John 6:1-15, 48-59 "That Which Abides" Scott Hoezee

Throughout history and across many very different religious traditions there has long been a curious linkage between spirituality and food. The Old Testament has its share of dietary restrictions and laws, many of which to this day translate into what observant Jews regard as kosher or non-kosher foods. Although the Christian faith has largely left behind such strictures, we still regard gluttony as one of the deadly sins, and some Christians also promote strict vegetarianism. Then there is the Roman Catholic "no meat on Friday" rule, which recently made the headlines since St. Patrick's day fell on a Friday during Lent this year, causing a number of Catholic bishops to suspend the rule for just March 17 so the Irish could celebrate with their traditional corned beef and a pint of Guinness!

Even some of the foods we eat each week have a religious background. In the mid-1800s there was a group of people in America known as the Millerites--a Christian sect firmly convinced that Jesus would return sometime late in the year 1843. He didn't, setting off what was called "the Great Disappointment." At least some of these folks, however, made the best of the situation by declaring that as a matter of fact Jesus had returned but that it had turned out to be an invisible, spiritual advent. Believing themselves to be living in an already-present millennial kingdom, these Adventists decided that as part of this new identity they should invent alternative foods as a sign of their not being fully in this world. So one preacher named Sylvester Graham invented a new kind of cracker for his congregation to eat--yes, the Graham Cracker. Peanut butter was also invented at this time, as was a variety of cold breakfast cereals, including something called a "corn flake," perfected by Adventist devotee John Harvey Kellogg in a spiritual community located in Battle Creek, Michigan.

Food and spirituality have long been yoked, but aside from observing occasional periods of fasting, no religious group has ever said it would never eat anything again. We all know we must eat and drink to live. If we go much more than three days without water or a month or so with no food, we will die. Many organizations nobly work every day to get food to this world's starving. The fact that thousands of children die of starvation every day is as vivid, and utterly tragic, a sign of this world's broken condition as anything.

We need food to live. Those of us blessed enough never to have to worry about our food also have the luxury of being able to enjoy this creation's bounty in all its manifold variety. We even celebrate those skilled at serving up particularly tasty cuisine, whether it's Aunt Millie whose pot roast cannot be topped or Julia Child whose "Beef Bourginon avec Champignon" is so fine we'll shell out thirty or forty bucks just to get a plate of it.

We need food, we appreciate it. The crowds around Jesus on that long ago day as reported in John 6 were no different. They were hungry, Jesus fed them and so he quickly rose in their estimation because of this miracle. And it was quite a stunning spectacle. As we've reflected on this story before from some of the other gospels, this must have been an occasion of great wonder but also of great joy and hilarity.

As the basket of bread and fish kept going and going without being depleted, waves of laughter must have accompanied it. By the time the basket got to the fiftieth person you can almost imagine his shouting back to the first person in line, "Hey, Sherman! Isn't this the same fish you ate?!" As astonishment gave way to joy, as growling stomachs gave way to stuffed bellies, the people realized Jesus truly was a great man of God.

Only the Creator himself could "play" with the very stuff of creation as to pull off this feat. As the Son of God, Jesus held in his hands the kernels of wheat from every field on the planet as well as the fish in every stream, lake, and ocean. Through his hands alone the bounty of all those fields and streams was channeled to this hungry gathering. Not surprisingly, they right away wanted to make him their king. Who can blame them? We always hope our leaders will somehow find the wherewithal to make available to all the people the riches of the land. Smart politicians who want to be elected promise just this, too. "Vote for me and taxes will be cut to give you more money, production will be increased to give you more food, the economy will grow to give you more of . . . everything."

So also these people perceived that since Jesus could so richly provide the good stuff of life, they would set him up as their new leader. But Jesus wants nothing to do with this, and so he gets out of there. Because much though the feeding of the hungry is a sign of Jesus' larger purpose, this miracle is only a sign of Jesus' salvation but it is not the same thing. Jesus does not want to be made a king who will just keep producing more wonder bread because Jesus knows that in the long run the business of eating and drinking is quite literally a dead end. Even as any individual meal can sustain us just so long before we need to eat again, so the entire enterprise of eating and drinking can only keep us going just so long, and then we die. The bread of this earth cannot keep us alive forever.

