“Fresh Eternal Bread” Mount Olive Lutheran Church Season Of Pentecost Sunday Sermon July 28, 2024 – John 6:22-35

Mount Olive Lutheran Church / Pr. Ted A. Giese / Sunday August 4th 2024: Season of Pentecost / John 6:22-35 “Fresh Eternal Bread”

On the next day the crowd that remained on the other side of the sea saw that there had been only one boat there, and that Jesus had not entered the boat with His disciples, but that His disciples had gone away alone. Other boats from Tiberias came near the place where they had eaten the bread after the Lord had given thanks. So when the crowd saw that Jesus was not there, nor His disciples, they themselves got into the boats and went to Capernaum, seeking Jesus. 

When they found Him on the other side of the sea, they said to Him, “Rabbi, when did You come here?” Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, you are seeking Me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you. For on Him God the Father has set His seal.” Then they said to Him, “What must we do, to be doing the works of God?” Jesus answered them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent.” So they said to Him, “Then what sign do You do, that we may see and believe You? What work do You perform? Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’” Jesus then said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave you the Bread from heaven, but My Father gives you the True Bread from heaven. For the Bread of God is He who comes down from heaven and gives Life to the world.” They said to Him, “Sir, give us this Bread always.”

Jesus said to them, “I Am the Bread of Life; whoever comes to Me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.”                                        

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in Your sight O Lord. Amen.

Grace peace and mercy to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Good Christian Friends you truly shouldn’t eat bread with visible mould on it; and even if parts of the loaf look ok to you, you shouldn’t eat any of the bread from a loaf with visible mould spots. And even though you can’t see them, when any mould spots are visibly present the mould roots that come along with that visible mould can rapidly spread through the entire loaf bread making the bread toxic and dangerous. Bread is a very a transient thing, and as a result we are always looking for fresh bread because we know bread will not last when not eaten quickly, the bread of this life becomes stale quickly. You can’t make a loaf of bread and keep it out on the counter in the kitchen and expect to slice it up and eat it next month. By then it’ll no longer be fresh, by then it’ll be mouldy, by then it’ll be inedible, by then it will cause you harm, by then it will have perished beyond use. In our Gospel lesson from John’s Gospel the people were seeking Jesus for bread to eat and Jesus says, “Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life.”

This is all in reference to the feeding of the 5,000; where Jesus miraculously fed the people who had come out to see Him in the wilderness. After that feeding the disciples had gathered up twelve baskets of leftovers and while the bread Jesus gave them that day was of a miraculous nature it was still bread and would have eventually gone the way of all bread. In last week’s Gospel we hear that account of Jesus walking on the water and then right near the end of that Gospel reading the disciples are said to have not so much marvelling at the fact that Jesus walked on the sea of Galilee or that He calmed the storm that had been tormenting them, but rather Saint Mark says that the disciples “were utterly astounded, for they did not understand about the loaves” Saint Mark tells us that the disciples “hearts were hardened.”

It wasn’t just the disciples that didn’t understand the loaves—that miraculous bread that Jesus gave them and the people—apparently everyone was confused about the bread and what it meant.  This Sunday and for the next three Sundays the Gospel readings will focus on Jesus teaching the disciples and the people about the “food that parishes,” verses “the food that endures to eternal life” the food that is “the True Bread from heaven,” the sort of enduring thing that won’t become stale or mouldy. Do you want to learn what this Bread of heaven is? Do you want to learn what having this Bread of heaven means for you in your life?

