Receive, from the Father’s Son, the Bread of life.

 

Sermon for Laetare, Lent 4, March 15, 2026

Now may the God of hope fill you with complete joy and peace as you continue to believe, so that you overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

John 6:41-47  ⁴¹So the Jews started grumbling about him, because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.”  ⁴²They asked, “Isn’t this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know?  So how can he say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?”  ⁴³Jesus answered them, “Stop grumbling among yourselves.  ⁴⁴No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.  And I will raise him up on the Last Day.  ⁴⁵It is written in the Prophets, ‘They will all be taught by God.’  Everyone who listens to the Father and learns from him comes to me.  ⁴⁶I am not saying that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God.  He is the one who has seen the Father.  ⁴⁷Amen, Amen, I tell you: The one who believes in me has eternal life.” (EHV)

Receive, from the Father’s Son, the Bread of life.

Dear beloved in Christ Jesus, our Lord,

            It seems incredible to me, but for some reason, the world has always had a hard time understanding who Jesus is.  Even as a twelve-year-old boy at the temple, the teachers were dumbfounded that Jesus could have such understanding, while He always appeared to be an ordinary boy and later an ordinary Man.  Still, having been taught by the words of Scripture for the last two thousand plus years, how can anyone today not recognize Jesus?  Still, many do not.

This morning, we will take a look at a portion of the Second Article of the Apostles’ Creed.  The Christian Church has confessed Jesus’ nature ever since He ascended to heaven.  Of course, God the Father has been testifying to Jesus’ nature from the very beginning through the work of the Holy Spirit in recording the written Word of God.

As we confessed a few moments ago, we believe “in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord; Who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary.”  That seems very straight forward, but perhaps Luther’s explanation will help those who may be confused; he wrote, “I believe that Jesus Christ is true God, begotten of the Father from eternity, and also true man, born of the virgin Mary; and that He is my Lord.” 

Here, we come to the crux of the matter.  These blunt statements seem like an impossible contradiction to the intellect of the person broken by sin, and since we were all broken by sin through our inherited nature, it is impossible to understand these truths except by faith.  Therefore, I bring you another seemingly impossible message: Receive, from the Father’s Son, the Bread of life.

To the natural mind, if Jesus is God then He cannot be human and certainly not bread.  Furthermore, if Jesus is a man, then how could He be true God?  Likewise, how could a baby be born of a virgin?  All this is completely outside of our human experience.  Therefore, the Spirit of God conceiving a Son in a virgin seems like mythology, so natural man rejects it, unless of course, he imagines something equally incredible himself.

In our text, the crowds react with disbelief because Jesus had said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.”  The Jewish people reacted in much the same way that modern man does, arguing through human logic that Jesus’ statement is impossible.  They knew Jesus’ earthly parents, Mary and Joseph.  They knew without any doubt how babies come into existence.  How could Jesus say something so preposterous?  Later, when Jesus had the audacity to teach that to be saved they must consume His body and blood, many if not most of those people turned against Him saying, “This is a hard teaching!  Who can listen to it?” (John 6:60)  And, they walked away.

We can resolve the difficulty in understanding Jesus’ words when we realize that He is not speaking about the Lord’s Supper He would institute the night He was betrayed.  Jesus is speaking, here, about Himself as the Word of God.  To help us understand, St. Paul writes in his letter to the Romans, “Faith comes from hearing the message, and the message comes through the word of Christ.” (Romans 10:17)

From the very beginning of the Book, the Bible tells us that the world and everything in it came into existence as God spoke.  His word has the power to create and to destroy.  St. John tells us about the saving power of God’s spoken Word when he writes, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was with God in the beginning.  Through him everything was made, and without him not one thing was made that has been made.  In him was life, and the life was the light of mankind.” (John 1:1-4)  Thus, Jesus is the food that gives life to the soul.

This world exists because God’s spoken Word has the power to create and sustain it.  You and I exist because God spoke into existence the elements that make up our bodies and He then formed us into special beings into which He breathed the breath of life.  It isn’t so hard to understand once we are willing to believe that our God truly is God.  The trouble for most people is that it doesn’t line up with what the sinful mind accepts.  Everything about God, His being, His power, His outside of this world nature, His mercy, forgiveness, and kindness is outside of the realm of human comprehension, so our salvation is understood only through the power of God working faith in us.

