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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
I am glad to be back here at Pilgrim this morning, after a week of vacation, which included a five-day trip to Austin for my niece’s wedding. There is something about this time of year and my being gone, though; interestingly enough, the last two times that this particular Sunday of our three-year lectionary series came up I was away: the first in 20-15 for Continuing Education, and the second in 20-18 for vacation. But, as I said, I am glad to be back here at Pilgrim this morning, especially to preach on this important Gospel Reading appointed for today, in which Our Lord Jesus identifies Himself as the “Bread of God” Who “gives life to the world”.
You may recall from the Gospel Reading two Sundays ago how Jesus had taught and with five loaves and two fish miraculously fed five-thousand men, not to mention women and children (Mark 6:30-44; confer Matthew 14:21). Then, as we heard in last Sunday’s Gospel Reading, Jesus walked on water out to His disciples struggling against the wind, and they were first terrified and then utterly astounded, because they did not understand about the loaves (Mark 6:45-56). Then, as we heard in today’s Gospel Reading, largely unique to the Divinely‑inspired St. John’s account, the next day the crowd found Jesus on the other side of the sea, apparently in a synagogue in Capernaum (John 6:59), and, although Jesus had withdrawn from them because they wanted to take Him by force to make Him king (John 6:15), there He graciously taught them about the food that endures to eternal life, that is, about Himself as the “Bread of God” Who “gives life to the world”. (The next two weeks we will hear subsequent sections of this same discourse of our Lord.)
Certainly the world needs life! All the more does the world seem to need life as we continue in the throes of the coronavirus pandemic, where even the much-vaunted vaccines are not stopping people either from getting infected or from spreading the virus, though the vaccines may lessen the severity of COVID-19 for some and so the vaccines may decrease the likelihood of COVID’s being the immediate cause of their deaths. Whether one dies from COVID-19 or from something else, of course, the ultimate cause of death is sin in the world, and no mask mandate, no vaccine order, or any other human medicine is going to cure that! In the Gospel Reading, Jesus said the crowd was seeking Him not because they saw (in the sense of correctly perceiving) the miraculous sign of His feeding more than five-thousand people, but, Jesus said, the crowd was seeking Him because they ate their fill of the loaves, and presumably they wanted Him to continue to provide them food without their working for it, like some people in our society today expect the government to do for them. Not only did the people in the Gospel Reading not correctly perceive the miraculous sign that Jesus had done, they wanted another miraculous sign, like that of the forty-years of manna in the wilderness, which Jesus said they attributed to Moses, not to God the Father, Who not only gave the manna but Who also gives the true Bread from Heaven, the “Bread of God” Who “gives life to the world”.
Jesus told the people in the Gospel Reading—and, in a sense, Jesus also tells us—to stop working for the food that perishes, as we ourselves should perish, now and for eternity, on account of our sin. The people in the Gospel Reading may have thought that the manna’s feeding more than five‑housand people and more than one time was a greater miraculous sign, but, as Jesus points out in a verse that follows, those who ate the manna nevertheless later died (John 6:49). What Jesus was offering was food that remains to eternal life, and that food that remains to eternal life was not really something that they could work for and earn but something both that God was giving and that they could only receive from Him by God’s first graciously working in them faith that would continuously receive both the food itself and the eternal life that the food gives.
That “Food that endures to eternal life”, that “Bread from heaven”, that “Bread of God” is He Who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world, namely Jesus Himself. Jesus is the Son of Man, true God in human flesh, upon Whom God the Father has set the seal of His Holy Spirit, as in Jesus’s baptism (for example, Mark 1:9-11). God the Father loved the sinful, fallen world by giving His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life; God the Father sent His Son not to condemn the world but that the world might be saved through Him (John 3:16-17). For, that Son of God and Son of Man, Jesus, bore our sins to the cross, and there He died for us, in our place, the death that we deserved. There Jesus triumphed over sin and death, and with His resurrection declared that victory to the world. When we turn in sorrow from our sin, trust God to forgive our sin for Jesus’s sake, and want to stop sinning, then God forgives us all our sin, whatever our sin might be.
“The Bread of God gives life to the world”, but each individual in the world must, with faith, eat of the Bread of God, Jesus’s own flesh, in order to receive the life that it gives (confer John 6:50-51, 53). The miraculous feeding of the Sacrament of the Altar, with a small piece of unleavened bread that is the Body of Christ given for you and a small amount of wine that is the Blood of Christ shed for you, ultimately feeds far more people and for a greater period of time than even the manna in the wilderness. This Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ are true food and drink (John 6:55), our food for the way, our medicine of immortality, that strengthen and preserve us in body and soul to life everlasting. The Sacrament of the Altar, individual Holy Absolution, and Holy Baptism together are the miraculous signs of our time that we correctly perceive and so believe. The Sacraments and the read and preached Word of God are the tools of those in the one Holy Office that God gives, as we heard in the Epistle Reading (Ephesians 4:1‑16), to equip the saints, to do the work of ministry, and to build up the body of Christ that is the Church.
The goal of that building up of the Church is the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we are no longer children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we grow up in every way into Him Who is the Head, into Christ, from Whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love. Also individually, as members of that body, as we heard God urge us through St. Paul, we walk in a manner worthy of our calling as Christians, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. Like the people in the wilderness of the Old Testament Reading (Exodus 16:2-15), we may be tested in regards to the miraculous feeding of the true Bread from Heaven, as we are tested every Sunday regarding to whom this Altar is open or closed, but, for any failures in that regard, as for all of our sin, we are graciously forgiven when we repent and believe in that Bread, Jesus Himself.
Truly I am glad to be back here at Pilgrim this morning, especially to preach on this important Gospel Reading. “The Bread of God gives life to the world”. The eternal life that God gives to those who receive it by the faith that He works is the only cure for sin and death in the world, whether that death is from what seems to be an increasingly threatening coronavirus or from anything else. We need fear only God (Matthew 10:28), and, with that right regard for Him, we have peace and joy. As we sang in the Introit (Psalm 78;23-25; antiphon: v.72), part of which was apparently quoted by the people in today’s Gospel Reading, with an upright heart the Lord shepherds us and guides us with His skillful hand.
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +