John
6:1-14, 35, 47-51
I think that the 6th chapter of John's Gospel, apart from the spiritual
truth it reveals, is also a beautifully constructed chapter in the
literary sense. It opens with a simple incident. Jesus is in the
wilderness, a large number of people have followed him, and the time comes
for them to eat and there's no food. So Jesus has a conversation with
Phillip and Andrew and discovers that there's a boy who has five barley
loaves and two fish. Jesus had the people sit down in the wilderness and
he took the loaves and he gave thanks to God for the food, and then
distributed the loaves and fishes to the people. Just a simple incident,
with a touch of the miraculous, but in it Jesus is reminding us of the
goodness of God who gives us food for our physical being.
But then something very important happens in John's Gospel. After
taking 14 verses to talk about material bread and physical feeding,
John takes the rest of the chapter to create a marvelous symphony on
the words
of Jesus, "I am the bread of life." And what John wants us
to know is that the same great God who gives us food for our physical
bodies,
gives us Christ as the food for our spirits.
Let me draw two brief lessons from this text. I know sometimes I come
home in the evening complaining that I had to miss lunch and I'm starving,
and I'm wondering how soon we can eat. Missing a meal is a big thing for
many of us. We complain and fuss if we have to miss a meal, or more than
one meal, certainly. We know the importance of eating regularly.
The important thing that John is saying to us is that we need to carry
this over into our spiritual life. When we begin to think about this,
we begin to realize that many of us are literally on a starvation diet
when
it comes to nourishing ourselves spiritually. Many of us try to get
by once a week on a meal…that is, we go to church once a week. Some of us
don't even go that often. Others of us are on a fast food diet. We grab a
bite of prayer here and a bite of Scripture there… strictly fast food.
And it's just not sufficient, and so there's a nutritional deficiency
in our inner life.
And this is a very serious matter for us who really take the spiritual
life with any degree of seriousness and integrity. To put it more
directly, if we would begin to spend some time each day just being in
prayer and Bible reading or devotional reading, I think we would be
astonished at what would happen to us, to our general outlook on life, the
way we begin to treat other people, the energy, the strength, the
guidance, the things that would happen through us.
There's a cute and probably fictionalized story about Michelangelo
when he was working on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. He was holding
out
his arm way up there on the scaffold, a brush in his hand, ready to
make a critical brush stroke, and he dropped the brush all the way
down to the
floor. Angry with himself, he said in a very loud voice, "I'll be
damned." A nun, who was walking by, was shocked at this kind of
language in the chapel, such a holy place. And when Michelangelo got down
to the bottom of the ladder, she reprimanded him. She said, "Shame
on you; you shouldn't use language like that here. If you have to say
something, say 'heaven saves.'"
Michelangelo listened to her and quietly walked back to the foot of
the ladder and started climbing. When he got to the top of the ladder
it
slipped and started to fall. It would have been fatal because he had
been so high up. He started to shout the forbidden phrase, but then
he
remembered the nun's words and he said "heaven saves." Well, the
ladder stopped slipping and swung right back into a secure place. And the
nun, who was watching all of this from below, said, "I'll be
damned."
Well, I believe that many of us might be just as astonished as that
nun as to what happens in our lives when we take the time to nourish
ourselves
spiritually--the changes that will occur, the energy that will be
released. So, a simple implication of this teaching in John's Gospel
is that we must eat regularly. Jesus said, "I am the bread of life"…of
life itself, he is the bread. Therefore, when we eat regularly of his
spirit, through prayer or meditation or spiritual reading or in so
many other types of spiritual practice, we experience the gift of that
life.
There's one other implication. We live in a world where many people do
not have enough physical food. There is an increasing number of persons
who are concerned about this problem, and there are many organizations
including churches who are working to feed the hungry. Many people in our
own church are concerned about physical hunger and through Loaves and
Fishes and FoodShare and the Crisis Food Support Program, are working on
it.
But what Jesus wants us to know is that there are hungry folks
everywhere around us, and some of the hungriest folks in the spiritual
sense are living in the most expensive homes and wearing the most
expensive clothes. In many cases, they work at the desk next to ours or
live on our street. There is a spiritual hunger in so many people. And one
of the greatest things we can do for another person is to share with them
the spiritual food. And we don't have to do this in a heavy-handed way or
a holier than thou way. Often that has the effect of driving people away.
But we can do it through a relational approach, at a time when it seems
appropriate and right simply to share the spiritual food.
A few months ago a member of our church was ministering to her sister
who was very ill and dying. This woman had not had, what you might
call, a strong spiritual anchor during her life, but her sister felt
comfortable
during these months sharing with her the spiritual food. She shared
a spiritual practice she had learned here at the church, and her sister
found it so helpful to her during her days of illness. It's really
a
prayer practice. It's called "The Empty Chair," and let me share
a little of its story. The practice was developed by a Jesuit priest,
Anthony DeMello, as a result of hearing the story of a fellow priest who
went to visit a parishioner once in his home. While he was there, he
noticed an empty chair at the parishioner's bedside and he asked what it
was doing there. The parishioner said, "I had placed Jesus on that
chair and was talking to him before you arrived. For years," he
explained, "I had found it extremely difficult to pray, until
a friend explained to me that prayer was a matter of talking to Jesus.
He
told me to place an empty chair nearby, to imagine Jesus sitting on
that chair and to speak with him and listen to what he says to me in
reply.
I've had no difficultly praying ever since." Some days later, so
the story goes, the daughter of the parishioner came to the rectory to
inform the priest that her father had died. She said, "I left him
alone for a couple of hours. He seemed so peaceful. When I got back to the
room I found him dead. I noticed a strange thing, though: his head was
resting not on the bed but on a chair that was beside the bed." Well,
here was some spiritual food, which was especially helpful during this
difficult time in our member's sister's life.
Another way might simply be to find a comfortable way and time to
invite a friend or coworker to church, if they do not have a church, or to
a class, or if it feels right, at a time when they seem to be having some
difficulty in their lives, to share with them how your faith has helped
you during a difficult time in your life.
There is a satisfaction that comes when we are able to share physical
food with a hungry person. But there is also a satisfaction that comes
when we share the spiritual food.
But there's one more thing about this chapter. Toward the end, John
begins to talk about the Lord's Supper. It's interesting that John
does not mention the Lord's Supper before the crucifixion in the upper
room as
the other Gospels do, but rather he introduces it here in the wilderness,
symbolically in the wilderness of our lives perhaps. But he says toward
the end of this chapter: "Whoever eats of this bread," meaning
the Eucharist, "shall have life abundant."
In this way John so skillfully and beautifully pulls it all together
for us. Here is the physical bread, the symbol of physical food. But Jesus
is saying that his real presence is in the bread, that as we partake of
the elements of the Lord's Supper, we are literally receiving the Christ
Spirit. So let us partake of both this physical and spiritual food with
thanksgiving, thanksgiving for Christ who can bring us wholeness and life
abundant.