Jesus, The Bread Of Life
St. John 6:1-15
In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.
St. John 6:12-14 12 So when they were filled, He said to His disciples, “Gather up the fragments that remain, so that nothing is lost.” 13 Therefore they gathered them up, and filled twelve baskets with the fragments of the five barley loaves which were left over by those who had eaten. 14 Then those men, when they had seen the sign that Jesus did, said, “This is truly the Prophet who is to come into the world.”
Dear fellow redeemed in Christ our Lord… Today’s Gospel concludes by saying that the people tried to take Jesus by force to make Him king. They finally found the leader they were looking for from among all candidates that were out there. Politics and theology were running close together in the people’s minds. Jesus had developed quite a following through His teaching and His healing. Now, by feeding the 5000 in this miraculous way, Jesus was the instant frontrunner to lead the people.
While some seemed to understand who Jesus really was when they said, “This is truly the Prophet who is to come into the world,” referring to the Messiah Moses had prophesied, most seemed to be more interested in the power and the miracles. They didn’t follow Jesus for salvation or for forgiveness of their sins or for reconciliation with God; they followed Him for free food and health care. Here’s a guy who could really help their economic circumstances, and their medical needs, and maybe do something about those foreign Roman occupiers, too. This is about as close as they could get to an election. The people had spoken
At this point, Jesus was the envy of every politician running for office. His poll numbers were strong, and He had proven he could deliver on his promises. Church politicians would be thrilled with Jesus, too. Jesus really seemed to have hit upon a successful evangelism program; just look at the crowds! Of course, by the end of this chapter, after Jesus had talked about eating His flesh and drinking His blood, He went from having thousands of followers to only a dozen.
Now, just because the majority speaks, that does not mean that the majority is necessarily right, whether it’s 99% or 51%. Majority votes are sometimes not all that much different from mob rule, as in North Africa and the Middle East where majority rule has meant the persecution of Christians; or, for that matter, in this country where majority votes have meant the normalization of sexual perversity, legalized the killing of unborn and just born babies, and the sickening denigration of God’s institution of marriage. So also with the majority in today’s Gospel; other agendas were at work that did not belong to Jesus, political agendas that were not the Father’s design for His Messiah king.
That is why Jesus goes to the mountain all alone thereby shunning the voice of the people. Jesus understands that while presidents and prime ministers are elected by the people, kings are not. The king is who he is by virtue of his birth, by virtue of his person regardless of the voice of the people.
There is a temptation offered to Jesus here that is not unlike what the devil had offered earlier when he took Jesus up on the mountain and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. “All these I will give you,” (Mt 4:9) the devil said. But to attain such glory would require a deal with the devil, which our Lord Jesus would never make. His kingdom is not of this world, it is from above. And His kingship is not subject to the will of the people but the will of the Father.
Jesus was all alone on the mountain, which is the way Moses probably felt in the Old Testament reading as the people grumbled against him. When they were in Egypt, they groaned against their yoke of slavery. But once they were liberated, they groaned against the burden of freedom. And this is right after God saved the children of Israel by opening the Red Sea to them as an evacuation route, and drowning the entire Egyptian army. With very short memories they now tell Moses they would rather be back in Egypt. And note just how fickle public opinion can be! If the Israelites could vote, Moses surely would have been recalled.
And yet, God does allow Moses be ousted. God alone is the deciding vote. He gives the people that which they don’t deserve, and in spite of themselves, He rains bread from heaven upon them, literally giving them their “daily bread.” Of course, the children of Israel would later complain even against this generosity of God. They wished they had more variety in their free meals and not the same old manna every day.
Likewise, in today’s Gospel, Jesus provided miraculous bread for the 5000, even for those who did not have in mind the things of God but the things of men. For, as we confess in the Catechism under the Fourth Petition, “God certainly gives daily bread to everyone without our prayers, even to all evil people.” And He sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous, that we may learn to receive His undeserved gifts with thanksgiving.
