Bread, yes, but not bread alone

Sermon for Lent 4 – Laetare

Galatians 4:21-31  +  John 6:1-15

We began this Lenten season watching the Son of God go without bread—or any food—for forty days at the beginning of His ministry. You remember His reply to the devil when the devil tempted Him to turn the stones into bread for Himself? Man does live on bread alone, but on every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. The body needs bread. But man is more than the body. We’re body and soul creatures, and the soul needs to eat, too. Physical bread for the body, and spiritual bread—the Word of God—for the soul.

In today’s Gospel we see that God is well aware that, yes, man does live on bread, and we see God graciously providing it. But man does not live on bread alone, and yet, tragically, the people in our Gospel, like so many people today, wanted nothing but bread from Jesus, who wanted to offer them so much more.

Jesus was trying to get away from the crowds for a little while. He got in boat with His disciples and crossed the sea to a deserted place. But the multitudes saw Him leave and left on foot to meet Him on the other side of the lake. It tells us why: Because they saw all the signs He was doing and they wanted to see more. And they wanted to have their bodily illnesses healed. Mark’s Gospel tells us that Jesus had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd, wandering aimlessly, attracted by the flashing lights—by the miracles Jesus was doing.

So, as the other Gospels tell us, Jesus spent the rest of the day teaching them and healing their diseases. And when evening came, Jesus had one more lesson to teach, both to His disciples and to the crowd—a lesson that centered on bread. After all, as John tells us, Passover was near. Passover—and with it, the Feast of Unleavened Bread.

People’s minds should have been wandering over to that important annual celebration, just as most of us think about and plan ahead for Christmas, and (hopefully) also Easter, weeks in advance. Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread—a reminder of God’s physical providence in redeeming Israel from slavery in Egypt, and of Moses leading them through the wilderness where God provided bread for them every day in the form of Manna, teaching them to rely, not on their own strength to provide for themselves, but on God and His Word, for everything. But the Passover was also a reminder of God’s spiritual providence in His promise to redeem Israel by the blood of Christ, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world, the Prophet who is greater than Moses, who offers the true Bread from heaven: Himself as the one Mediator between God and man. There it is again: bread for the body and spiritual bread for the soul.

First, Jesus tests Philip and the other disciples. Where shall we buy bread, that these may eat? It wasn’t an urgent need or anything. Jesus had spent 40 days without food. These people would manage just fine without food for one day. The question was, would Philip and the other disciples rely on themselves to come up with this bread for the people, or would they put all their trust in the word of Jesus and put it back into His hands? We know what they did. They focused on their own ability and (rightly) despaired. They did find a boy who had five loaves of bread and two small fish, but they gave up. “What are they among so many?”

Jesus didn’t scold them. He showed them what He was able and willing to do. He had the people sit down on the grass—5,000 men, plus women and children. Jesus took the boy’s bread and fish, gave thanks to the Father, and then started handing out bread and fish to the disciples, and the disciples to the multitudes, and the food just kept coming. All 5,000 ate their fill, with twelve baskets of broken pieces left over, not just barely enough to get by, but more than enough to satisfy.

Yes, man does live on bread. That’s how God designed us. But who provides it? Where does it come from? It comes from God the Father; it comes through Jesus, the Son of God and the Word of God. It comes from God usually through parents or through hard work. But God can also rain bread down from heaven or multiply what’s in the pantry, if that’s how He has to keep His promise to provide for His people. Recognize God as the source of your bread. Recognize Jesus as the Giver. And receive your daily bread with thanksgiving. Receive it with gladness. Enjoy it while you have it, and share the leftover pieces with those who need it.

But recognize that man does not live on bread alone. Go ahead and eat your bread. Eat it every day. Eat it for years to come. But you know very well that eating bread every day—doing everything possible to care for your body—still won’t keep you alive on this earth for more than a few more decades, maybe less. Your body is dying, no matter how healthy you are at the moment, no matter how much bread you have on hand. You were conceived in your mother’s womb with an expiration date, known only to God, with death already programmed into your genes and cells, not because of some evolutionary mechanism, but because of sin. Eating bread regularly just means prolonging the time until your death. It does nothing for your soul—for your eternal well-being.

Your soul lives on “every word that proceeds from the mouth of God,” as Moses and Jesus said. God’s word is what keeps your soul alive, God’s teaching about sin—your sin, and the sin of everyone else, and the sin that has corrupted even nature itself, the sin that will result in the death of your body and the destruction of this earth. Your soul also needs to feed on God’s teaching about His grace—His gracious plan of salvation through faith in Christ Jesus, His gracious acceptance of all who believe in Christ, His gracious gift of His Holy Spirit to begin a new obedience in the Christian, His gracious help in bearing the cross each and every day, until you reach the goal of the undying life.

Tragically, the multitudes in our Gospel today wanted bread alone, like most of the rest of the Jews, who wanted to stick with Hagar, if you recall the Epistle today from Galatians 4. They wanted to stick with “Jerusalem below,” with the First Covenant of the Law instead of the Second Covenant of grace and of the Promise of forgiveness through Christ. The people in our Gospel believed that Jesus was the Prophet who was to come, but all they wanted from and expected from the Christ was an earthly king to fill their bellies with bread, to fight their battles with political opponents, to give them social justice, a pleasant and comfortable earthly life. As it says at the end of the Gospel, the people who ate the bread were about to come and take Him by force to make Him king. “This is the kind of Savior we want! One who can give us bread for our bodies, every day, as much as we want!” And so, as we learn from the rest of John 6, those very multitudes pursued Jesus to the other side of the lake on the next day, and then immediately walked away from Jesus that same day when He refused to perform miracles on demand, when He insisted on offering them Himself instead, not as an earthly bread-king, but as the living Bread who came down from heaven who would give His very flesh and blood to reconcile them with God and to bestow on them, not an earthly kingdom, but a heavenly one.

Like those crowds, people today are happy to follow Jesus, if it’s the Jesus who gives away free things—material things, who gives them a better life, who makes them feel good. They’re happy to have a Jesus who didn’t create the world, who doesn’t demand any sort of obedience or worship. They’re happy to follow a Jesus who does only the things they think He should do, who works together with other religions to solve social problems, who would never pass judgment. Such a Jesus the people of this world might have for a king.

But the real Jesus appeared, teaching that He is the Creator of all and the Judge of all, the only true God, together with the Father and the Holy Spirit, the One who came to call poor sinners to repentance and to terrify the impenitent with the fiery judgment that awaits. The real Christ came to suffer the judgment we deserved for our sins and to offer forgiveness of sins and eternal life to the penitent and believing. The real Christ calls people to repent and be baptized, and to sit at the feet of the pastors whom He has sent, to be active in a church that teaches His truth purely, to receive His very body and blood in His Sacrament, and to recognize His Word and Sacraments as the true food for the soul and as the source of a life that’s so much bigger than what we can see here.

That Jesus was not accepted then, and He still isn’t accepted now—not by most of the world, even by most of our neighbors, even by many churches that bear His name.

But you know better, don’t you? Look to the Lord Jesus for daily bread and receive it from Him with thanksgiving. But don’t look to Him for bread alone. Look to Him for the things that last: for the forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation which He earned for you through His suffering and death, and which He now hands out for free in His Word and Sacraments. Then and only then will you be able to “rejoice with Jerusalem,” not with the earthly Jerusalem that rejects Jesus’ word, but with the Jerusalem above, which is the home of all the blessed who are saved by faith alone in Christ Jesus alone. Amen.