The Bread of the Free

John 6:23-35

We hear an awful lot about freedom these days. Freedom in Iraq. Freedom in Cuba. Freedom in the United States. Freedom of the press. Freedom of religion. Freedom seems like a pretty great thing. But this morning I want to stretch your mind a little beyond concepts of political and social freedom. Today I want to talk about a deeper sense of freedom, namely the religious and moral freedom that Jesus offers to each of us who follow him.

In today’s gospel reading from the book of John, we pick up the story a day after Jesus has fed 5,000 people that gathered to hear him speak.

The crowd has just had a pretty awesome and filling meal and now they have gone out looking for Jesus. When they finally find him. . . Jesus confronts them and proclaims, “the truth is, you want to be with me because I fed you not because you saw the miraculous sign, don’t be so concerned with perishable things like food. Spend you energy seeking the eternal life.” Somewhat perplexed, the crowd asks, “What does God want us to do?” Jesus responds, “believe in the one he has sent.” But the crowd is not quite sure that they can do this. Even though Jesus a day earlier fed 5,000 people with a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish. . . the crowd wants to see another sign.

And the crowd gives Jesus a reason for their desire to see a sign.

They point out that Moses gave their ancestors manna in the desert, he gave them bread from heaven to eat. The reference is clear. In the book of Exodus, after the Israelites had been freed from Egyptian captivity they fled into the desert where they were without food. They cried out to God for help and God gave them manna to eat. God sustained the Israelites by providing them with food and now the crowd around Jesus is asking for a similar miracle. To show them a sign that God is indeed with Jesus. But Jesus responds with a startling answer. Jesus says, “I am the bread of life.” “No one who comes to me will ever be hungry again. Those who believe in me will never thirst.”

Now I don’t know about you, but this does not necessarily sound like such a great deal to me at first glance. I imagine at least a few of you are sitting here today thinking, by golly I did not eat enough for breakfast, I hope that someone brought something good for the fellowship hour. So what would you think if when you went down stairs there was no food but a big sign that said, “Jesus is the bread of life. He who has Jesus won’t go hungry.” You might be a little disappointed. And you would probably still be hungry.

But I think we are missing the point if we think that Jesus is saying, stop eating, you just need me. No, Jesus is making a comparison here. And to really understand the comparison we have to understand a little about the role of bread in Jesus’ time. Now bread is still pretty important today, but in Jesus’ time bread was the staple food. The word “bread” was even used as a synonym for “food” itself. Bread was the symbol of what it took to sustain physical life. Without bread, without food wel die. Our bodies need sustenance to live.

So Jesus is drawing a comparison here. You see like bread that sustains our physical life, Jesus sustains our spiritual lives. And while bread may keep us alive for 80, 90, 100 years, Jesus, “the bread of life,” will keep us alive eternally.

In a few minutes we are going to remember the last supper that Jesus shared with his disciples before his death and resurrection. We will take bread and eat it in remembrance of Jesus, but we also will take this bread because it reminds us that as bread and food are necessary for our physical survival, the body of Christ, his death and resurrection, are necessary for our spiritual survival. Without Jesus we are spiritually dead. And if we are spiritually dead, our physical life has little significance.

But with Jesus. With the “bread of life,” we are spiritually alive. And when we are sustained not simply by physical food, but by Jesus himself we are opened up to a freedom that is more profound than anything we can find elsewhere. Like the nourishment and sustenance we get from a full meal, Jesus nourishes our spiritual lives.

Too often though we allow wants and desires to supplant our true needs. There are countless things that we think we need, but which really only get in the way of our ability to be nourished by Jesus, the bread of life. We prefer spiritual junkfood. And there are quite a few needs in our life to which we say, “Jesus, thanks, but you are not enough.” Regularly we become so detached from the richness of our faith in Christ that we come to believe that Jesus is not enough. That something more is needed.

Marva Dawn tells the story of several Canadian students who went to Nairobi, Kenya to learn about the conditions there from local residents. The group spent mornings in lectures, and then the students participated in afternoon site visits to some of Nairobi’s slum areas. The students were deeply affected by the poverty around them and one day they visited a destitute Kibera slum where 1,500,000 people lived in a small, concentrated area of long, narrow, winding dirt lanes and small mud-and-stick shanties. Up the serpentine paths they trudged, into the middle of Kibera’s dismal bleakness to a church. At the church the students discussed the congregation’s ministry and community development against seemingly impossible odds and were served tea and bread by church members. Shocked by the immensity of the problems and the lack of the congregation’s resources, the students kept asking, “where is the hope?” The students raised their question with a young Kenyan pastor, “with all this poverty and corruption, where is the hope?” The pastor eloquently described his faith and finished with an astonishingly simple remark, “our hope is Christ!” The reply from the Canadian students was swift and startling; immediately they cried, “that is not enough!”

