John 6.35: "I am the Bread of Life" - that without which you cannot live at all, but having which, you have all that is needful.

John sets the scene for our Lord's discourse on the Bread of Life with the account of an actual episode, the feeding of the 5000. If Jesus is indeed the eternal Son of God through whom the worlds were made, His ability to multiply bread is hardly surprising. For the Lord Himself, I am sure it was, as you might say, a light thing - not at all deserving of the round-eyed astonishment with which it was greeted. The reason He only ever did it once or twice is to be found in precisely that reaction; people were too bemused by the wonder of it to see the point. Certainly the crowd that day was highly excited by it, but for the wrong reason. They saw only that here was a miracle man who could provide a welfare state by magic. "You seek me," Jesus said to them afterwards, when they had chased Him half-way round the lake, "not because you saw a sign" - not because you saw a thing which pointed to something beyond it, something higher and greater - "but because you ate your fill."

THE BREAD SUSTAINS HEAVENLY LIFE

Whenever we see religion as a means to some worldly end, we fall under the same condemnation;
... when, for example, we look to religion to make Zambia great, rather than to make God glorious;
... when we want Christianity to prevail so as to rid industry of strife and make it prosperous, rather than bring peace with God;
... when we espouse religion to cure the world of war, coveting earthly security more than God's rule.

When we value what is eternal only for some advantage it secures which is purely temporal we corrupt it, however desirable and right that advantage may be. By setting our sights on any goal that is less than God, we miss both God and that goal. This is why Jesus reacted to the crowd's enthusiasm with so little enthusiasm Himself.

Jesus perceived that they were about to "take Him by force and make Him king." "What's wrong with that," you ask? "He was born to be King, wasn't He? Shouldn't He rejoice that the goal had been reached and let them do it?"

But no. He withdrew to the mountains. He declined the adulation.

Why? Because it was false. What they wanted to enthrone was not Christ, but their own wants. They wanted, not Him, but what they fancied, selfishly, He could do for them.

He Himself, not anything else or less, is the Bread of Life. The motivation of all natural religion is to use God and His power for purposes of our own. If we are not careful, our praying can be like that. From all such desire, Christ is pledged to cleanse us. That is not the sort of life He will nourish in us. He is the source of the strength by which we may serve God, not of the strength by which we may serve ourselves ... and our own notions of what will be good for us. If He were, He would be the poison of death to us, not the Bread of life.

If you are looking to Christ to help you to achieve your ambitions, He will disappoint you. What He is concerned to do first is radically to change your ambitions, till you have no desires but those He brings to birth and sustains in you. That is the life of which He is the Bread.

THE MEANING OF THE BREAD AS MANNA

Now John, in his record of this miracle and the discourse that followed it, reinforced this message in a powerful, though subtle way. John often uses little details in his story-telling, true-to-life touches which somehow suggest something deeper; by pondering those little touches you catch his deeper meaning. This chapter carries many allusions to the story of the Exodus, as we noted earlier in our study of the feeding of the 5,000. I believe John wants us to understand thereby that Jesus is everything to us that the Israelites discovered God to be to them in their desert pilgrimage ... their true sustainer, and their guide.

Let me briefly recapitulate:

vs. 1-2 "Jesus went to the other side of the sea, followed by a great multitude" who had been impressed by the signs He had wrought

... as Moses crossed the Red Sea, followed by the hosts of Israel who had been impressed by the signs he had wrought in Egypt.

v. 3 "Jesus went up into the hills and there sat down with His disciples," who were soon to share this extraordinary meal with Him
... just as Moses took seventy elders with him into the mountain where, (as the narrative tells us in Exodus 24 and that astonishing verse 11) "they beheld God, and did eat and drink."

v. 4 "Now the Passover, the Feast of the Jews was at hand."

It was the first Passover that started the Israelites on their desert experiences, chief among them the provision of the Bread from Heaven which was evidence of their invisible God's sustaining presence in their midst all their journey through.
At this Passover time too the Son of God is seen to be among His people to sustain them with the Bread from Heaven all their journey through.

v. 5 Jesus' question to Philip is exactly the question that faced Moses and his people in the Sinai: "Whence shall we get bread to feed this multitude?"

v. 6 "This Jesus said to test him," John tells us, just as Exodus 16:4 tells us that God promised them manna "to prove them" - to test them - "whether they would walk in His law or not."

Time and again, the Israelites faced what looked like the end of every-thing for want of resources, just as the crowds and the disciples did on the Galilee hillside, only to be shown again and again that with God, nothing shall be impossible. Disciples must learn what the Israelites were so slow to learn, that every crisis faced, far from being a reason to despair, is a challenge to believe and hope and watch for God to act.

v. 11 When Jesus miraculously multiplied the bread, every one ate "as much as he wanted."

That too is reminiscent of the desert experience: "Gather the manna," they were instructed, "every man as much as he can eat."
And when they had done so, Exodus 16:8 tells us, "They gathered, some more, some less. But when they measured it, he that gathered much had nothing over, and he that gathered little had no lack." And Moses said to them, "Let no man leave any of it till the morning."

