John 6:60-69

This morning we’re drawing to a close a lengthy story in John chapter 6. If you remember, the story opened with a miracle by the sea. Jesus fed more than five thousand people with just a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish. Everyone was stunned! In fact, it had such an impact on this crowd, that they were about to take him by force and make him King. But Jesus quickly withdrew, and the crowd can’t find him. But they didn’t give up the chase. More than anything, they wanted to find Jesus, and so when they got word that he had crossed over to the other side of the sea, they hop on boats and follow him - thousands of them.

And they catch up to him in Capernaum, where Jesus tells them that the bread that they ate, the bread that he multiplied before their very eyes, that bread was meant as a sign to something greater that Jesus would do for them. In fact, what Jesus was going to do was going to be even greater than the time that God supplied bread from heaven when Israel needed food and sustenance in the desert. What Jesus was going to do for them was going to provide even greater nourishment for God’s people, because he was the true bread from heaven.

And hearing all of this, the people, who had just pursued Jesus across an entire sea, they say to him, “Give us this bread, always.” And as we read the story, we’re impressed with this crowd! They’re hooked on Jesus’ every word. They are longing for this bread that he’s offering. They want it now and always.

But something happens. Because Jesus continues to teach and talk to them, and they begin to grumble, and grumble, and dispute amongst themselves, until finally, they turn their backs - thousands of them - and they walk away. As we read in our gospel reading this crowd that was so hungry for Jesus that they cross land and sea to find him, the story ends with their walking away.

So this morning, I want to ask the question, “Why?” Upon hearing all of these wonderful promises from Jesus, that he was the bread of life, that he was offering his flesh and blood to provide everlasting nourishment to all who came to him, why, on hearing these beautiful words, did this crowd walk away? That’s what I want to look at this morning.

We can see the first evidence that something is off in the interaction between Jesus and the crowd when they finally find him again. Verse 25:

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.”

The first indication that maybe this crowd doesn’t quite get what’s going on is right here. Jesus says to this crowd, “The reason that you’re looking for me; the reason that you’re crossing bodies of water in hot pursuit of me is not because you saw signs...” What does Jesus mean by that? Well, what does a sign do? It points to something else. You don’t stop at a sign that says “100 Miles to Disney World” and say, “This is amazing! Disney World rocks!” No, the sign points to something greater than itself. And so Jesus says, you’re not following me because you saw the sign that pointed to something greater - the bread that you ate, the miracle that I performed, it was sign that pointed to something greater, it pointed to something about who I am and what I’ve come to do - but you didn’t see that. That’s not why you’re following me. You’re following me, you’re inconveniencing yourselves and jumping through hoops, because your bellies are full. At the end of the day, you want more food. You don’t actually want me; you want what I can do for you.

Why did the crowd walk away from Jesus? Well it started with this. They saw Jesus as a genie. They wanted something badly. In the first century, before grocery stores, when the majority of the populace lived in poverty, what they wanted more than anything was food. And Jesus just made food out of thin air. He was a means to get food. That’s why they are here.

And, I think it’s a worthwhile question for us to ask. Why are we here? Why did we wake up early on a weekend? Why did we wrestle with our kids all morning long to get them ready? Why do we sing songs together and listen to words read from a thousands-year-old book? Why are we here? It’s an important question. The first question that Jesus asks his disciples in the gospel of John is, “What do you want?” Why are you here? What do you want from Jesus?

It is so easy to slide into this mode of being where we follow Jesus because we think he will give us what we want: the marriage that we want, or the family that we want, the kids that we want, or the job that we want, or the clarity and sense of purpose that we want, or the stability that we want. But in that sense, are we not just like this crowd? We get up early, we drive twenty minutes, we show up and sing the songs and pray the prayers, and we do all these things, we jump through these hoops because we want something from Jesus. We do all these things in the hopes that he’ll give us what we really want.

This is actually how most people think of religion. Martin Luther said that the default condition of the human heart is religion. And what he meant was that we tend to fall back on a particular mindset that asks, “What do I need to do, what rules do I need to follow, what standards do I need to keep, what works do I need to be about in order to be accepted by God, loved by God, made righteous by God, so that I can be blessed by God. What do I need to do in order to receive the good stuff that God promises to his faithful ones? Religion becomes a question of means.

And this is how many people approach Jesus. Jesus is a means to an end. But Jesus refuses to be a means to an end. This crowd thought of Jesus as a means to more bread, which is what they really wanted. But how does Jesus respond? He says, I haven’t come to get you bread. I haven’t come to show you the way to more bread. I haven’t come to tell you the five step program to finding your best bread now. Jesus says, I am the bread! I’m not a means to an end, I am the end!

