This is a copy of my talk given at Ayia Kyriaki and Saint Luke’s in the Anglican Church of Paphos on Sunday 11 August 2024. The Bible reading was John 6:35 & 41-51. 

Prayer

Heavenly Father
I thank You for Your word
By the power of the Holy Spirit
May You speak to my heart
And change my life
In the precious name of Jesus I pray
Amen.

Introduction

Bread is a staple part of people’s diet all over the world and satisfies most hunger pangs! If not bread – it’s rice! Especially for those who live in the Far East. If Jesus was speaking to an Oriental audience he would have said he was the ‘Rice of Life!’

But as well as a physical hunger that gnaws away at our stomachs, we all hunger spiritually. We all suffer from soul hunger. We all hunger for something more in life. There is an emptiness in our souls that needs to be fed and we can look in many different places to feed that hunger. We try to fill it with material possessions, people, experiences, careers, drugs, relationships – and they all fail us. All of the physical things that we look to for meaning and nourishment eventually fade.

We keep going thinking just one more promotion will make us happy, just a few more £/€ in the bank will secure our future and then we can relax, but even when we get that promotion or fill up our accounts, we realise that kind of food cannot keep us alive. Only Jesus can give us ‘soul food’ that satisfies. Only Jesus can do that. Only Jesus promises life everlasting. In this passage Jesus tells us that He is the bread of life, that He is the only bread that matters and endures. Only He can quell our cravings and satisfy our souls.

  1. God gives bread to the hungry

Jesus is speaking in Capernaum and He twice makes reference to Moses in vs49 (as well as in vs30-32) when mention is made about the manna that God provided in the wilderness to feed the Israelites. He did so in order to feed their physical hunger so they would know that he was their provider, but it was also a picture of what was to come when God would send them bread that would quench their spiritual hunger.

The parallels between Jesus and Moses are interesting: the manna came at night, and Jesus comes into our spiritual darkness. Manna was God’s gift to the Israelites, and Jesus is God’s gift to us. Moses held out his staff and God parted the water, Jesus walks on the water.

In vs14 the people said: Surely he is the Prophet we have been expecting. They called him the Prophet and not a Prophet.

  1. The bread that changes lives

The Israelites wanted a King that would rally the people, fight for them and free them from the tyranny of Roman rule but that was not Jesus’ mission. Jesus did not come into the world to help us to achieve all our ambitions and grant us the desires we already had before we were born again. He came to profoundly change our desires and to be our main desire. To be the bread that is sufficient, because whatever situation we find ourselves in, Jesus is enough.

It’s not that he doesn’t care about our health and wellbeing, he does. He showed us time and time again his care and compassion for people, his hatred of disease, sickness, and death. He never said that issues of political freedom or economic justice were unimportant, and he was never indifferent to the plight of the poor and the oppressed, but he was not, and is not, a political messiah.

It’s simply that meeting all our physical desires is not his main concern. He wants to change those desires at their core, so that he becomes our desire over everything, so that we may love and follow him, worship him, and be satisfied in him.

  1. Choose your bread

They asked him: “What must we do?” and he replied, “This is the only work God wants from you: Believe in the one he has sent.” They shrugged that off and persisted by demanding another sign because if he wanted them to believe in him then he needed to prove it. vs30 “So they asked him, “What sign then will you give that we may see it and believe you? What will you do?” Jesus had just fed thousands of people with 2 fish and 5 loaves and the very next day, they are asking him for a sign! The miracle of feeding the 5,000 had been enough to get their interest and row across the lake to find Jesus, but that was yesterday’s miracle, it was yesterday’s news and not enough to last until the next morning, they wanted more.

Does that hit any nerves with you? Do we too at times suffer from an insatiable appetite for spiritual excitement but at the same time lack a sense of responsibility towards Jesus?

How many of us can say that we have never attended church or a Lent Course or Bible Study or similar expecting to be fed, even entertained, but having prepared nothing to offer of ourselves? We crave spiritual excitement; new experiences and the odd miracle now and then would be good. Jesus didn’t want the kind of follower that only got excited about what he could do. He wants a genuine relationship with every one of us, but he won’t be bargained with. He doesn’t enter that relationship on our terms but on his. He won’t do something we ask in order that we believe in Him, he’s done everything already.

Something quite important happens in vs41, which is easily overlooked. Until this point, Jesus has been talking to ‘the crowd’ now the crowd has been replaced with ‘the Jews’ and this creates conflict and changes the dynamic completely. Vs 41-42 “At this the Jews there began to grumble about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” 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?”

Many walked away dissatisfied, Jesus wasn’t who they were looking for to fill their needs. They wanted a strong leader who would perform miracles to order and to impress. Their response also tells us a lot about the difference between what people want and what people need, and so often the very thing people need the most is the last thing they are looking for.

They were hungry materialists and materialism will never meet our deepest need. They were so excited by the miracle they had witnessed that one would never be enough, and they would always have been hungry looking for the next one, forever seeking another experience to confirm the last one. The pursuit of material things only creates a downward spiral of acquisitiveness that can never be satisfied.

The legalists among the Jews wanted a set of rules they could follow or things they could do before they believed in him. The materialists wanted the miracles more than they wanted Jesus. Jesus, however, is looking for faith, he wants us to stop relying on our own resources and trust in him. He wants us to want him for who he is instead of what he can do. He stands as the Bread of Life and freely offers himself to you, but it is not a free lunch. This bread cost Jesus his life.

4. Refusal to eat the bread is very costly

They rejected Jesus and in rejecting Him rejected eternal life. They judged by human standards and by external values. They rejected Jesus claims about himself because they only saw the carpenter’s son they had seen grow up in Nazareth and couldn’t understand that he could possibly be someone special from God. They listened to what he said, they saw what he did but they learned and understood nothing. How sad and how dangerous. To listen and to see but to learn nothing and to go away unchanged and unsaved.

We can all listen to what Jesus said and know facts about him, we can think about him and understand how he saves us, but it’s not the same as believing in him, as giving our lives over to him and receiving him as our Lord and Saviour. It’s not the same as knowing that without him we have no future in this life or the next. Only Jesus has seen the Father and only Jesus can give true illumination which brings us knowledge of the Father. Only Jesus can give everlasting life to those who believe in him.

5. You can keep all the world – just give me Jesus

We love eating food, reading about it, and watching other people prepare and cook it on the TV. There are diets to suit everyone, and we go from one food fad to the next. We spend a lot of time thinking about what to feed our stomachs. But what about feeding our souls? Do we spend as much time feeding on the Bread of Life as we do on peanut butter sandwiches?

I confess to being tempted by the allure of the world and what it offers. I confess to getting my priorities wrong many times and making Jesus wait while I’m busy with other things going on in my life and only seeking him when I need him and it pains me as much as it may hurt him to confess this, but I can only say that my greatest joy, my deepest contentment and what keeps me calm and free from fear in the middle of the night is knowing Jesus Christ as my Saviour and Lord and ultimately, you can have all the world and everything in it, but give me Jesus every time.

In Matthew 4:4, Jesus said that we “cannot live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” A timely word needed to be heard by Christians living in affluent western societies everywhere dominated by consumer culture. John 6:35: “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

COPYRIGHT DISCLAIMER The text contained in this sermon is solely owned by its author, Revd Paul A. Carr. The reproduction, or distribution of this message, or any portion of it, should include the author’s name.