We are on a journey with Jesus to His resurrection.  Along the way, we met a Pharisee, a man, Nicodemus, a ruling council member.  Nicodemus stepped from the darkness of night into the light of Christ’s presence.  In the light, Nicodemus learned that unless we are born again, we shall not see the kingdom of God.  We also met an unnamed man lying beside the Pool of Bethesda. The man was paralyzed for 38 years. Jesus told the man to “Get up! Pick up your mat and walk!”  The man learned that we must choose to be made well by Jesus and be freed from sin.  This is what happens when we are born again.

Today, we are moving with Jesus towards His resurrection as He told friend and foe alike that to be bound for glory in the realm of God required eating Jesus’ body and drinking his blood.  Jesus’ words were difficult for his followers to hear and repulsive to his detractors.  When Jesus’ followers heard Jesus’ words, many left him and never returned.  Jesus’ foes declared Him insane or demon-possessed. What in the world was Jesus talking about when He said that you must eat of his body and drink of his blood? Let’s pick up our journey today in Chapter 6 of John’s Gospel, where Jesus taught through dialogue with the people of a synagogue in Capernaum, the hometown of several of Jesus’ disciples.

“35 Jesus declared, ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. 36 But as I told you, you have seen me and still you do not believe. 37 All those the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away. 38 For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me” (John 6:35-38).

Just before this teaching, Jesus had fed 5,000 men plus their accompanying families.  The people were excited by what Jesus had done.  The people were so excited that they had in mind to force Jesus to become their king.  Jesus left the crowd's presence, but the crowd followed, looking for Jesus to fill their stomachs.  Jesus shocked the crowd when, rather than miraculously producing more food to eat, Jesus said, “I am the bread of life that has come down from heaven.” 

To Jesus’ audience, which was overwhelmingly Jewish, the idea of bread coming down from heaven was understood as the manna God provided to the Hebrew people escaping Egypt.  The Book of Exodus records, “4 Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘I will rain down bread from heaven for you. The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day’” (Exodus 16:4).  “31 The people of Israel called the bread manna. It was white like coriander seed and tasted like wafers made with honey” (Exodus 16:31).  Manna, bread from heaven, nourished the ancient Hebrews and gave them life.  Manna was seen as a life-saving gift from God.

But Jesus declared himself the bread of life that came from heaven.  John wrote, “41 At this the Jews [likely the ruling Council members] there began to grumble about him [Jesus] because he [Jesus] said, ‘I am the bread that came down from heaven.’ 42 They said, ‘Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I came down from heaven’?’” (John 6:41-42).  The ruling Council members again focused on the physical world and relied upon what they thought they knew.  The Jews thought Jesus was the son of a common laborer.  Jesus was a nobody born of a nobody.  Jesus, the Jews believed, was talking nonsense about having come down from heaven, as though Jesus was somehow superior to them.  The Jews were displaying arrogance.

Arrogance is believing foremost in yourself, not in a self-confident manner but in a way of self-importance. It is a belief that you are beyond learning.  Arrogance breeds a sense of entitlement.  The Jews defensively dismissed Jesus because he was a nobody.  In rejecting the person Jesus, the Jews did not need to deal with Jesus’ message.

          Jesus, undeterred by the Jews’ arrogance, continued to bring the message God sent Him to speak. “48 I am the bread of life. 49 Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, yet they died. 50 But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which anyone may eat and not die. 51 I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world” (John 6:48-51).  Jesus made His message so stark as to end the grumbling about His parents.  Jesus said He was the bread of life and that to live forever, to move from the realm of the world to the realm of God, was only possible if you ate the bread Jesus offered.  Jesus said that bread was His own body, his flesh.

          Jesus’ words broke through the first layer of the Jews’ arrogance.  “52 Then the Jews began to argue sharply among themselves, ‘How can this man give us his flesh to eat?’” (John 6:52). The Jews were still thinking in the worldly realm, but instead of speaking of Jesus’ parents, they were talking about Jesus offering his flesh for people to eat.  They were thinking like cannibals, not as spiritual leaders.  The scene with these Jews differs from when Jesus taught Nicodemus at night.  But the central problem is the same.  Jesus said to Nicodemus, “12 I have spoken to you of earthly things and you do not believe; how then will you believe if I speak of heavenly things?” (John 3:12).  Nicodemus struggled, the Jews here struggle, and many people today struggle to understand the spiritual things of Jesus because they do not understand essential earthly things.

          What are those essential earthly things?  It all begins with God.  God calls all things into being and gives them their nature and place in an ordered creation.  Plants and animals, even such things as rocks and rivers, follow the patterns of their nature.  Humans, because they are made in the image of God, were designed to follow the pattern of God’s nature with creativity and reason.  But sin marred that image, and humans no longer followed the precise pattern of God.  These are the essential earthly things.

God gave the Law, the commandments of Scripture, of the heavenly things to humanity through the Hebrew nation as a mirror to see that marred image.  But now the Hebrew nation, the Jews, were trying to use the mirror, the Law, as a tool to clean themselves of unrighteousness.  I do not know anyone who successfully used a mirror to make themselves clean.  A mirror only reflects the light; in this case, the mirror, the Law could only show the sin, and the Law could not heal people from sin.

  To redeem and cleanse humanity and heal people from sin, God sent Jesus to become the pathway to righteousness.  Jesus was and is an answer to prayer.  Jesus said the way to the restored image of God, to live forever, was by believing in Him and accepting without hesitation the life He would offer through His flesh and blood.   Jesus was again speaking of his journey to the resurrection.  But profound arrogance blinded the Jews.  They could only conceive of spiritual things through the mirror of the Law and not through the Lawgiver standing before them.  Arrogance about sin remains with us today.

