B, Pent 10 Proper 14 - John 6:35, 41-51 "Bread from Heaven - A Unique Being" (Part 3 of 5)
Text: John 6:35, 41-51
35 …Jesus declared, “I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty. 41 At this the Jews began to grumble about him because he 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’?”
43 “Stop grumbling among yourselves,” Jesus answered. 44 “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him up at the last day. 45 It is written in the Prophets: ‘They will all be taught by God.’ Everyone who listens to the Father and learns from him comes to me. 46 No one has seen the Father except the one who is from God; only he has seen the Father. 47 I tell you the truth, he who believes has everlasting life. 48 I am the bread of life. 49 Your forefathers ate the manna in the desert, yet they died. 50 But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which a man may eat and not die. 51 I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.”
Sermon
So we might have a repentant, forgiven, and forgiving inner being, we allow ourselves to be kept in state of willingness to believe that the Son of God’s being is the bread of present life and eternal life in our being.
Today is the third sermon in the five part series focusing on Jesus’ being, being revealed to us in John 6! We have also examined our being and the state of our contentedness to remain in the being of Christ! And if forced to compress the first two sermons into one sentence it would sound something like what I have just read…
So we might have a repentant, forgiven, and forgiving inner being, we allow ourselves to be kept in state of willingness to believe that the Son of God’s being is the bread of present life and eternal life in our being.
Last week we focused on the fundamental work set out by God for us to do. And that is: to believe in the one he has sent. Now having been given this task we hear Jesus, the one God has sent, and hear of the uniqueness of the one he has sent, and hear how the Jews began to grumble in disbelief at Jesus’ claim of uniqueness as the “I AM”- the being of life.
Just as the
Yet even amongst such disbelief Jesus proclaims the truth, that he is divinely “I AM”, by saying, “I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty. …I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.”
We are called to believe Jesus is the bread of life and this bread gives us everlasting life – now and forever. We are called to believe its uniqueness; that it is beyond compare and second to none! This living bread is food that will save us, and our work is to believe, trust, and have faith, in this living bread who is sent to us from God in heaven.
Just like the Jews and the
The work of believing in Jesus is the work of the Holy Spirit who makes us holy through the gift of faith, giving us the ability to believe in the life Jesus gives to the world through his death on the cross. And in believing, the Holy Spirit works to keep us united with Jesus Christ.
So, does that mean we have no work to do if the Holy Spirit does the work? Certainly not! We keep believing; we endure in being, allowing the Holy Spirit to do his work in our inner being creating faith, so that we believe and trust the effectiveness of the living bread which is giving us life. To put it another way, the Holy Spirit allows the living bread to be tasty and desirable in our sinful being which would much prefer to gorge itself on unhealthy food. Our work is to receive and enjoy this holy bread!
All this happens so that we might have a loving relationship with our Father in heaven. Jesus came down and continues to be present together with the Holy Spirit, so we might live before God in peace. The Holy Spirit brings us to Jesus Christ, so we might have access to God the Father. Jesus is, the Holy Spirit is, and the Father is. The Trinity is and will continue to be. The work of the Trinity is to be the “I AM” in our lives so we might believe in the one the Father has sent, so we might believe in the one who has come down from heaven, and so we might have our present life, our eternal life, in peace with God, in whose image we are created, and recreated in Jesus Christ daily by the Holy Spirit.
Some are led to believe we live in the realm of the Holy Spirit today. That God the Father was in the world, only in Old Testament times and has gone back to heaven. Then Jesus came along and did his thing for thirty-three years and is now back in heaven too. And since the first Pentecost we only have the Holy Spirit who transcends us into the holy of holies of heaven.
But in fact nothing could be further from the truth. We live in the being of him, Jesus Christ, who comes down from heaven to us. The Holy Spirit just helps us to faithfully know this so we can willingly be in a state of belief and in a state of justified restful peace before him who is God and Father of us all. Today we live in the realm of eternity, in the realm of the Trinity, who is hidden behind the veil of faith.
The story of Elijah in today’s Old Testament reading (1 Kings 19:4-8) clearly shows there is just no way we can get to God. In fact left to our own devices the best we can do is to lie down and die! We are no better that our fathers and mothers or any of our ancestors in either our biological or our church families.
The story of Elijah is also a prototype of the Trinity’s work of giving us loving peace, gracious salvation, and enduring powers to keep on keeping on for the duration of this life.
Just as the angel of the Lord woke Elijah up to the fact there was bread and water which needed to be consumed for the oncoming journey to Horeb - to Mt Sinai. The Holy Spirit kicks us into action, delivering us out of our sinful stupor, to eat and drink Jesus Christ and believe his word of salvation, so that we might make the “40 plus lifetime trek” in the wilderness of this seemingly Godless world. Why does he do this? So that we might come into the Triune God’s presence and have peace and rest in his being. So we can be, where the great “I AM” is!
We can’t see God—the Father, the Son, or the Holy Spirit—but we know the members of the Trinity are here by faith, because we feed on the one who is the Bread of Life. We feed on this food every time we hear his word, and eat his body in the bread, and drink his blood from the cup of salvation. The Holy Spirit works to make Jesus Christ known through these means so we might have peace with God.
But one day Jesus will be seen, he will be revealed to all. The veil will be removed from the unseen and we will see Jesus our Saviour just as he is coming in victory. He was sent by God to us from heaven and he will come again. Jesus was, is, and he will be!
Last week we heard the most popular line in literature from Hamlet – to be or not to be. But perhaps we can hear another popular line of literature from a more contemporary source, in the words of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who said in one of his movies, “I’ll be back!” Jesus lives, and he will “be back” as the eternal judge to raise us up at the last day, despite our sin. So trust in him now and feed on the living bread of heaven, so when he does come back he will be your Saviour and not your terminator! Amen.
Next week we will look at the progression of belief: Jesus exists only because of his perfect willingness to be in the Father, and we exist into eternity when we trust in Jesus’ perfect willingness to be in the Father, and receive his perfect willingness when we take the real food that is his body and is his blood.
