THE ‘I AM’ SAYINGS OF JESUS - 1. THE BREAD OF LIFE

After last week’s brief introduction, we begin this morning our look at the first of the ‘I am’ sayings of Jesus in St. John’s gospel. ‘I am’, says Jesus, ‘the bread of life.’ The passage or ‘discourse’ containing this first saying stretches from verse 22 of chapter 6 to verse 58. 

The questions we need to ask ourselves are these. What does Jesus actually say here about himself? What did he mean by it? And what is its significance for you and for me in terms of our understanding of Jesus and our discipleship of him?

Now of course anyone is free to make of what is said here whatever they like. Indeed that is not just a modern phenomenon in our increasingly self-oriented society where people will make of something whatever pleases or suits them, it has been true, sadly, even of very influential people within the Church herself and throughout her history. This very passage has been interpreted by certain wings of the Church to justify certain developments in faith and doctrine, creating new mythologies about the sacraments and about the eucharist or Lord’s Supper in particular. 

The fact that these developments have caused over the centuries not only great divisions but horrendous loss of life ought at the very least to warn us about ‘reinterpreting’ or ‘developing’ understandings and practices of the Christian faith which have little or no justification from what Jesus actually said or did. 

As I hope you will be able to see, it was precisely because Jesus saw that this was going on in his own day – that people were misunderstanding what it was God wanted from them in terms of their religion – that he gave this piece of teaching that we are looking at this morning.

Sadly, already well before the end of the first century, when John was writing, people were reverting to the comfort blanket of ritual rather than developing right relationships in the practice of Christianity, at the same time creating out of the sacraments, such as baptism and the eucharist, something that simply was not there in the teaching of Jesus. ‘Do these rituals, say these words, and all will be well.’

The sacraments fairly soon began to be seen as ‘efficacious’, that is, possessing in themselves the means of God’s grace, rather than, as Jesus taught, quite simply ordinances or practices designed to lead people to a closer relationship with him, and through this to more faithful and effective discipleship. 

We can see Jesus getting increasingly frustrated with the crowd who keep asking him, ‘What must we do to perform the works of God?’ The crowd have it in mind that as long as they perform certain rituals or practices and keep certain rules, all will be well. What they cannot see is that the ‘works’ God wants them to do are those inspired by belief in Jesus and by a loving response to his agenda.

The mistake we all too often make is thinking that because we have come up with an idea for a good work it must be what God wants; when actually what God wants is for us to first work out with Jesus what it is he wants us to do.

The Church often fails in its calling to discipleship because Christians plan their agenda of good works without actually first consulting Jesus through prayer and bible study; often, I am sorry to say – but I have to say it – with results that do not bring glory to God or enable other people to appreciate something new of his truth and love.  

If I may just quote from a prayer in the 1662 Prayer Book that makes this very point; ‘Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works...... and glorify your Father which is in heaven.’ 

This is why the Christian engages in good works; not to glorify ourselves – perish the thought! Not even simply to help those in need; but to ‘glorify our Father which is in heaven’. That is to say, that people must be made aware in some way or other of the motivation for our good works. And such works are best and most effectively done when they are done in relationship with Jesus and out of evident, demonstrable, love for him.

I don’t want to say any more about ‘good works’ at this point except that, just as the sacraments are not of themselves means of grace or in any way sufficient to bring us to eternal life but simply ways of leading us to a closer relationship with Jesus, so ‘works’ or ‘good works’ are not in themselves capable of gaining us acceptance by God unless they are unashamed expressions of our faith and love for Jesus and designed to bring glory to God.

So, when Jesus says ‘I am the bread of life’ here, he is not talking about the future Lord’s Supper or eucharist. He is talking, using the highly appropriate metaphor of eating, about the fundamental necessity of our having a personal relationship with him through faith, a relationship which leads to eternal life.    

 And yet because people have read into it, for their own purposes – political, emotional, cultural, or whatever, far more than the words allow, the eucharist has become, for some, far more than was intended when Jesus introduced it; indeed a reversion to the very reliance from which Jesus was trying to wean his audience! The fact that you or I may like ‘doing church’ in a particular way that suits us does not mean that it is necessarily correct or what our Lord intended. Indeed we ought always to be questioning how we ‘do’ church and if how we do it is not only deepening our faith and making us more effective disciples but also helping others to come to an experience of God’s love and knowledge of his truth.

 By this I mean that the way we do church can sometimes – more often than we perhaps care to realise – get in the way of our being or becoming more effective disciples of Jesus and also of helping others to come to know him. That we happen to have done church in a particular way all our lives, or that we can point to certain long standing traditions or practices, or that we can name certain eminent churchmen on our side is not the point. 

This was so largely the obstacle that Jesus faced and was tackling here in this discourse. His audience had certain agendas, religious and political, that were effectively preventing them from understanding who Jesus was and what was their proper response to him.

If we come to Jesus or to Church with a particular agenda – however hallowed by tradition, however emotionally uplifting, however righteous it seems in our own eyes, it makes it more difficult for us to hear what Jesus actually tells us and expects of us. And the Church as a whole at times in different periods of its history has been astoundingly successful at creating an institution and practices that have not served well the task her Founder gave her. 

This is why understanding correctly passages like this is so important.

