Sermon for Pentecost 14, August 25, 2024
John 6:51-69 51I am the living bread which
came down from heaven. If anyone eats
this bread, he will live forever. The
bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” 52At that, the Jews argued among
themselves, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” 53So Jesus said to them, “Amen,
Amen, I tell you: Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his
blood, you do not have life in yourselves.
54The one who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal
life, and I will raise him up on the Last Day.
55For my flesh is real food, and my blood is real drink. 56The one who eats my flesh and
drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him.
57Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the
Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. 58This is the bread that came down
from heaven, not like your fathers ate and died. The one who eats this bread will live
forever.” 59He said these
things while teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum. 60When they heard it, many of his
disciples said, “This is a hard teaching!
Who can listen to it?” 61But
Jesus, knowing in himself that his disciples were grumbling about this, asked
them, “Does this cause you to stumble in your faith? 62What if you would see the Son of
Man ascending to where he was before? 63The Spirit is the one who gives life. The flesh does not help at all. The words that I have spoken to you are
spirit and they are life. 64But
there are some of you who do not believe.”
For Jesus knew from the beginning those who would not believe and the
one who would betray him. 65He
said, “This is why I told you that no one can come to me, unless it is given to
him by my Father.” 66After
this, many of his disciples turned back and were not walking with him
anymore. 67So Jesus asked the
Twelve, “You do not want to leave too, do you?”
68Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom will we go? You have the words of eternal life. 69We have come to believe and know
that you are the Holy One of God.” (EHV)
Jesus’ spiritual food
gives life forever.
Dear disciples of the Living Bread,
Upon
hearing Jesus speak these words, many of those who followed Him found His
message too hard to accept, so they turned away. The Jews of Jesus’ day certainly didn’t
understand what Jesus was about.
However, to truly understand what Jesus was teaching requires a certain
level of understanding God Himself, which, by definition, is impossible for any
of us mere mortals. All that being said,
however, we can understand this: that Jesus’
spiritual food gives life forever.
There are some who associate this portion of
John’s Gospel with the Lord’s Supper.
Yet, Jesus spoke these things to His followers some time before He
instituted His Supper on the night He was betrayed. Though some parts of this teaching seem to
relate, Jesus’ message here is more related to His human existence and divine nature
which together bring us the Word of life.
At that time, many of Jesus’ followers were primarily
looking for an earthly king to make life easier and to ease their hardships and
illnesses. Likewise, it could be said
that many Christians today seek a Savior in much the same way. They want earthly peace, an end to poverty in
the world, retribution for perceived hurts, and a lengthy list of other personal
desires. Yet, while many of those
desires can be noble goals (actually goals for us to work on ourselves), Jesus
didn’t come to make life on earth a paradise.
He came into this world to bring us peacefully home to His Father in
heaven.
Our text comes after Jesus fed the crowd of
five thousand men plus women and children.
Some in that crowd wanted to take Him by force and make Him king. They were controlled more by natural desires
for an easy life than by a desire for peace with God. This question of a desire for peace with God
is worthy of our consideration. I suspect
that many people around us don’t give it much thought, and there is a good
chance we haven’t spent much time considering it either.
For the natural man, the desire for peace with
God often brings great fear. People
experience troubling events, illnesses, accidents, or storms, and many assume
God is punishing them for some perceived fault or guilt. In the Bible, Job’s friends are a prime
example of people assuming that God directly punishes us for some sin.
In our times, it is more likely that people
have been trained to believe that God either doesn’t exist or is not actively
involved in our world. These ideas have
been pushed for several hundred years now, and they have benefited no one, but
even at that, many will blame God when hard times come. At the same time, because we were raised in
the Church, and taught about Jesus’ love and what He did to save us, we may
fall into the trap of thinking that we deserve God’s benevolence, or perhaps,
we just don’t realize how greatly we have been blessed by the Gospel of our
Lord Jesus.
The point Jesus is making, here, is that no
person can survive into eternity without Him.
Like the Israelites in the wilderness needing God to provide bread for
their physical survival, we all need Jesus to provide for our spiritual and
eternal lives. Therefore, just as the
Lord sent down bread from heaven in the manna, He sent down His Son to provide
us with spiritual food by joining the divine nature with human flesh so that
Jesus could live for us, and especially, so that Jesus could bear our guilt and
the punishment of death and eternal damnation we deserved.
