John 6:35-51
August 13, 2006
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
Every year at Youth Camp, Thursday is Commitment Night. At the beginning of the camp, the counselors begin preparing the youth to reflect on their faith in Jesus: Have you been faithful in your words and deeds? Do you want your life to be transformed in Jesus Christ? Do you have a personal relationship with Jesus?
In the youth journal, there is information about what Commitment Night is all about and an invitation to speak with your counselor or leaders about one’s faith. And during the week, every youth has an opportunity to chat with one of the pastors in what we call, “Pastoral Conversations.” The ultimate purpose of Youth Camp is to bring everyone into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
Is that all there is to ministry? Surely a pastor wants to encourage a wide array of faithful acts—service to others in need, study the Scriptures, knowledge of traditions and church history, faithful witness in the community, and on and on. But for all churches and ours is no exception, there is usually one big question, in fact, perhaps the only question—“do you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ?”
And yet, when it all comes down to it, while the Christian faith may be more than this, it is certainly not less than this—a personal relationship with Jesus.
When I lead the Inquirers Class six weeks before Easter and then again six weeks before Christmas, we cover a variety of topics about our church, about our Baptist beliefs, about our values, our practices—but in the end what really matters is whether you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. And when the Deacons interview the candidates for Baptism and you the church membership listen to their testimonials, we are all listening for that personal relationship they have with Jesus.
It’s all about Jesus; it’s about getting up close and personal with Jesus.
Feed on Me
For three Sundays now, we have been looking at the “bread” passages in John’s gospel. When Jesus fed the 5000 with only 5 loaves of bread and 2 fish by distributing out the food himself, we heard that Jesus was accessible to us and not like some distant customer service representative somewhere on the other side of the planet. Last Sunday, we talked about how easy it is to cruise for food on a cruise ship or perhaps at an all-you-can-eat buffet but only Jesus, the Bread of Life can truly satisfies our needs.
Today we see that the crowds began complaining about who Jesus claimed to be. How can he be the bread of life when we know his father, Joseph and his mother, Mary?
How can he claim that he came down from heaven when we knew him as a little boy running around on earth?
Yet all this comes to a head when Jesus pronounces: You want to be fully satisfied, satisfied for all eternity? You want to be satisfied beyond the manna in the wilderness since eventually people who ate this bread still died? If you want to eat the bread and not die, Jesus said, “Feed on me. I am the bread.”
The crowds who are clamoring after Jesus want more bread. He gives them bread, more than bread. He offers himself. Jesus said, “I am the bread.”
Wouldn’t it have been a bit more appropriate if Jesus had said to them, “Now that you have eaten your fill of my miraculous bread, let me give you a lecture on the essential beliefs of the Christian faith?” We all have attended a dinner or a banquet when we know that we will need to sit through a speech or two before getting the chance to leave. It’s part of the course! Even at our Friday Night School, we offer a free dinner and expect the people to stay to listen to an evangelistic message. It’s simply a part of the course.
But Jesus doesn’t do that. He says eat me, feed on me, take me the same way you would take a good meal. This is a very strange teaching from Jesus.
For most of us, we like to keep a fair distance from each other. We like it this way. As soon as we get a chance to move out of an apartment to a single family detached house in the suburbs, we do so. We often want to maintain our personal spaces and not become intruded upon. We don’t want to sit elbow to elbow on the pews but we want a little distance from each other. But Jesus doesn’t do that. He says eat me, feed on me, take me the same way you would take a good meal. Jesus wants us to be up close and personal with him.
Getting to Know Someone
It is a well-known fact that most people are persuaded in religious matters not by reason or the arguments found in books and schools of thought, but rather by other people. There are many reasons, theories, schools of thinking that we can come up to debate and counteract other competing systems of thought. But what we can’t seem to resist are people—concrete, personal embodiment of thoughts and beliefs.
We all know that people in small towns know their neighbors better than people who live in the city. You may be prejudiced toward a group of people in the big city but when you are in a small town, you can actually get to know them. We don’t demonize other people or objectify them when they are neighbors who live down the lane.
We know that we think more positively of our local politicians than our national politicians. Even though it might be objectively shown that our local politicians have fewer credentials, and have greater problems with temptations to corruption, still, we know them for who they are and feel a higher level of trust and appreciation for what they do. Local politicians on the campaign trail are more apt to be up front and personal with you than the national ones. They want to be as personal with us as possible.
In a couple weeks, our children will begin school again. Schools put a big emphasis on the types of books and curriculum to use. We’ve come to expect up to date textbooks to teach our students so that they can receive good grades and get accepted into good colleges. Our Christian education program is no exception. We praise a well-written Sunday school curriculum and if I dare to say too that we want to have the most recent translation of the Bible as our basic text of our faith in hand. But when it all comes down to it, learning that will change one’s life is the living voice, the breathing form, the facial expression, the teacher that teaches and the preacher that preaches. Learning takes place when our teachers are up front and personal with us.
A pastor who writes as much as she preaches and has published many books wrote a wonderful meditation on why Christians should be against email. She says that Christians must mightily resist the tendency toward email because we are a religion of the incarnation. We believe that God has come in the flesh, among us. We are big on bodies. We don’t believe there can be any true communication worthy of the name, no communion, no community, without bodies. We like bodies.
This is the reason why we take a week out of our busy lives to spend a week with our junior and senior high youth at camp. We can’t have community without actually being close, up front and personal with each and every one of the youth. This is the reason why we have six weeks of Inquirer Class so that after getting to know each other, we can hear each other share our personal relationship with Jesus. It’s all about bodies because Jesus chose to become flesh like us and dwelled among us so that we may become personal with him.
I believe that one of the reasons why our congregation is growing and thriving faithfully today is because we are committed to encountering and getting to know each other. When we pray together in our small Bible study groups, we share how we trust our lives in Jesus. When we make our participation in the fellowship group that we are members of a priority, we demonstrate the importance of meaningful community in Jesus’ name. And we all know too well that cancer and sickness don’t bypass us just because we are Christians. But when we are in community with each other, we know that Jesus is among us because he wants to be close and personal with us. In the most difficult of situations, God is never far away because we as Jesus disciples are there.
Encountering Jesus
Today’s gospel is a reminder that the Christian faith is more than a set of beliefs, more than a list of intellectual propositions. It is a matter of being encountered by a person, Jesus, a matter of God getting close and personal with us, engaging us, taking over our lives, possessing us. If you want to not only be satisfied with the bread in your stomachs but to have bread that will satisfy you eternally, Jesus says to us, “I’m the bread of life. Feed on me.”
There was a woman who spent much of her life trying to figure out whether on not she was a Christian. She’s a very intellectual sort of person, very intelligent. She had real troubles with various Christian beliefs. Saying the Lord’s Prayer on Sundays was often a painful experience for her.
Then one day she said, “Well, I’ve just decided to stop thinking about Jesus and start living with Jesus. I’ve decided that, though there’s so much that mystifies and troubles me about what I don’t know about Jesus, I need to go on with what I know, which is Jesus.”
Personal Testimony
Just like the crowds in the Bible were following Jesus to have more bread, we come to church looking for the same. We expect even if we don’t readily admit it that we would become more blessed, more fortunate, more happy, less worries, no diseases. But Jesus says to them, not simply that he will give them bread, but rather that he is bread. “Feed on me,” he says.
This is an intimate, earthy, carnal, fleshy sort of metaphor. Jesus is more than an interesting idea, more than a belief. He is bread that we ought to hunger for, to eat, to savor, and to be satisfied by. Keeping Jesus at a distance is not possible. Jesus wants to get close to us, up front and personal with us. The Christian faith is about getting personal with Jesus.
In my own faith journey, I have come to know the love of God through Jesus. When I study Jesus’ life, I discovered that he welcomed everyone that God created. No one was unwelcome in his presence. I see that he spoke up especially for those who were persecuted and undervalued. He was always sharing his healing touch with those who were sick and diseased, crippled and broken, disheartened and crushed. He allowed people to come to him—the little children who were too small to see him and the woman who was too sick but reached out to touch his cloak so that she can be healed. In my entire life, I have come to know the Jesus who was always close to people and has a personal relationship with them.
I have a personal relationship with Jesus. And because of that, like what Paul said in 2 Corinthians, I may be “afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies.”
Paul continues, “For while we live, we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made visible in our mortal flesh.” (2 Cor. 4:8-11)
Clearly, Jesus invites us to feed on him—getting close and personal with him as the Bread of Life. And in turn, as we live our lives in faithfulness in Christ Jesus, an embodiment of Christ in the world, we serve as visible witnesses of the Good News in the world. May we invite others to know Jesus too.
Let us pray.
Dear God, in your desire to have a close and personal relationship with us, you gave us your Son, Jesus Christ to come into the world to dwell among us, teaching us your will, healing our broken bodies, comforting our troubles, and inviting us into a personal relationship with Jesus himself. Lead us to feed on the Bread of Life with the full confidence that in Christ, we are promised eternal life with you. Grant us the strength and commitment to represent your love both in word and in deeds in this hurting world that we have. In the name of the incarnate Christ, we pray. Amen.