That was exactly how it was, too, on the Galilean hillside. When the fragments were gathered up ("Nothing must be lost," said Jesus, as Moses had said), they exactly matched the need of the distributing disciples.

The supply of His Grace is always matched exactly to our need.

v. 14 The reaction of the Jewish crowd was to link Jesus in their minds with Moses; for the prophet they referred to when they said, "Surely this is that prophet" is the prophet whom Moses himself had promised, as recorded in Deut.18.15: "The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brethren. Him you shall heed, for I shall put my words in his mouth." Their response: "This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world" is exactly the response John means you and me, his readers, to make ourselves.

Moreover, the desert pilgrimage of the Jewish people is specifically referred to in the discourse that occupies the rest of chapter 6, where Jesus goes on to say, "It was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven; my Father gives you the true bread from heaven." (v. 32)

And then He says plainly, "I am the Bread of God which comes down from heaven, and gives life to the world."

Finally, notice the superb twist which John gives to this recapitulation of the old desert story.

The whole meaning of that Exodus story was that God was in the midst of His people as their sustainer and their guide through all the perils of the way. They had God to guide them. But with every fresh crisis they fell so persistently into unbelief that in the end they wandered about for forty years covering a distance that should have taken them but a few months at most.

The nice twist John is able to give the story is that when you take Jesus on board to be your guide, there is no need for you to grope about for forty years looking for the promised land; rather ... "immediately the boat was at the land to which they were going."

The truth then of this twin sign in ch. 6 is a simple one: Because God, the Creator and Redeemer has fixed His love upon us, we can trust him for everything; for our daily bread, as well as for the spiritual sustenance of which bread is the symbol. We are to cast ourselves on God for everything - for the big things of life, as well as for every little thing.

Life with Christ for His disciples, like life with God for the Israelites of old, has for its whole meaning the learning of one thing: to trust God - so to trust Him that in the end no circumstance of life, however disastrous, is able to weaken or whither our faith ... to be able at last to say, "Who or what shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril or sword? No. In all these things, we are more than conquerors, through Him Who loved us."

The Lord will sustain you through every experience of life. That is what it means that He is the Bread of Life.

John 6:57: "As I live by the Father, so he that eateth me shall live by me."

He lived by the Father ...
by His words
by His presence - God was always there for Him
by His love - in dependent trust, and in active obedience.

So we live by Christ ...
by His words
by His presence - He is always there for us
by His love - in dependent trust, and in active obedience.

WHAT BREAD IS FOR

God was to Christ what bread is to the body; Christ is to us what bread is to the body.

i. It nourishes our life
How, we do not know. We do not need to know; it does!
So Christ nourishes life. How, we do not know. We do not need to know; He does!

ii. It nourishes the life which is appropriate to it
Bread will not nourish vegetables, only people.
So Christ nourishes the life to which He is appropriate - the life of the Spirit in us which is His gift, not our fleshly passions.

Hence the emphasis on the need to understand the story rightly. "You seek me, not because you saw a sign, but because you ate your fill." Christ does not nourish the self-centred life in us which wants only to eat the fill of its own desires, but a God-centred life.

iii. Bread has to be appropriated to be of any use
So Christ has to be appropriated to be of any benefit to us. That means feeding-times, meditation on His words and works. Feed on Him; snacks will not do! He is bread, not an occasional cookie.
As we do, the way our bodies grow on bread our spirits will grow on Jesus, on His person and His words.

There is nothing very mysterious about that; words do nourish life in us. A whole family may be fed by the words, the gentle, wise and patient words of a good mother; an expedition may draw the sustenance of courage from the encouragement of a strong leader through all sorts of privations and disappointments; a whole nation may feed on the words of a leader like Churchill. He fed them inspiration - only to those who tuned in, of course!
Christ's words will feed us inspiration, but we have to tune in!

We have to feed on His words. That means more than just browsing vaguely through them - we have to "read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them," as the Prayer Book so expressively says it. We have to deliberately, trustfully reckon on the supply of His qualities of character to sustain us -
... His strength for our weakness
... His peace for our anxiety
... His courage for our fear
... His love for our selfishness
... His confidence in God for our doubt
... His hope for our despair
... His self-control for our compulsions.

iv. The bread has to be a quality product

There lies the importance of v. 27: "On Him the Father has set his seal" (i.e. the resurrection) - that is God's guarantee of the quality.

v. It has to be distributed

There was enough for all, but it needed distribution - by the disciples!
So servants must fill the water pots; Jairus' daughter, when she is raised, must be fed; Lazarus' friends must roll away the stone and loose him.
So here - Jesus passed the bread to the multitudes by the hands of His disciples.
It is so still. His words are conveyed by the evangelists, the gospel writers, first
... and by them to teachers
... and by teachers and other Christians to us
... and by us to others!

We must be careful to feed not ourselves only, but others too, with the bread we receive.

What we have in our hands may indeed be only a little, a mere morsel, as it was but a morsel the disciples took in their hands. But look what Jesus did with it! Distribution is a true means of increase!