You may be surprised to hear that there are those who don’t want to learn this. Throughout the Gospels, over and over again we find all sorts of people seeking to demote Jesus from teacher to [student], “people [who] think they know it all in advance and need no instruction. That is why they are vexed when Christ tries to teach them so many things. They defy Him saying, ‘What must we do?’ as though they were to say: ‘You are right, for we already know more than You can ever tell us or more than You can conceive, We have the scribes on our side, the divine worship, the people of God, the temple, and the priests. Our fathers and ancestors [like Moses] were no fools. And You [Jesus] claim to be the only smart one? Do You come with Your ‘new’ [teaching] to instruct the whole World? What can You tell us that the World has not all ready learned?’”[1] This is their hard hearted attitude toward Jesus and His teaching, they would rather see another demonstration of Jesus giving them bread then take the time to learn and believe what He is working to teach them; interestingly Jesus will give them this demonstration but it won’t be a slice of bread, it won’t be a piece of toast, or a loaf. In all that Jesus does He is working for the greater goal of providing Bread that will be, and is and ever shall be Bread that gives Life to the world, not just for the day but for all time. The place where Jesus would make this final demonstration was in the events of that first Holy Week.

On Thursday of Holy Week, the night in which He was betrayed, Jesus speaks plainly to His disciples, yet presents to them again the mystery of the Bread of Life when He takes the bread and blesses it and brakes it and gives it to the disciples saying “Take eat, this is My body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of Me.”[2] This is the same heavenly food, the same Bread of Life which would the next day hang upon the cross at Mount Golgotha. That is the place where Jesus gives of Himself, where He gives of the Bread of heaven, so that not just 5,000 people, or 4,000 people, or twelve people can be fed for the day but so that all people who have faith in Him would be fed at all times for eternity. It is upon the cross where Jesus does what He says, “I Am the Bread of Life; whoever comes to Me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in Me shall never thirst.” From the cross comes Jesus to all those who are in need: when we come to the altar rail hungry for forgiveness and thirsty for eternal life and we receive Holy Communion, we receive the very One Who came down from heaven and died that we would have life in Him. His Holy Supper, His time of prayer in the garden of Gethsemane, His cross and passion, His crucifixion is like an oven in which the Bread of Life was prepared and made ready for you. Yet some people would rather not learn this lesson when Jesus teaches it, because with hardened hearts they believe they know more than the teacher, and believe they know better how everything works day in and day out in this world, they believe they know best what Jesus is good for. This is why Jesus says to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, you are seeking Me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.”

Do you look at Jesus as a kind of vending machine; are you concerned only with the troubles of today? Are you thinking with your stomach? Is it an appetite for the food that perishes, that drives you? Have you lived your life as confused about the Bread of heaven as these people from our Gospel reading today?

Lately at Mount Olive we’ve been focusing a lot on the topic of trust; many of our recent Scripture readings have been touching on this topic. The people who came to Jesus looking for bread, looking for a demonstration of Jesus’ miraculous bread giving abilities, strangely didn’t seem to actually trust the one to whom they came: They demanded a lot of Jesus but oddly didn’t trust Him at His word. They were looking at Jesus as a potential new Moses, Jesus was of course more than that. This is why Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave you the Bread from heaven, but My Father gives you the True Bread from heaven. For the Bread of God is He who comes down from heaven and gives Life to the world.” In our Gospel today Jesus points out to them why they can trust in Him at His word. In this conversation with them Jesus doesn’t here point them forward to His crucifixion and the resurrection, no in this part of His conversation with them Jesus point them back to His baptism when He tells them, that “the Son of Man will give [them the food that endures to eternal life]. For on [the Son of Man] God the Father has set His seal.” Jesus is saying that He is the one to trust because God has put on Him His seal of approval. Jesus Himself is this very same ‘Son of Man’ of whom He speaks. The seal of approval Jesus speaks of isn’t a sticker or a label, it’s more than a best before date on a store-bought loaf of bread, it’s more than a peanut free notice printed on a Mars Bar wrapper; when Jesus says that, “the Father has set His seal” upon Him, Jesus speaks of His baptism where the Holy Spirit like a dove descended upon Him and the voice of God the Father boomed out from heaven saying, “This is My beloved Son, with whom I Am well pleased.”[3]

In your own baptism you have been given the Bread of heaven, you have been given Jesus, you have been given the Holy Spirit, and the Father has now put His seal upon you – Saint Paul in his Letter to the Christians of Rome asks you, “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? We were buried therefore with [Christ] by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.”[4] Jesus said to them, [just as Jesus says to you], “I Am the Bread of Life; whoever comes to Me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in Me shall never thirst.” By the grace of God, these words become, for those who believe them, a seal of faith upon the heart.