That's why, when a loved one is gravely ill with some disease, we do not conclude that if we run to the kitchen and whip together a ham and Swiss sandwich, we can make this dear one eat and so keep on living. No, it doesn't work that way. These days doctors are able to fasten a feeding tube into patients who are too damaged or too sick to eat the normal way. The high-protein goop that gets delivered through such tubes can sustain the person biologically, and yet in at least some situations the family members watching all of this conclude that the life this tube is sustaining is finally no life at all. So although we may agonize about it, we may ask for the forced feeding to stop in recognition of the fact that true life has now stopped in ways that bread and butter, calories and protein can no longer help.

What Jesus did on the mountainside that day for those 5,000 folks was wonderful. It was a sign of the kingdom. But it was not the kingdom. To get at the real reason Jesus had come, to solve the deeper problems of life and death, Jesus had to say something else, which is what he goes on to do in the last part of John 6. There Jesus presents himself as the true bread of life. Somehow by eating his flesh and drinking his blood we can find a new form of life--eternal life.

It's nearly impossible for us to imagine how this must have sounded to those folks who heard these words that day. The imagery and metaphor of eating Jesus' flesh and drinking his blood are so familiar to most of us as to cause nary a ripple of unease in our minds. We hear these words and immediately see in our mind's eye little cubes of white bread and small shot glasses of wine or grape juice.

But suppose you had never heard of the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, as was the case for the Jews around Jesus that day. Suppose you had absolutely no memories of any symbolic eating of human flesh and sipping of human blood. Suppose you merely had this strange rabbi in front of you saying things that sounded disgusting. Surely you would be scandalized, offended, maybe even a touch sickened.

It seems that maybe Jesus wanted to be just this radical, too. In verse 53 Jesus switches from the ordinary Greek word for "to eat" to a very rare word used only six times in the entire Bible, fully four of which occur right here. It is a word which is rather graphic, meaning not just "to eat" but something more along the lines of "to chew with your mouth open." It is a nearly crude verb referring to a kind of open-mouthed smacking of food--the way your mother told you not to eat when you were a child. Jesus is being about as graphic as he can be here to capture the attention of his hearers.

Somehow, some way Jesus is himself the very bread of life. Somehow, some way we really do need to connect with this Jesus in an utterly personal, radical way if we are to arrive at a form of life that can never be snuffed. This is as mysterious, odd, but finally also sublime a statement on what we gain through Jesus as you are likely to find in the gospels. We take Jesus to ourselves through faith, chewing on, smacking over his very self. To all who do this, Jesus says, something new comes: an abiding relationship.

The notion of remaining or abiding in Jesus is a vital theme in John's gospel. In this morning's passage we are told that when we eat and drink Jesus, when we take to ourselves the sacrificed Christ, then an eternal life springs up in us. We abide in him, and he in us. The life of the living God passes through Jesus into us. And he promises that when this happens, we abide perpetually in Jesus, who will then take care to raise us up at the last day. As it turns out, the fish-n-chips served up on the mountainside are not the key to life in any lasting sense. Only Jesus himself can feed us with himself in ways that abide.

But what does that mean? What does it mean that we remain in him, that we stay with him and stick with him in some kind of a life that cannot die? For the rest of the sermon this morning, I'd like to reflect on this with you. How do I, how do you, abide in Jesus now, and how does that abiding tie in with the grand promise of Jesus' raising us up at the last day? What is it that "remains" in Jesus? What is this thing called "eternal life," especially in view of the fact that whatever this life is, it obviously does not mean that we escape death.

The breakfast you ate this morning before church, the lunch you'll consume when you get home, and the sum total of all the food you've ever eaten in your life will not, as we said a few moments ago, prevent you from getting to a day when you'll very simply be beyond the help of calories and nutrition. You must eat to live, but just eating will not keep you alive forever. You, I, we all must and will die.

