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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
We are having hot, dry weather again, but at least we can escape into air-conditioning and refresh ourselves with, if nothing else, store-bought food and beverage. The people of Israel in today’s Old Testament Reading had left the perhaps more‑moderate temperatures and plentiful stores of Egypt for the heat of the wilderness where essentially there was nothing to eat and drink. The people grumbled against the Lord by way of His servants Moses and Aaron, and the Lord heard the people’s grumbling. For them, the Lord rained down bread from heaven, a fine, flake-like thing, fine as frost on the ground. The people said to one another, “What is it?”, in Hebrew, man‑hu, and so that bread from heaven was called “manna”. In the wilderness, God graciously fed and watered His people and indicated Moses was His prophet. The manna was both idealized as part of Israel’s past and expected again as part of its future, a gift of the coming Messiah.
Our Gospel Reading two weeks ago told us how that Messiah, Jesus, one afternoon had compassion on the people because they were like sheep without a shepherd, and so He taught them many things and gave them a “free lunch”, miraculously multiplying five loaves of bread and two fish in order to feed more than five‑thousand people. Then, our Gospel Reading last week told us how Jesus that night walked on the sea out to His disciples, who did not “understand about the loaves”. Our Gospel Reading today and those for the next two Sundays tell us what Jesus the next day taught about manna and the true bread from heaven. Thus today’s theme: “Bread from heaven”.
As the divinely‑inspired St. John tells us, the crowd that remained on the other side of the sea wondered what happened to Jesus. Only one boat had been there the afternoon before, the one in which Jesus’s disciples went away alone. So, the crowd itself took boats from Tiberias over to Capernaum. They found Jesus and asked Him when, and so essentially also how, He got there. They asked Him about Himself, but He answered them about themselves. The crowd had been fed by the miraculously‑multiplied loaves and had essentially deduced a miraculous mode of transportation, but Jesus said they were not seeking Him because they saw the signs—that is, not because they understood the signs for what they were, miracles designed to create faith in Jesus as the Messiah. Instead, Jesus said the crowd was seeking Him because they ate their fill of the loaves, and apparently they wanted Him to continue to feed them with such earthly food. So, Jesus graciously tried to help them understand, and they seem to make some progress, but at the end of today’s Gospel Reading they still seem fixated on bread to satisfy their stomachs, like the daily manna, instead of bread to save their souls, the bread of life.
How much of what the people of the crowd in today’s Gospel Reading think, say, and do is like what we think, say, and do? How much of what Jesus says about them also describes us? They missed obvious miracles in their lives intended to create faith in Jesus as the Messiah. Do we not also occasionally miss miracles in our lives? They were fixated primarily on Jesus providing their material needs. Do we not also often pray more for material and physical blessings than for our spiritual needs? Even after Jesus tells them He will give them the food that endures to eternal life, they still thought they must be doing something to please God, as if they could do something on their own. How often do even we who are already redeemed still think our righteousness depends on us, or how do we otherwise overestimate our abilities? Once they realized they just needed to believe, they demanded another sign. Do we not also likewise seek signs other than those that God has already given us? The people of the crowd in today’s Gospel Reading give us lots of opportunities to examine ourselves, and we really come out no better than they did. Like them, we are all sinful by nature, and so we sin in these and countless other ways.
In one way I have a little trouble faulting the crowd. When they bring up the manna, they quote, like today’s Introit, Holy Scripture that says, “He gave them bread from heaven to eat”. Since all Holy Scripture is divinely-inspired and therefore without error, we have to be careful just how we say the crowd was wrong with that quotation! In its proper context, the “He” who “gave them bread from heaven” refers to the Lord, but Jesus must have known that they at least were attributing the manna as bread from heaven to Moses. Even if the rightly‑attributed miraculous manna in their minds was greater than Jesus’s miraculous multiplication of the loaves, there are any number of other ways that even the manna was less bread from heaven than Jesus, Who identified Himself as the true bread from heaven.
In today’s Gospel Reading, Jesus identifies Himself as the true bread from heaven that the Father is giving. Earlier in St. John’s Gospel account Jesus had said God the Father so loved the world that He gave His only Son that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life. In today’s Gospel Reading, Jesus identifies Himself as the bread of God Who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world. Earlier in St. John’s Gospel account we are told that, though the world was made through Him, the world did not know Him. Our knowing Jesus, our having faith in Him, truly is the work of God, that we believe in Him Whom He has sent. We believe, teach, and confess that the Holy Spirit gives birth to us from above, as in the one Baptism the Epistle Reading mentioned, where we receive a new mind and heart. The Holy Spirit opens our intellect and heart to understand the Scriptures and to heed the Word. Moved by the Holy Spirit, we heed the words of Jesus’s invitation in the Gospel Reading: we come and believe in Jesus, Who also identifies Himself as the bread of life. On the cross He gave His life for ours and so earned eternal life for us. In restoring Jesus to life, the Father further “set His seal” of approval on Jesus, on His perfect sacrifice for our sins. When we turn in sorrow from our sins, when we believe God forgives our sins for Jesus’s sake, and when we want to do better, then God forgives all our sin, whatever our sin might be.
Jesus says whoever comes to Him shall not hunger and whoever believes in Him shall never thirst. Where is He today that we can come to Him and believe in Him? We cannot go to the cross; He is no longer there! We cannot go to the tomb; He is no longer there! To a great extent, the “coming” of which Jesus speaks is “believing”, and, to the extent that that “believing” is “eating and drinking”, that “eating and drinking” is chiefly spiritual, through faith. Yet, as we will hear more clearly in the next two weeks, our spiritually eating and drinking of Jesus through faith is connected with and depends on our orally (or sacramentally) eating and drinking Him. What Jesus speaks of abstractly in today’s Gospel Reading and the Gospel Readings of the next two weeks is found concretely in the Sacrament of the Altar. We can go there to come to Jesus! In bread and wine, He is present on the altar, distributed by me, and received by all who commune—believers also receive with Him forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation. In the Sacrament of the Altar is Jesus Christ, the true bread from heaven—the bread from heaven that we need to get through the hot, dry, and troubled wilderness of this life, to the life to come.
William Williams was a Welsh medical student in the early 1700s, but he later changed his major to ministry and was ordained a deacon in the Church of England. His sympathies were with the revival movement, however, and so he became a Calvinistic Methodist minister and wrote more than 800 Welsh hymns and 100 English hymns to meet the great need for hymns in that movement. One of his hymns was the basis for our Hymn of the Day. With the hymn’s many analogies between the Israelites’ wandering in the wilderness and Christians’ travelling through this earthly life, it is embraced by English‑speaking people everywhere. The first stanza is a fitting prayer to conclude this sermon:
Guide me ever, great Redeemer, / Pilgrim through this barren land.
I am weak, but You are mighty; / Hold me with Your pow’rful hand.
Bread of heaven, bread of heaven,
Feed me now and evermore; / Feed me now and evermore.
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +