Sermon for Sunday, August 4, 2024

August 4, 2024

By Kristin Berkey-Abbott



John 6: 24-36



Today’s Gospel takes place right after last week’s Gospel in terms of where it is positioned in the book of John. We left last week with the disciples and Jesus on a different shore. Today we’re back with the crowd. Here in the 21st century, we might expect the crowd to shrug and head home to tell their friends about the experience: “Good teaching and a good meal too. This Jesus, he’s one to watch.”

But that’s not what happens. They pursue Jesus, which means they get in boats and go looking for him. I confess that I’m a little surprised by Jesus’ reaction. I’ve been in the education field for decades now, and in the classroom, I rarely see this kind of interest. I’d be thrilled if my students waited for me at my car to ask further questions about the poems we studied or the ways to make their writing stronger.

Jesus, on the other hand, is less than thrilled. In fact, he seems a bit suspicious. He accuses the people of only being interested in him because he can feed them. But as I returned to this passage throughout the week, I was struck by how engaged they are. They don’t go off in a huff because Jesus is less than welcoming. They don’t leave when Jesus says confusing things. They ask questions. They show that they have studied the lives of their ancestors: they know the history and the text, the tradition and the scripture (which, as observant Jews, they would have been trained to approach questions that way). Again, if my students challenged me in this way . . .

Well, to be honest, if my students challenged me in this way, maybe I, too, would be frustrated, the way that Jesus seems to be. I would be especially frustrated if they just didn’t seem to be understanding what I was telling them. We say that there’s no such thing as a stupid question, but there are questions that reveal that people’s attention was elsewhere.

This week’s conversation about bread has the people asking about Moses and the manna in the wilderness. They seem focused on the past—what God has done in the past. Jesus changes the verb tenses to present tense and future tense, to try to help people understand what God is doing now.

Jesus could have reminded them of how ungrateful those ancestors were, once they got tired of the manna or how undeserving they were. But he doesn’t. Instead, he takes the opportunity to tell them, as he does again and again throughout his ministry, that God is the one who gives the true sustenance, whether it be manna in the wilderness or multiplied loaves and fishes.

In fact, the true sustenance is both similar to bread and completely different—something we’ll be considering over the next three weeks. Often bread is a symbol for sustenance of a deeper sort, the way it is here. And often, we see people respond the way that they do in verse 34: “Sir, give us this bread always."

But we know that a short time later, people will be clamoring for the death of Jesus, not for the sustenance that he can give them. What has happened? Is it the mob mentality that makes the crowd cross the Sea of Galilee looking for Jesus? Is his message just too hard?

We are back to a lesson that the parables give us multiple times: Jesus’ word is the seed that will fall on many types of ground. I’m going to shift metaphors. I’m thinking of a tomato seedling that I planted back in late May. It has gotten tall. But it hasn’t yet given any fruit. In another month or two, I expect it to whither and die, just like the spiritual lives of this crowd that pursues Jesus in our Gospel today.

Let’s ask ourselves the question that Jesus does in verse 27: What food endures? If you could easily tell the difference between “the food that perishes but for the food that endures for eternal life,” what would you choose?

The obvious answer is Jesus, but in our current day, that choice might look different than it did to those who were literally following Jesus, chasing him across lakes, making him so nervous that he withdrew to the mountains so that he wouldn’t be proclaimed their ruler.

It’s interesting to get these bread passages in August, that time of the year that we often call the “dog days” of summer. In some ways, we might be experiencing the dog days of the spiritual year. Think about it: we don’t have the kind of high holy days, like Christmas or Easter. In August, we don’t have times of penitence, like Lent, or times of anticipation, like Advent. If we’re not careful, it’s easy to find ourselves malnourished.

Jesus tells us that we must believe, but what is unsaid in this Gospel is that our beliefs can be fortified by keeping certain spiritual practices that sustain us. If we’re thinking that we’re in a bit of a spiritual doldrum, think back to a time when you weren’t—is there a practice from that time you could adopt? It doesn’t have to be rigorous, like reading your way through the whole Bible. Just a bit more reading of something that is spiritually nourishing might help. Or maybe you want to take a practice that you love from a different time of year, like lighting candles, and add it to your spiritual life now; instead of an Advent wreath, you could have an August wreath.

Jesus tells us that he is the bread that will never leave us hungry, if we just believe. But Jesus needs us to turn away from the forces that are not life giving and towards the practices that will lead to our flourishing. We are gathered here in this church, where we have an opportunity to be nourished and fed weekly. What will help us remember that Jesus comes to nourish us daily? How can we connect to God, the source of flourishing, on a daily basis?

The answers to those questions are as varied as the people in this room. Maybe it’s adding some prayer to our daily walk, prayers of gratitude or wonder or supplication. Maybe it’s getting back to a creative practice. Maybe it’s social justice or charity work.

Jesus is the bread that never leaves us hungry. Our weekly and daily spiritual practices are the way we chew that bread, the way we get the full benefit of that nourishment.