Bread from Heaven

In Nomine Iesu
St. John 6:35-51
August 12, 2018
Proper 14B

Dear Saints of Our Savior~

There’s a nice little restaurant in Shorewood where they come around to your table with a big platter filled with three different kinds of bread. They ask you if you want the ciabatta, or if you want the sourdough, or if you want the French peasant. I’m not sure why they bother to ask! My response is always the same: Yes! Yes! And yes! Who can say “no” to fresh bread? Who but the most disciplined counter of carbs can turn down that warm, crusty goodness, and just sit around waiting for the main entrée to show up?

Not everyone shares my enthusiasm for bread. But what about bread from heaven? What about a bread so amazing that you could eat of it and never die—bread that promises eternal life—bread eaten today that will raise you from your grave on the last day? Imagine the

demand—the lines that would form just to get a morsel of this bread. Think of how this bread would go viral on social media as people snapchatted and instagrammed and facebooked this bread from heaven 24/7.

Then again, maybe not. Or at least, not yet. For when I got here this morning there was nobody camped out on the front lawn or lined up at the door—no satellite trucks on Santa Monica, and no helicopters hovering overhead. Just a sleepy, summer, Sunday morning.

But here—in the church and in the liturgy of the Divine Service—here the bread of life—bread from heaven—is being given out. Here the Lord feeds us like a shepherd feeds his flock in green pastures. Here the Lord fills the hungry with good things—with the Bread of Life that is Jesus Himself—a bread greater than the manna that rained down on Israel for forty years in the wilderness—a bread greater than the angel’s bread that raised up Elijah and sustained him for forty days across the desert (and kept him from the clutches of Queen Jezebel).

Jesus Christ is that bread—living bread, bread from heaven, the bread of life. Jesus is the one living loaf, alive with the life of the Father—a thick, crusty, Palestinian peasant bread—baked in Bethlehem, broken on Calvary, raised from the dead, ascended in glory.

This Jesus is completely unique—one of a kind. But He chooses to come to us in the way of plain, ordinary bread. You don’t have to go to the North Star Bistro for bread—it’s available at practically every restaurant and grocery story on the face of the earth. Bread is what the server tosses on your table to appease carb-cravers like me. Bread is what you use to soak up the last of the tomato sauce. In fact, in first century Palestine, where everyone ate with their hands, bread served as your fork and spoon and napkin. There was nothing more basic—more utilitarian—than bread.

But when Jesus began to say that He Himself was the bread that came down from heaven—well, that got the Jews grumbling. Who does this guy think He is? They knew His mother. They thought they knew His father. They probably remembered that He grew up in Nazareth (which was kind of like the Fond du Lac of Galilee). How can this traveling rabbi call Himself bread from heaven? Their questions reeked of unbelief.

Unbelief is our inherited eating disorder—a refusal to eat the food of life . . . and a desire for the delicacies of death. Adam and Eve could eat from any tree in the garden, including the tree of life. Only one tree was off limits. Only one tree would make an enemy out of God. Only one tree would bring death to them and to all their descendants. But that’s the tree for which they hungered. That’s the tree that made their mouths water (carried along by a satanic sales pitch). They didn’t fear God. They didn’t love Him. They didn’t trust Him . . . and neither do we.

We share in their eating disorder. We too have a disordered appetite that makes us hungry for the delicacies of death. Sin has left us empty and famished. And we find all kinds of creative ways to make that emptiness go away. Some of the deadliest poisons we crave were mentioned by St. Paul in today’s epistle from Ephesians: a greedy eagerness to practice every kind of impurity, bitterness and wrath, anger and slander, theft and malice. These are just a sampling of the disordered ways we try to appease the nagging hunger that nothing in this world can fill.

But we keep trying to fill that emptiness with something. We fill it with work, hoping that achievement and success will leave us feeling satisfied. We fill it with play and entertainment, with travel and recreation. We try relationships, hoping to find in somebody else what’s lacking in us. We find causes to dive into—whether it be relief for refugees or environmental justice or the promises of your favorite politician. But the hunger remains unfilled. The appetite remains disordered.

But the good news for today is hard to miss: God has food for you—soul-satisfying food! He will not leave you to starve in this wilderness of sin. God gives living bread in the person of His Son. On your own, you’ll never get this bread. By nature we don’t know where to find it or how to get it. Jesus said, “No one can come to me—no one!—unless the Father who sent me draws him.”

God takes the initiative. First He sends His beloved Son to be our bread of life by giving His life on the cross. Then He draws us to this bread by bringing us to the water of baptism, to the preaching of His Word, to the Holy Supper, to confession and absolution. There, in these ways, He continually, richly, daily feeds us with Christ—urging us, bidding us, inviting us to “taste and see that the Lord is good,” that from His open hand our deepest desires are satisfied. Nothing delights the Father more than that we should be hungry (and even greedy) for the gifts of forgiveness we have in His Son. Here in this place God gives us the richest of fare, a feast for our salvation, a banquet of blessings!

But do you know what I see when I look around? I see skinny Christians—(they’re everywhere)—Christians with their ribs sticking out—Christians who only pick and nibble at the bread of life as if they were afraid of overdoing it and getting fat on the forgiveness of sins—of putting on pounds from the rich promises of God’s Word. And so we only show up here every so often—as though the bread of life should only be received in moderation—as though we can get by without it—as though the devil, the world, and our own sinful flesh don’t really pose a threat to us.

Beloved in the Lord, you need Jesus. You need the bread of life. You don’t have to go up to heaven to get it because Jesus calls Himself the bread that “comes down from heaven.” Jesus comes down to meet us where we are, where we eat, where we sin, here and now. He reaches down to feed us with the true manna of His death and resurrection—with bread that we may eat and not die. Luther wrote that we treat the forgiveness of sins in two ways—1) how it was won, and 2) how it gets delivered. It was won two thousand years ago on the cross of Calvary when the living bread from heaven was broken for the life of the world. There the Bread was broken; but here, here in the liturgy, here in the church, here in the Word and sacrament—here that Bread is distributed to those who hunger for it. Here the forgiveness of sins gets delivered.

The bread of life comes with a promise and a guarantee to the eater: I will raise him up on the last day. Jesus says that four times in John chapter six. Four times He promises what no other food in this world can deliver—resurrection from the dead. Every other food we eat goes with us to the grave and dies. But this food goes with us to the grave and raises us to life.

This present life still has its pains and its problems. And even those who delight to dine on the bread of life are not spared the troubles and the tragedies of life in a fallen world. It’s not magic bread. It’s not the bread of success and happiness. Jesus is the bread of life—resurrection life. But eating this bread—scarfing it, devouring it, receiving it in all of its humble forms—this bread will give you the strength you need to live each day in the peace that passes understanding and in the joy of Jesus—even when “the journey is too great for you.” It may not be until the Last Day that you will be able to look back and see what you cannot always see now—that you are loved by the Lord Jesus, fed by Him, forgiven by Him, protected by Him. He is the bread of life. And He will raise you up on the last day.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.