Too often we say to Jesus Christ, “you are not enough.” We are so attached to the things of this world that we think we need more than we really do. That we need more to really be happy. We are not set free by Christ but enslaved by everything else around us.

I really believe that if we can get to a point where we realize the simplicity of the Gospel message, that Jesus Christ is the “bread of life.” That Jesus is all we need to sustain us. That even physical bread and water stop keeping us alive at some point, but that Jesus can sustain us eternally, he is the bread of eternal life. If we realize this simple fact, that Jesus is all we really need, we can realize a freedom that we have not ever experienced before.

An important point, however, is that this freedom is both a grace and a discipline. It is a grace in the sense that it is a gift from God. And with a relationship with God and personal intimacy with Jesus comes freedom. But freedom in Christ is also a discipline in that we have to be in a position to receive it. Through discipline we can order our individual and community lives in such a way that God can work into us his freedom.

I think most of us truly desire this spiritual freedom in Christ, but I think we have become so attached to our modern world that it is sometimes difficult even to know what freedom in Christ would be like. After all most of our perceptions of freedom are political and social, thus if we are free to do as we please then we are free. We completely fail to see the multitude of ways that we are enslaved to money, success, power, security, and so on. The problem is that we, like an alcoholic, are unable to recognize the disease once we have been engulfed by it.

When I was a kid, a neighbor friend about my age invited my brother and me over to play. He asked if we wanted to play cops and robbers. It sounded like a good time to me so I quickly volunteered to be the robber and darted off as if I had just committed a crime and was fleeing the cops. I have come a long way from kid robber to seminarian. Anyways, I proceeded to run around the house and hide for 10 to 15 minutes before I thought it might be fun to act like I had been caught and get arrested. So I peaked out behind a shed and revealed myself to my brother and our friend who were the cops. They quickly approached me and placed me in handcuffs. They led me around for quite some time, interrogating me, and then placing me in a jail that looked an awful lot like a lawn mower shed. It was really quite fun and we played this way all day with me in handcuffs. Eventually, it was time to go home so I asked to be let out of the handcuffs thinking there was just some button to press like on most toy handcuffs. Well that was not the case, and my friend said that he had to go get the key. He returned a few minutes later with a confused look on his face. No key. His mom came outside. No key. Apparently, the key had been lost and I was stuck in real handcuffs that were a gift from a family friend who was a police officer. There was no getting out of them. My fun quickly turned into despair. What seemed like such harmless fun quickly turned into a frustrating constraint that I could not escape.

We eventually called the police and someone came and cut the handcuffs off, but it was quite a memorable experience.

I think in many ways we handcuff ourselves with various things of this world that are eternally insignificant. And we play around and hardly notice that we are in handcuffs. And even if we know we are in handcuffs we think it is no problem getting out of them. You just press a button and off come the handcuffs. Unfortunately though, it is not quite that easy to find freedom.

This is where the discipline comes in. I mentioned earlier that freedom is one part gift and one part discipline. It is pretty difficult to reach out your hands and receive a gift when your hands are behind your back in handcuffs. We must be disciplined and seek Christian simplicity in order to avoid being enslaved or handcuffed by money, success, power, security, and whatever else it is that makes you think, “Jesus is not enough.”

The image of bread is pretty simple. It is the basic. It is fundamental. When Jesus is telling us that he is the “bread of life,” he is telling us that he is it. He is all we need. And when we realize the simplicity of this notion. When we come to understand what it feels like to have a singleness of purpose. To see everything first through the lens of Jesus Christ, we will realize what it means to be free in Christ.

Jesus is enough. He is the “bread of life.” He is the “bread of all those who are truly free.”

Almighty God, too often we think we need money, security, and power because we do not think that you are enough. Help us to realize that you are all we need. Help us to see that too often we become enslaved to the things of this world and tricked into believing that there are things that we will miss out on if you alone are the center of our lives. Jesus you alone are the bread of life. You alone can set us truly free. Give us the strength to know your power, to know your glory, and to experience your freedom. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.