To make it lot easier I am going to tell you now the essential point that Jesus makes here. But this doesn’t mean you may then doze off for the remainder!

This passage has been argued over and interpreted in many different ways depending on the prejudices and agendas of different scholars. Essentially what we need to understand though is that Jesus is not here talking about the eucharist or about how the bread and the wine of communion become his flesh and blood. 

Yet nor, as some on other wings of the Church have claimed, may we deduce from this that the eucharist is unimportant. What he is saying here is that what you and I need, indeed must have, in order to discover real life in this world and everlasting life in the next is him, the real ‘bread of life’ v35, which, or who, is appropriated by faith v47. We must appropriate him into our innermost being. ‘Eating’ the flesh of the Son of man is a very striking metaphor to express this, and really not so bizarre. 

After all, we say that we ‘devour’ books, we ‘swallow’ stories, we ‘drink in lectures’, we ‘chew over’ a problem or matter.

Now when we remember that Jesus was trying to get the people to move away from trusting in rituals to forming relationships as the true and only way to know God; and given, as we discovered last week, that John’s Gospel is essentially an evangelistic tool to help the Jews of the diaspora come to belief in Jesus , what this metaphor does, in a very down to earth sort of way, is to link Jesus in their minds with the manna from heaven in the wilderness, verses 31 & 49, and to Moses v32, but in such a way that they are left in no doubt that Jesus is here claiming to be superior to both! 

And if the Jewish readers had observed or heard of, as almost certainly they would have, the commemorating of the last supper with its breaking and sharing of the bread, they would be able to see in this metaphor of bread and flesh not only that Jesus himself is now the central object for a person’s faith in God but that he fulfils the sacrificial necessity fundamental to our understanding of Christianity as well! 

He is the bread that fulfils in our earthly and heavenly lives: he is also the atoning sacrifice for our sins who makes eternal life possible for us – indeed for the whole world v51. So all this talk by Jesus about being ‘the bread of life’ is not John introducing or justifying the eucharist, the Lord’s Supper; rather, the eucharist, as it was and ought to be understood and practised, is about what John is describing here in chapter 6: that knowledge of Jesus, in the believer’s personal relationship with him, is what is supremely important and what the euchaist points to and encourages in the believer.

You see, already when John was writing, the danger was, then as now, that people believed the Lord’s Supper to be a rite which, by their mechanical repetition of receiving bread and wine, secured them salvation, eternal life; a sort of magic formula almost! The same can be said today about baptism – judging by some people’s commitment to their promises after the baby has been ‘done’ – as a kind of one-off insurance policy. 

John seems to share the frustrations of Jesus that people are hoping to get away with going through the motions of ritual rather than welcoming the risen Jesus into their lives and allowing him to change them. And of course the Gospel is not just about receiving eternal life it, is about gaining freedom from sin for his service, service that leads, as Jesus promises, to ‘the reality of life’.

Unfortunately, as the years went by, the sacraments came to be understood by many as conveying grace in themselves – eat the bread and God’s grace is conveyed to you; once again the rituals taking the place of the relationships. Of course human beings find the doing of ritual easier than the making of relationships – it’s less messy, less risky: yet this was the very thing Jesus was trying to drum out of them. 

Move away from reliance on your rituals; those days are passed, a new world, a new creation is here. 

But the Church has preferred its rituals and effectively reversed Jesus’ teaching. As someone once put it, using Jesus’ first sign or miracle at Cana to illustrate such ecclesiastical revisionism, ‘Jesus performed the miracle of turning water into wine; but the church has performed the greater miracle of turning it back again!’.

The comfort blanket of ritualised religion is no substitute for a living personal relationship with Jesus through prayer, bible study, and active discipleship. It is not that we are not free to chose from the many different ways in which we may meet with Jesus and worship him BUT that these must not become ends in themselves, nor must they delude us into thinking that being baptised, attending church, taking the bread and the wine, or singing hymns - whether ancient, modern or both, will in themselves gain us eternal life. 

It is only as these things lead us into a deeper personal relationship with Jesus himself that we are saved.  So in answer v29 to the age old question ‘what must we do?’ Jesus replies ‘believe in him whom he has sent’. And then v40  [READ] This essentially symbolic nature of ‘bread of life’ and related expressions in this discourse is disclosed by the mingling of metaphorical and non-metaphorical elements. 

Jesus is the bread of life, but it is the person who ‘comes’ v35 and v 37 to him who does not hunger, not the person who eats him. Similarly, it is the person who ‘believes’ v35 in him who does not thirst, not the person who drinks him.

There is so much more that we could say about and learn from this passage – and I am sure we will be able to do so through the bible studies and notes in due course - but I want to end by saying a few words about our last verse v51. 

Certainly v51 calls to mind the institution of the eucharist; but the focus here is not on the taking of or the efficacy of the bread and the wine: the focus is squarely on Jesus as the sacrifice for the sins of the whole world. ‘the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever.’ 

It is as you and I, indeed as anyone, place our faith in Jesus that we are reconciled to God, forgiven all our sins, and granted the gift of eternal life. What can we do but thank and praise and serve him in all that we do in this life: this is ‘glorifying our Father in Heaven’, this is discipleship.