Despite the profound arrogance of the Jews, Jesus' purpose compelled Him to speak of spiritual things.  “53 Jesus said to them, ‘Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. 54 Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. 55 For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. 56 Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them’” (John 6:53-56).  Jesus’ message never wavered.  Jesus had come to give eternal life and that life required the presence of Jesus to be found in each person.  Salvation was not about the Law because no matter how someone lived, that mirror of the Law would only show their sin, not cure it.  But with Christ, a sinless person living within the believer, the mirror, when used by the believer, would reflect the image of the sinless Christ.

Jesus then spoke the words the Jews could not accept, but Jesus’ disciples needed to hear.  “57 ‘Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. 58 This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your ancestors ate manna and died, but whoever feeds on this bread will live forever’” (John 6:57-58).  This was Jesus’ teaching on spiritual things.  Jesus gives life.  Activities in the flesh, such as doing earthly things to achieve righteousness, lead to death.

I can only imagine how quiet the synagogue became that day.  The Jews’ grumbling stopped.  The disciples sat motionless.  All eyes were fixed on Jesus.  Then, somewhere in the back of the synagogue, Jesus’ followers began looking at each other and saying, “60 ‘This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?’’ (John 6:60).  “61 Aware that his disciples were grumbling about this, Jesus said to them, ‘Does this offend you? 62 Then what if you see the Son of Man ascend to where he was before! 63 The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you—they are full of the Spirit and life. 64 Yet there are some of you who do not believe.’ For Jesus had known from the beginning which of them did not believe and who would betray him. 65 He went on to say, ‘This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless the Father has enabled them.’  66 From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him” (John 6:61-66).  The quietness of the synagogue remained.  The voices heard earlier were replaced by the shuffling of feet as people left and went home.  It was one thing to take Jesus’ free meal, but it was something entirely different to follow Jesus without hesitation or reservation.

Finally, perhaps with just Jesus and his twelve apostles remaining in the synagogue, Jesus said to them, “67 ‘You do not want to leave too, do you?’  68 Simon Peter answered him [Jesus], ‘Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. 69 We have come to believe and to know that you are the Holy One of God’” (John 6:67-68).

What, then, do we make of this profound spiritual teaching from Jesus? I think there are just two things I want to emphasize today.  First, Jesus made an outrageous claim.  Jesus claimed to be one with the Father, making Himself God.  The Jews reacted with anger, believing they should kill Jesus for His claim. The Old Testament prophet, Isaiah, had spoken of such a day for Jewish people.  Isaiah wrote, “13 All your children will be taught by the Lord, and great will be their peace” (Isaiah 54:13).  Now, Jesus claimed God was teaching the people, but significant was their distress, not their peace.  Why were the people, especially the Jewish ruling council, in distress about Jesus’ teachings?  The Jews were distressed because they believed Jesus was a rabbi from Nazareth, not God’s Son from heaven.  The Jews were distressed because Jesus’ words conflicted with the sense of God they had created for themselves.  The Jews were distressed because to accept Jesus meant their lives would have to change, and they did not want to change.  Because the Jews distressed themselves, they did not receive the peace by being taught by God as promised in Isaiah’s prophecy.

How about you?  Does Jesus’ teaching distress you or bring you peace?  Jesus’ teachings distress the world, even though many nonbelievers think Jesus was a great moral teacher.  But Jesus was not a great moral teacher.  Jesus was and is God.  I want to share a quote from the atheist-turned-Christian writer C. S. Lewis. ““I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”  Our first point is that we must decide who this Jesus is making his way to the cross and resurrection.  Is Jesus God, or is he only a man?  Your answer determines your life.  If Jesus was just a man, Jesus points out clearly that your life will be like the ancient Hebrews.  You will eat manna, bread if you will, and will die.  If Jesus was and is God, He offers Himself that you may have abundant life now and forever.  But you must choose.

If you follow Jesus as God, then Jesus has some stern words for you. You must eat his flesh and drink his blood.  What does Jesus mean?  Jesus must provide us with the strength of faith and spiritual life on our journey through life.  This is the second point.

Jesus was clear. He did not come to fill our stomachs with perishable bread. His mission was not to end the suffering of world hunger but to end the suffering of separation from God. To end such suffering, Jesus would go to the cross, and God would demonstrate His power over death, our most feared enemy, by raising Jesus to life on resurrection day.  The resurrection of Jesus would prove Jesus’ claim that to live, we must never be separated from Him.  Perhaps today, we should think differently about the words of the Lord’s prayer, “Give us this day our daily bread.”  Give us this day, not our daily ration of manna, but Jesus, the bread of life, for this day we may live.

I have met many distressed people and counseled a fair number. Every one of them wanted peace. Many of those people have not received peace because they choose to eat manna.  They do not genuinely accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior.  Sadly, they will live in distress and die separated from God.  Others who were distressed now live in peace because they received Jesus as their bread of life.  Do they struggle with difficulties and illness?  Of course, they do.  We all do. But we can still be at peace if we allow ourselves to consume and take up the bread of life fully.  Peter said it well.  “[Jesus] You have the words of eternal life. 69 We have come to believe and to know that you are the Holy One of God” (John 6:68b-69).  Can you say this about Jesus?  If so, then be at peace and live.  Let us pray.