Oak Chapel United Methodist Church

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The sixth Chapter of John’s Gospel is some read! It begins with Jesus feeding the 5,000, and continues immediately with his walking on water: two amazing miracles stressing the importance of faith. And the people are obviously in awe of him. But then, before the Chapter’s half over, Jesus offends everybody by calling himself “the bread of heaven.” The nastiness began when Jesus impugned the motives of the crowd (insulted them, actually), saying that all they took away from the miraculous feeding was some free food in their stomachs. They had missed the main point, he said, the spiritual point.

And then he broadened his complaint: “Don’t waste your time and energy seeking that kind of food,” he said, “the food that fills you for an hour or two, and then leaves you hungry. Look for the food that sticks to your ribs, that nourishes you for eternity, the kind of food (Careful now Jesus!) – the kind of food I am.” “Show us your stuff,” the people say, as if thy had not already seen plenty. “Our savior, Moses, gave us the real McCoy “bread from heaven,” the manna that sustained our ancestors in the wilderness. Can you top that?” “Yes. Your ancestors ate Moses’ bread, and eventually they all died. If you eat my bread, you will live forever.” And they heard him say, “Verily, verily I say unto you (That’s the Bible’s way of saying, “Listen up!”) – Verily, verily I say unto you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you….for my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed.”

If you find these words, about eating flesh and drinking blood, a tad grizzly, even repulsive, you might be comforted to know that many in Jesus’ time did, too. Even the disciples mumbled among themselves that this was “a hard saying, who can listen to it.” and John says plainly that “after this many of his followers drew back and no longer went about with him.” Apparently, in these words, for them, Jesus had crossed that fine line between spirituality and lunacy. You might also want to remember that Christians have fought over these words for centuries. Is it the actual body and blood of Christ we receive at communion, or should we understand these verses more figuratively? “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” All the controversy only proves the importance of this passage. Whenever you speak a “hard saying,” you loose friends, cause disputes, drive people away. But sometimes it has to be done. You have to break a few eggs, as they say, to make an omelet.

W.E. Orchard, a great Christian preacher in his day, visited, with his wife, one of those large, extravagant churches in California where a very popular preacher held forth each week and the services were a lot like show business. Orchard remained polite, but his wife was upset by it. She whispered to him, “the atmosphere is all wrong, the people aren’t in a worshipful mood, the music’s an extravaganza, the preaching is syrupy and shallow.” He whispered back, “That’s all very well, my dear, but I could not fill this place.” “No,” she replied, but you could empty it.” Speaking the hard truth often drives people away. The greatest preachers, beginning with Jesus, have done so.
I see two lessons in this scripture, and they are intertwined. First, for a man or woman to spend his entire life seeking only material things (food for the stomach, bread from the earth instead of bread from heaven) is a human tragedy beyond words. I saw on Animal Planet a documentary about a certain insect that spends his entire life looking for food. He sits, camouflaged, on a small limb all day long waiting for another insect to pass by, and when that happens he sticks out his tongue, catches that poor fellow, and swallows him down. And then, in a split second, as if nothing had happened, he returns to his position and waits for another victim. That’s it. That’s his life. Survival only. There are people like that. For animals, as far as we know, it’s enough just to stay alive and propagate one’s species. But not for people. People need to know why. Why do I go to work each day? Do I eat only so that I may eat again. Do I propagate my race only so that my descendants can do the same. Isn’t there something beyond that endless cycle? Or is it all “a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing?” That’s why human beings develop philosophies and religions and animals don’t.

The second theme in this text is that men and women can find the deeper meaning, and that that sense of meaning and purpose comes from a close, intimate relationship with Christ. “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood, abides in me and I in him.” We shouldn’t shrink from that analogy. When we eat we admit a foreign substance into our body, and in a miraculous way it becomes part of us. Somehow, that baloney sandwich we ate for lunch becomes skin, and fingernail, heart muscle and gall bladder. And, at the same time, it gives us energy to move about and do things. Paul says, “I can do all things through Christ who strengtheneth me.” It is a very intimate thing to eat. We can make Jesus our food, and he can dwell in us and we in him. We can feed on Christ: absorb his teachings, his character, his ways. His power becomes our power. His love becomes our love. And he becomes part of us. That’s the miracle of new birth, new life.

We need to find a reason for living, and it needs to be a good reason. Idols will keep us going for a while: our bodies, our brains, money, the environment, a just cause, the love of another person. But, in the long run, they all fail, and the terrible fact confronts us: life without God isn’t worth living. I know the problems connected to that. But they do not compare to the problems of a godless life.

The world is not a neutral place. It is not simply that we are plopped down here to fend for ourselves. No. There are adversaries here. There are moral dangers and great sadness in this place. These will eat away at us, and eventually destroy us, unless we find a presence within that renews our spirit all the time, a bread that never leaves us hungry. Last Sunday evening on television the Country Music Association presented the top 100 country songs of all times, starting with number 100 and working down to number one. It brought back a lot of good memories: Hank Williams singing “Your Cheating Heart,” Patsy Cline singing “Crazy.” Dolly Parton with “Coat of Many Colors.” The number one song was Tammy Wynet singing, “Stand By Your Man.” But number two brought back some powerful memories for me, for it was my favorite: George Jones singing, “He Stopped Loving Her Today.” They interviewed George Jones, before they had him sing the song, and he said when his agent first presented it to him he told him, “I’ll sing it because I like it, but it’s never going to sell, because it’s too damn sad.” But, of course, it did sell. It sold millions of copies. Because there is a ton of sadness out there. The Bible calls this world “a vale of tears,” and so it is. We can’t live in it with any quality of life, as consumers only, sitting on a limb and sucking into ourselves whatever we can catch, and we surely can’t find true happiness, without the everlasting food, the bread from heaven, His flesh and His blood. Understand that any way you want, but don’t miss the main point: that we cannot really live without him.