Sermon Tone Analysis
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Some teachers are better at communicating than others.
One can make a difficult biology lesson or calculus formula clearer and easier to understand when another only makes these subjects feel more complicated and confusing.
Yet sometimes even the best of teachers will say things that are hard to understand – to stimulate thinking and challenge the best of minds.
Christ, whom even secular thinkers recognize as an effective teacher, did this sometimes.
Sometimes he said things that were hard to understand to get people thinking closely about an important spiritual truth they would otherwise ignore or misunderstand.
One of the most intelligent business and scientific minds in the world today, Elon Musk, sat down for an interview with the Babylon Bee.
Near the end of the interview, he recalled memories of “having the blood and body of Christ” as a kid in church, which he said was, “kind of weird because they gave you some kind of weird-tasting biscuit and wine.”
As a young child he thought this was strange.
“Is this some kind of weird metaphor for cannibalism or something?
I don’t get it.”
He said, “I remember thinking that was just crazy…Even as a metaphor, it was kind of odd.”
Perhaps you’ve thought similar things.
Why do we eat bread and drink juice together as a church?
To partially answer this question, let’s turn our attention to something Jesus said near the end of his teaching ministry.
He said these things to a large crowd of people who were listening to his teaching outdoors (John 6:22-71).
“Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you have no spiritual life in you” (v.
53)
“Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life” (v.
54)
“My flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed” (v.
55)
“He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood lives in me, and I live in him” (v.
56)
“He who feeds on me will live” (v.
57)
After he said these things, Jesus received some critical feedback and negative results.
Many of his followers were confused and said, “This is a hard saying; who can understand it?”
(v.
60).
Some of them even “complained” about what he said (v. 61).
What’s more, many of them stopped following him altogether; “many of his disciples went back and walked with him no more” (v.
66).
The negative fallout from this one awkward and difficult moment of teaching would prompt many of us to conclude that Jesus had failed, that his teaching methods or, worse yet, his message was insensitive and ill-advised.
What was Christ teaching when he said these things?
And why did he say it this way?
Many people followed Christ for the wrong reasons.
(John 6:22-30)
At that point in time, Jesus was so popular that he couldn’t get rid of the crowds.
He tried to shake them by leaving the packed urban center of Jerusalem to the rural, out-of-the-way region by the Sea of Galilee, but a crowd of 10,000-20,000 people followed him there.
He taught them patiently and then fed the entire crowd by miraculously multiplying 5 loaves of bread and 2 fish.
By doing this, he taught them that whatever they needed when they followed him, he could meet that need.
They should never worry.
In fact, he was the one who had sent bread to the nation of Israel in the wilderness when Moses led them.
After this, he dismissed the crowd and disappeared to the other side of the sea, but the crowds searched for him and followed him there.
They had wanted to make him their king so he would solve their political problems, but he wanted nothing to do with a political revolution.
Beyond this political motive, why else did the crowds chase Jesus around?
There are at least three additional reasons.
They followed him for the food.
(John 6:26)
This reason is somewhat surprising.
Jesus said, “You are not following me merely because I performed some miracles.
You’re following for a far simpler reason – I gave you food, and you want me to give you more.”
Do we have this problem?
We do.
We may follow Jesus because he’s done good things for us in a material or financial way, so we want him to do more things like that.
He provided a pay raise, so we want another one.
He provided a successful business deal, so we want another one.
He provided a nice job, so we want another one.
He provided a nice house, so we want a nice car, too.
He provided food, so we want even more.
But following Jesus for reasons like this do not impress him.
In this chapter we see that Jesus is patient with people like this but eventually does or says things to get them off his tail.
He wants them to stop following him.
Stop chasing him.
Stop grabbing after him like some kind of genie in the bottle or a religious insurance plan.
People who follow Jesus for reasons like this do not understand what it means to be a disciple.
Consider when God freed Israel from slavery in Egypt.
Before that happened, he allowed them to be in slavery for a couple hundred years.
After he delivered them, he led them into a wilderness for 3 months and fed them nothing but bread from the sky, the same stuff every day.
And sometimes they ran out of water.
Why did God allow this?
To teach them that the true quality of life for any person does not come from meeting material needs and feeding our stomachs.
It comes from Jesus.
That’s why he said, “Don’t spend your life laboring for the kind of food that perishes and expires” (John 6:27).
This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t work a job, earn money, and buy groceries.
It means that though you will do those things, you should not live as though groceries, bills, and material comforts are the focus and purpose of your life.
Why?
Because these things never satisfy your deepest most significant appetite and longing – your desire for God.
They never truly raise the quality of your inner life, and they certainly give you no confidence about your life after death.
They followed him to get religious teaching.
(John 6:28)
The crowd could tell that Jesus does not appreciate how they wanted more bread from him.
As a result, they asked another question, “So what should we labor for then?
What should we work for then?
What can we do to do the kind of work that you want us to do?
That God wants us to do?”
This first seems like an excellent question.
They are saying, “So what do you want us to do?”
But they still don’t understand what Jesus had been explaining to them for hours and days.
He said (my expanded paraphrase), “Rather than doing certain things, you need to believe on me and on God who sent me.
We are one and the same.
I am God, and God the Father is God.
Stop trying to reform yourself.
Stop trying to conform yourself.
Stop trying to do any number of things to get your life in line with God.
Believe on me instead.”
We have this problem, too.
We want to know what to do to please Jesus and to be on his side of things.
What can we do to follow Jesus?
We must believe on him.
Trust him alone.
Depend on him completely.
But that’s not what we want to hear.
We want a list of religious things to do, steps to take, and so on.
A few decades later, Paul the apostle explained the same truth this way (Rom.
6:23), “For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
We cannot work our way to God.
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