August 8, 2021
/The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost
2 Samuel 18:5-9, 15, 31-33 | Ephesians 4:25-5:2 | John 6:35, 41-51
The Rev. Bradley Varnell
Jesus has just performed this incredible miracle. He’s fed over 5,000 women, men, and children with just five loaves of bread and two fish. He has demonstrated in a remarkable way the extent of his power, his connection with God. It’s this scene that serves as the backdrop for today’s Gospel, and that helps provide a key for what’s going on today. See, Jesus has just provided for the physical needs of an incredible number of people, but in our Gospel lesson today he seems to minimize that. Jesus has given people – 5,000 people! – food. But that is a small feat in comparison to what else Jesus can give. Jesus offers not just bread and fish, but the bread of life. Jesus doesn’t just satisfy physical hunger, but, more importantly, satisfies spiritual hunger.
The challenge of our gospel lesson today is to see the deeper gift of Jesus. The healings, the exorcisms, the feedings, all of these practical, material miracles point to a deeper reality: Jesus is from God, the power of God flows through Jesus and is found in Jesus. What Jesus offers includes health and wholeness, freedom from demonic powers, and the satisfaction our physical hunger only as a means of leading us to the deeper reality: Jesus meets us in our spiritual needs, our soul needs, offering us life. Jesus didn’t come simply to feed folks, he came to give people life.
In all these miracles Jesus satisfies the people’s needs and desires for a greater purpose: to invite them to wake up to an even deeper need, an even deeper desire, the need for God and the desire for life with God. It’s hard to imagine but part of what Jesus is doing today is challenging us to recognize that there is a need deep than our need for food. Jesus challenges us to stop being impressed by the multiplication of bread that will satisfy for a time, but that will ultimately lead to death, and to wake up to the better food he offers: himself.
Jesus is the bread from heaven, like the manna the Israelites ate in the wilderness after they were freed from slavery in Egypt. This manna was a sign of trust! It was a reminder of God’s ever-present help. God provided the bread all through their wanderings until they came to the promise land. So too with Jesus. Jesus is the bread from heaven, a sign of God’s help and mercy. Like the manna, Jesus is offered as we wander in our world, as we seek to return to the God who created us. Jesus nourishes our souls for the journey. He nourishes our hearts.
One of the challenges of faith in the 21st century is believing that souls matter, that they must be fed. We live in a busy world, with many competing demands, and, if we stop and think about it, we live in a world that so often forgets the soul. It forgets how the soul can thrive and how the soul can shrivel, it forgets how the soul live and how the soul can die. It forgets how the soul can be healed and how the soul can be harmed. If we’re not careful, we, Christians, can get lulled into that trap. We can forget that our soul needs to be cared for, we can imagine that all this around us – church, liturgy, music, sacraments, scripture – all just exist to provide good examples for morals, or community, or as a kind center for positive thinking. But that’s simply not true. All of this, this entire faith, the church throughout the world only exists to draw each and every one of us to Christ, the bread that nourishes our souls, to pour the good news of Christ into our souls like water onto dry ground. Jesus fed the 5,000 – but greater than that, he brought souls to life, and gave them a life that cannot end.
Jesus is the bread of life. The one who satisfies hunger and thirst. Some of you may be familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, it’s this model of imaging the various needs of humans and its organized to show the most important, foundational needs at the base, on which others are built. It helps us see what must be in place for all the complex needs of humans to be met. But, it’s foundational level is physiological needs: food, water, shelter, etc. I think what Jesus invites us to open our eyes to today is the truth, or at least the possibility, that there is a deeper need that our physiological. There is spiritual need. We have a need for Jesus, for the Gospel, for the truth that we are loved and supported at every moment by the creator of the universe.
How is that need met? Much like our physical needs to have our spiritual needs met requires sustained habits. I need water and food to survive, but that doesn't mean a sip here and a bite there. Water and food are daily necessities if I’m going to thrive as a human, if my basic human needs are to be met. The same is true for us spiritually. Jesus, our necessity, can’t be someone we come to here and there. Daily we must turn to him in prayer, through reading Scripture, through worship, through the sacraments. If we would have our soul thrive, our soul live we must tend it. And we can only tend it by eating the bread from heaven, the bread which satisfies our deepest need: Jesus Christ. Jesus offers himself to each and every one of us. Not a guru, or a guide, but as the very way – the only way – our deepest needs can be met. Do not be satisfied with the bread of this world, because you have been offered more. Come to Jesus, come to the bread of life, come taste and see that the Lord is good. Amen.