And with that, Jesus redefines religion. The old paradigm is gone - obliterated by these words of Jesus. The old paradigm said that there’s a set of rules, a set of standards and behaviors that you and I should do and must do in order to get the good stuff from God. God has this amazing life sitting just over there out of reach, and to get to it, to experience it, we’ve got to run the religious obstacle course.

They just added to Hulu this British TV show called Total Wipeout. Have you heard of it? The contestants on this show are ordinary people, and they are tasked with navigating their way through an incredibly creative and devious obstacle course; and if they do it well enough, they have the chance to win a good bit of cash! That’s what most people in our city think of when they think of Christianity. They think that it’s this rigamarole that if we navigate it well enough, we get a prize at the end.

But Jesus shatters that paradigm in this text! When Jesus tells this crowd that he is the bread of life, he’s telling them that their prize isn’t waiting for them to win the race. Jesus wasn’t offering them a means to the end, he was offering the endgame right there. He is the prize. He is the bread of life. The whole sum of what the Father desires for you is this: that you would come to me and eat.

And with that, Jesus demands that we displace everything else in our lives, and place him at the center. So that he is not the means by which we seek other things, but so that he is the thing that we seek.

And this applies to every area of our life. Those of us who work in the marketplace - often times we think of Jesus like the chaplain of our office. He comes alongside us and counsels us and advises us on how to do our job well. But when we come to see Jesus as the bread of life, we recognize that Jesus is not an advisor for our work, he is the whole point of our work. The jobs that we hold, the relationships that we form with our coworkers, the paychecks that we earn by the work of our hands, Jesus is not the one who makes these things work out for us, he is the point of it all. In all these things, he has gifted us and equipped us and raised us up so that we could leverage what he has given us for the glory of his name and the furthering of his agenda.

Some of us are married. And often times we think of Jesus as the one who is there to provide for us the marriage that we always wanted. He is the means for a happy union. But when we come to see Jesus as the bread of life, we come to see that he is not the means, but he is the goal of our marriage. The whole purpose of our marriage is to demonstrate to the world who Christ is and what Christ is like - that the steadfast love of Jesus would be seen and known through our union.

Jesus demands to be the goal and center of everything in our lives. This is what he meant when he told this crowd that he was the bread of life. He is not the means, he is the end. He is the thing. He is the prize.

We chase after so many things. We orient our lives around so many things, when our heart’s desire is right there in front of us, beckoning us to come. And C.S. Lewis had it right when he said it’s not that we desire too much in life, it’s that we desire too little. He writes in his sermon, The Weight of Glory:

We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.

At the end of the day, Jesus challenged this crowd by saying that you can’t honor the Messiah as a side gig. You can’t go to church, give your tithe, read your Bible, and yet spend your life trying to get something else. There is nothing else. Jesus is the bread of life.

And this crowd found that a hard thing to swallow. Because it is. There is nothing easy about following Jesus, but it is especially difficult when he is just a means to an end, like he was for this crowd. And so they walked away. Thousands of them, walked away from the bread of life.

But then Jesus turns to the Twelve Disciples, and he asks, “Do you want to walk away as well? You guys heard the same things that they did. Was it too much for you?” And Peter stands up to speak for the group, as he often does, and he comes at Jesus with brutal honesty, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of Eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.”

Peter doesn’t always get it right - but boy, does he get this right. He just heard this teaching that deeply offended thousands of his countrymen. He just watched them turn their backs and leave. And now his teacher is turning to him and asking what he thinks of all this - are they going to leave as well? And notably, Peter does not say, “Those guys are being ridiculous, it’s not going to be that hard. We feel good about this.”

He doesn’t say that. No, what he says is, “Lord, where else are we going to go?” You see, what Jesus demands is incredibly difficult - to reorient the entirety of our lives around him? That’s a big ask. And I think Peter knows that. He knows that what Jesus is asking of him and the others is beyond their capacity to handle, and yet. And yet. He knows, that Jesus is the bread of life. He knows that Jesus is what he longs for. And so he says, “Lord, where else are we going to? You have the words of eternal life.” You are the thing. You are the prize. I want that faith.

Leslie Newbigin defines faith in this way, “to believe is to have been brought to the place where one knows that one has to rely completely on Jesus, and on Jesus alone.” This is the portrait of faith that John paints in his gospel - to live with full knowledge that what we need more than anything is Jesus - the one for whom we were made, the one who’s life is the light of mankind, and the one who gave his life for ours.