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And this is where we often fall short. We must confess that we focus way too much on ourselves, and we have sometimes grumbled and complained against God for the way He has provided for us or hasn’t come through for us as we wanted. We want God to fit our agenda, and when He doesn’t, we become disappointed or upset. Too often we let the voice of the majority affect our desires more than the voice of our Lord’s Word. It is the opinion of our peers that drives us, a desire to fit in and keep up with the world, to have the approval of those who are considered important. We are, by nature, people pleasers rather than God pleasers. And for this we must repent.
So also must the church at large repent, the church which is constantly facing the temptation of watering down its confession and practices to make itself more amenable to the world with market-driven megachurches and success-driven preachers. We must ever be reminded that Jesus is Lord, not public opinion or financial pressures or human votes.
And we must also be reminded that God is still at work in the midst of all these things, using even evil things and turning them for good. Even the rebellious will of the majority becomes an instrument of God’s will, both for judging and for saving.
Sometimes the worst judgment that can befall a people or a country is for the majority to get its way and suffer by its own doing; it is, in essence, God saying to that country or people, “Fine, your will be done,” what I call “the Burger King God:” “Have it your way.”
It is true that our salvation also came through the rebellious will of the majority. Remember that when Pontius Pilate placed Jesus and Barabbas before the people, and asked them which one they wanted him to release, there was something of an election. They shouted for Barabbas to be released and for Jesus to be crucified. And the murderer was set free while the Lord of life was sentenced to death.
Though this was indeed a grave injustice humanly speaking, it was precisely how divine justice would be carried out. For Jesus had come to take the place of us sinners, to bear the judgment for sins He did not commit, so that we would be forgiven. And so, the voice of the majority was indeed the voice of God the Father Himself, speaking through the people saying, “Crucify Him! Crucify Him!” It was the will of God that His Son should die for the people in spite of themselves. And precisely because of that sacrificial love of God, we Barabbases are released from sin and death. We who deserve to die and suffer eternally for our sins are now children of God.
When politics and theology become indistinguishable, people die. In the Gospel, the people were going to take Jesus by force to make Him king. And in the end, the crowds did exactly that when they forced Him to the throne of the cross, where He was crowned with thorns. That is where Jesus is lifted up and exalted in all His royal love for us. It is from the cross that we hear the true voice of God which trumps all other voices: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!” (Lk 23:34)
Jesus said in John 6:49-51, “Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and are dead. This is the bread which comes down from heaven, that one may eat of it and not die. I am the Living Bread which came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this Bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I shall give is My flesh, which I shall give for the life of the world.” Jesus is our Manna, given over to the cross for the life of the world, given out to you in Sacrament of the Altar.
Thanks be to God that our Lord does not give in to the mobs to become an earthly king. For His kingdom is an everlasting kingdom to which you belong by virtue of God calling you His own child in Holy Baptism. Jesus is more than a bread King; He is your Redeemer King, the very Bread of Life Himself.
Thanks be to God that His mercy overcomes our sin. For in spite of our grumbling, our Lord also gives us that which we do not deserve. Not only does He give us our daily bread and the things we need to support this body and life, He also gives us the bread of immortality, His own flesh and blood. Again, Jesus said later in John 6, “I am the Bread of Life. He who comes to Me shall never hunger, and he who believes in Me shall never thirst. . . Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day” (Jn 6:31, 44). We have our own greater miracle from Christ right here in divine service: the Bread which is His body and the wine which is His blood, multiplying His forgiveness to you so abundantly that it never runs out. Those who eat here are filled and satisfied with the goodness and mercy of the Lord.
What a tremendous blessing, dear fellow redeemed, that in God’s mercy and grace He brings us here to where we may truly hear the voice of God, not in majority votes, but in Christ’s Word, in His sacraments, and in His preached Gospel. May He make us glad to receive the words of Jesus, for they truly are the words of eternal life.
In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.