This is why when the people were complaining about His teachings Jesus answered them, “Stop grumbling among yourselves.  No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.  And I will raise him up on the Last Day.”  The Jews claimed to have the faith that saved Abraham, but they were being misled by teachers who insisted salvation must be earned.  Many of those teachers didn’t even believe in angels or life after death.  As you can imagine, the scribes, Pharisees, and Sadducees were not pleased when Jesus told the crowds, “Every plant which my heavenly Father did not plant will be uprooted.  Let them go.  They are blind guides of the blind.  And if the blind are guiding the blind, both will fall into a pit.” (Matthew 15:13-14)  The teachers of Israel had become a people led by their faulty intellect.  Yet, forgiveness, eternal life, and salvation cannot be earned, invented, nor come by our decision, because “Salvation belongs to the Lord.” (Psalm 3:8)

Consequently, every doubt or fear we might have about God or our salvation is, of course, sin.  Furthermore, almost all of us are troubled by these things at times.  The Christian faith doesn’t always make sense in the sinner’s mind, and there is opposition all around us, both from people in the world and the forces of evil that seem to rule the world.  Our own flesh cries against us, because we don’t want someone else having power or control over us.  What the sinner, by nature, fails to understand is that we are either under the devil’s control, or God has wrested us away from that deceiver by the power of His Word.  That is the only way anyone is saved.  Therefore, when we are brought to faith in Jesus, He has become our Lord to whom we owe our lives, for He rescued us from Satan’s chains.

Now, therefore, hear Jesus as He tells the crowds and the world, “It is written in the Prophets, ‘They will all be taught by God.’  Everyone who listens to the Father and learns from him comes to me.”  For thousands of years, God has been telling the world about His love, and the way He would show that love through sending His Son to be the sacrifice that would reconcile the world with God.  For fifteen hundred years God sent prophets to the people to tell them about the coming salvation. 

Actually, God was telling that Good News right from the beginning.  He spoke the story of salvation to Adam and Eve.  God showed the world His saving might as He rescued Noah from the judgment flood.  Again, God demonstrated to the world that He would save His people as He rescued Abraham’s descendants from their slavery in Egypt.  Time and again through Word and action, the Father told the world about Jesus.  Still, it all seemed so mysterious until Jesus made everything clear.

Therefore, it is now given to us to enjoy forgiveness and everlasting life, because the Holy Spirit has caused us to Receive, from the Father’s Son, the Bread of life.  Jesus told the crowd that day, “I am not saying that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God.  He is the one who has seen the Father.  Amen, Amen, I tell you: The one who believes in me has eternal life.”  This is simple enough for anyone to understand; whoever believes in Jesus Christ, that is whoever believes that Jesus is the Son of God who came into the world to redeem us from the curse of sin and the devil’s control will receive forgiveness of all sin, reconciliation with the Father, and life everlasting in heaven.

Jesus told the Samaritan women at the well, “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth.” (John 4:24)  God is Spirit, so we can’t find Him in the created world.  We can’t discover His secrets by human ingenuity or exploration.  The only way for us to be reconciled with God and be saved from our sins and the condemnation we deserved is if God reveals Himself to us, and He does that in the power of the Holy Spirit through His Word, through His Son, Jesus, for “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation, for in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, things seen and unseen, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him.  He is before all things, and all things hold together in him.” (Colossians 1:15-17)

For us today, Jesus remains that saving food that enlivens us to live forever.  He feeds our souls so that by His holy Word we believe in Him as our Savior from sin, Satan, and death.  We consume the Bread of Jesus through the hearing of the Word of God and its Good News for us in Word and Sacrament.  Having heard and believed the message Jesus brings, we are no longer children of darkness, for in Him we have the Light and Bread and the sure Hope of life everlasting.  Today and always, dear friends, Receive, from the Father’s Son, the Bread of life.  Amen.

Amen.  Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanks and honor and power and might belong to our God forever and ever.  Amen.