In baptism you receive Jesus and in baptism Jesus receives you, therefore in baptism you receive the ever fresh eternal Bread of Life. And in Holy Communion, this same ever fresh eternal Bread of Life is put in your hand and in your mouth and in addition to the forgiveness of your sins which you receive there as Christians you likewise receive redemption of your body and your soul in this same Christ Jesus. This is why Saint Paul comforts you in your distress saying, dear Christian “do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away [that is our physical bodies], our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light [as a feather] momentary affliction [that we are experiencing] is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen [like the bread of this world that becomes mouldy and perishes] but to the things that are unseen [like Christ Jesus the very Bread of Life given to you by the Father from heaven]. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.[5] Dear ones this is why Saint Paul teaches us that as Christians “we walk by faith, not by sight.”[6]

The ones who came to Jesus in our Gospel reading couldn’t see beyond their nose, they were thinking with their hungry stomachs and as such wished to be taught not by faith but by sight; they believed they needed a demonstration and even still they didn’t know for what they were asking, they thought it was all about feeding their bellies when Jesus knew it was all about giving them eternal life and removing hunger and thirst forever ... not just for a couple hours or days or weeks or years but forever. That He, the very Son of God with the Father’s seal of approval, wanted to give them the Bread of Life from His cross, so that each Christian would be baptised into this Bread of Life, so that each Christian could receive this Bread of Life in Holy Communion, so that on The Last Day it would be made obvious to all people, not just those with eyes of faith but for all people what it was that Jesus gives and what we from His hand have received in this life.

What are we to remember when we find the loaves of manmade bread that we’ve clung so closely to turning to toxic mould in our fingers? What then are we to do when we are tempted to think only of the needs of this day? Believe in Jesus: turn to your baptism, rush to the altar rail, fix your eyes on Jesus who is the Bread of Life, and share this trust and hope with others. When looked at in this way, sharing this Good News of Jesus Christ with others is a very simple matter. This sharing of the faith has been beautifully and simply described as, “one beggar telling another where he can find bread,” this right now is one beggar sharing The Bread of Life with another beggar who needs it just as they do. And where can they find this Bread of Life: You find it in God’s Word found in Holy Scripture and in the Holy Sacraments found in His Church. Dear ones scribbled on a piece of scrap paper by a dying man were found these words, “We are beggars. This is true.” These are reportedly the last words that Rev. Dr. Martin Luther wrote in the days leading up to his death on February 18, 1546. Therefore, hold fast to Jesus’ word when He says to you, “I Am the Bread of Life; whoever comes to Me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in Me shall never thirst.” From one beggar to another: You needn’t fear the mouldy stale bread of this World nor the momentary afflictions we all suffer when you have the Bread of Life in whom there’s ever fresh and everlasting true forgiveness unto eternal life. Amen.

Let us pray: Lord have mercy on us, Christ have mercy, Lord Have Mercy, “take our minds and think through them, take our lips and speak through them, take our hearts and set them on fire; for the sake of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, Amen.

[1] Martin Luther, Luther’s Works Volume 23, Sermons on the Gospel of St. John Chapters 6-8, Concordia Publishing House 1959, pg 20.
[2] Lutheran Service Book, Divine Service Setting Three, Concordia Publishing House 2006, pg 197.
[3] Matthew 3:17
[4] Romans 6:3-4
[5] 2 Corinthians 4:16-18
[6] 2 Corinthians 5:7

Photo Credit: Main photo detail of kneading bread from pexels.