interested them. The sadness today is that a generation is growing up,
who appear to have little interest in the great questions of life and
death: why am I here, what does God want of me, what am I looking for,
what must I do to inherit eternal life? Those questions used to drive
people on. All that interests a lot of us today is self-fulfilment and
personal achievement, and that's it. It won't do. That's not the way to
ignite a divine spark in our lives, to bring about the Kingdom of God.
If the questions aren't asked, the answers won't be found. This gives
Christians a job to do, opening some kind of channel between God and
mankind. What we need for that task is the bread of life, so that we
live with God's life in us. God asks us to take that bread of life,
take Jesus Christ into our lives, live with his life, complete his
work, and proclaim his glory.