And that death will be the end of our lives in every sense that we have ever known life. The moment each of us was conceived we became alive, we gained a life, and we've never known ourselves to have any other kind of life. Death ends that. Precisely this is why the death of a loved one hurts so much. The morticians can ply their art with great skill but the final result of the body in the casket is by no means life. We know and we sense that this dead body is not really the person we knew. That person is gone, beyond us. We cannot talk with him or her, we cannot hear from him or her. We cannot reach him or her, and the startling reality and finality of that is what makes us choke with grief.

Yet as Christians we have the bold faith that tells us that somehow, some way this is not the end after all. This person, we say, is still abiding in Jesus who will raise him or her back to life at the last day. But what does that mean? What is it that Jesus "has" of you and of me as well as of our friends and family who are dead? What's Jesus got? What already now, much less after death, remains in Christ? Clearly it's not our bodies. Indeed, scientists say that few, if any, of the atoms in your body this morning were there two years ago. Two years hence most, if not all, of the atoms in your body today will be elsewhere, having been replaced with other atoms as a result of the normal processes of breathing, blood production, eating, and so forth.

So as John Polkinghorne has asked, what is the continuity of your life or my life? My mother has in recent years taken up the hobby of making "Creative Memories" photo albums. Last year on my birthday she presented me with an album containing a photo chronicle of my life thus far. Were you to open that book, you could see on the early pages pictures of a mop-haired schoolboy with a pre-orthodontic gap-toothed smile. But what provides the continuity between that little boy and the suddenly middle-aged preacher standing before you this morning? How are that far-off little boy and this grown man the same? It's not simply this particular collection of atoms in skin, hair, and organs, for those have been exchanged many times in my thirty-six years. The chemical stuff of each of us changes and finally dies.

No, what makes me me and you you is vastly more mysterious than that. The soul of you is created through a myriad of complex interactions, experiences, and spiritual realities that go far beyond even something like DNA. It may well be possible to clone any person in this room, resulting presumably in another human being who will grow up to look identical to you and be a DNA duplicate of you. But it would not be you any more than identical twins are interchangeable human souls with no real difference between them.

There is something to you and something to me and something to every human person that is irreducibly unique and marvelous. And perhaps it is just this unique pattern of you--the way you are and all the experiences and happenings and memories and likes and dislikes that go into making you who you are--that Jesus promises will forever abide in him. Eternal life means that already now, and across the dark boundary line of death, what and who you are matter so supremely to God that in Christ you are constantly being taken up into God in so complete a way that nothing can separate you from his love, not ever.

On the last day, whenever that will be, God in Christ will then be able to take you--you, your very self--and gloriously re-unite you to a very real body. We are meant in God's good creation to be together body and soul. We are not apprenticing ourselves to be angels or spirits or vapors who will never again be physical but who will merely flit and float through the ether of pure thought. No, Jesus promises to grab hold of you right now, today, in all the rich complexity of your soul, so that you can again be whole and complete one day in the resurrection from the dead.

And it is all possible--all of it, every last quark and gluon and lepton of the whole process--it is all possible only because of who Jesus is and what God makes available for us to feast upon in his sacrificed flesh and spilled-out blood. It is all of God. Our hope is based on nothing less than Jesus alone who, we believe, has become the conduit to bring into us already right now the effervescent, never-dying, white-hot and zestful life of God himself. In verse 57 Jesus says that the living God sent the living Son to make us live and live eternally at that. "Your forefathers ate manna and died," Jesus points out, "but if you eat this new bread, you will live forever."

This is our hope. The Christian hope as founded on the gospel means that by the grace of God we have quite literally tasted and seen that the Lord is good. So we are even now abiding in this Lord and Christ. Since he is himself the ever-abiding one, the Alpha and the Omega, the one whom the world already did its level best to wipe out by executing him but who came back with new life anyway--since this is the one in whom we abide and who abides in us, we are assured that we are even now traveling to the new creation.

We journey to the new heaven and the new earth, for whose eternity God in Christ will raise us from the utter destruction of death so that we can dine with our God at the eternal wedding feast of the Lamb. That will be a feast of true bread and true drink--a meal with a never-ending supply of all good things. Then, as happened also long ago on that Galilean mountainside, that abundance of good things will be passed from our Lord's hands to our hands and on down to all persons, accompanied by waves of holy laughter and eternal joy! Amen.