At the beginning of this Gospel, St. John
wrote, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the
Word was God.” (John 1:1) Thus, when
Jesus speaks of consuming His body and blood in order to live, what He is
really saying is that we need to consume His holy Word by faith. It is His Word of grace that brings us
peace. Jesus said, “The one who eats
my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him. Just as the living Father sent me and I live
because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven,
not like your fathers ate and died. The
one who eats this bread will live forever.”
Jesus had also told His followers, “The one who believes in the Son has eternal life.” (John 3:36) In
regard to this faith in Jesus, St. Paul wrote “Faith comes from hearing the
message, and the message comes through the word of Christ.” (Romans 10:17) Therefore, God’s Word isn’t something
irrelevant, unnecessary, frivolous, or mythical; it is literally the spiritual food
we need to consume so that this world is not the best thing we ever experience,
because for the one who does not learn about Jesus and believe in Him, the
eternal destiny is everlasting torment and pain separated body and soul from
God’s love.
Many of the people that first heard Jesus speak
these words understood Him to mean only a physical eating of His flesh and
blood which was offensive to their religious upbringing. Through Moses, God says the life is in the
blood, therefore Mosaic law required that no blood be consumed. Of course, that is also why it makes Godly
sense that Jesus’ spiritual food gives life forever for Jesus said, “My
flesh is real food, and my blood is real drink.
The one who eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in
him. Just as the living Father sent me
and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because
of me.”
When we swallow God’s Word with whole-hearted
trust in His promises, we are truly and completely connected with the Savior
who conquered death so that just as He now lives forever, so shall we. Again, we read the explanation of the Holy
Spirit through St. Paul’s letter to the Roman congregation: “If we have been
united with him in the likeness of his death, we will certainly also be united
with him in the likeness of his resurrection.” (Romans 6:5) In other words, when we are connected with
Jesus through faith in His Word, we are united with his resurrection unto life
eternal.
As Jesus taught this concept, however, many
found it too hard to believe. Still
today, many find it too hard to believe the teachings of the Bible. They want answers to earthly problems without
concern for our true spiritual need.
Jesus told those who would depart from Him, “The Spirit is the one
who gives life. The flesh does not help
at all. The words that I have spoken to
you are spirit and they are life. But
there are some of you who do not believe.”
For Jesus knew from the beginning those who would not believe and the
one who would betray him. He said, “This
is why I told you that no one can come to me, unless it is given to him by my
Father.”
Dear friends, not one of us came to believe in
Jesus by our own volition or choice.
Then again, no one else ever has either.
Jesus makes it clear that it is by His Father’s choice that we are
brought to faith. That takes the burden
off of us and gives us the assurance that it truly is God’s will to save us
that brings us to where we can hear the Word and the Spirit can use that Word
of the Gospel to convert us and bring us new life. Why some don’t believe and be saved is not
for us to understand. We are merely to
treasure the Good News of what Jesus has done for us so that we have the
forgiveness of all sin and the reward of faith which is life in heaven.
Our text closes with one of the most eloquent
and confident statements of faith known to mankind. Jesus asked the Twelve, “You do not want
to leave too, do you?” Simon Peter
answered him, “Lord, to whom will we go?
You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are
the Holy One of God.” Like Peter, we
believe that Jesus is the Holy One of God, and by believing in Him as our
Savior and Redeemer, we, who once were dead in trespasses and sin, now have
life everlasting and eternal peace with God.
We have a home in heaven bought and paid for by the blood of God’s Lamb,
His own dear Son, Jesus Christ. This
truth became Peter’s bold confession after Jesus returned to heaven. When put on trial and commanded not to preach
about Jesus, Peter’s response was to declare confidently, “There is
salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to
people by which we must be saved.” (Acts 4:12)
Years later, a Roman jailer was ready to commit
suicide rather than to face the wrath of his superiors when he thought Paul and
Silas might have escaped his jail. He
was saved by Paul’s intervention at the last moment. The jailer’s thankful response then was to
ask, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?”
They said, “Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved, you and
your household.” (Acts 16:30-31) This
confident invitation is basically the rallying cry of the Christian Church ever
since Jesus entered this world, because Jesus’ spiritual food gives life
forever. Amen.
Blessed
be the LORD God, the God of Israel, who alone does marvelous deeds. Blessed be his glorious name forever. May the whole earth be filled with his glory. Amen.
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