We all have heard (especially the last three weeks) Jesus’ declaration in John 6 that he is the bread of life, but we likely don’t feel what the original audience would have felt when they heard this. After all, most of us probably don’t think of food as integral to our relationship with God. In fact, even the thought that food is integral to our relationship with God is a little weird!
One of the core themes of the Bible is that God feeds his people. In the beginning, God gave Adam and Eve the trees of the garden to eat. When Noah left the ark, God gave Noah the right to eat meat. In the wilderness, God provided manna and quail. Through the prophets, God declared that he would prepare a great feast for his people. Throughout the Bible, God offered food to his people, demonstrating both his care for them and their dependence on him. Food was how God tested and instructed his people—it was how they showed their trust and willingness to obey. With food, he marked them as set apart for him (hence the weird laws about what they could and couldn’t eat). Food was also a symbol of their future, when they would feast with their God.
(All of this is in stark contrast to the various pagan accounts, which taught that mankind existed to provide food for the gods. The Biblical account is the exact opposite of the normal pagan beliefs. That God created man and woman and then fed them would have struck most pagans as backwards, too good to be true.)
All of this food-instruction reaches its culmination in Jesus’ declaration that he is the true food. A Jew listening to Jesus would have heard much more than we do. Jesus was saying, in effect, “All of that was pointing forward to me. I am the true provision, the true place where faith is tested, the true place you are humbled, the true place God cares for you, the true place you are marked as different from the world, the true feast to come.” His words are staggering; they are blasphemous if they aren’t true.
We need our imaginations enlarged! Our God provides for us because he offers himself as food. We are called to consume him in faith so that we become a part of his life, and this humbles us and tests our faith—we want to provide for ourselves, we don’t want to need God. That the provision of life for the world is the Son of God, who gave himself away in death for us to consume, is staggering, unthinkable, humbling. We live because he died. He is the food offered for the life of the world.
Steven+
The Beginning of Fall
My guess is that many of you feel the approach of fall—perhaps because the thermometer hasn’t hit 90 degrees for a while (I am hoping this trend will continue!), but more likely because of the change in activities. The last few weeks of summer are usually a hectic whirlwind as the final moments of vacation-time collide with the beginning of new seasons at school and work. If your house feels like ours, the transition is well underway.
There are lots of moments when the secular calendar is out of sync with the Church’s calendar, and summer is one of them. Summer lands in Pentecost Season every year, and summer is a feast season in our country, even though Pentecost Season isn’t. In the moments when the Church’s calendar and the secular calendar don’t line up, we can feel the tension of being citizens of heaven even though we live in the kingdoms of this world. We are exiles, waiting for the moment we go to our true home. Living under two calendars is actually a fantastic reminder of this!
But in the fall, the secular calendar begins to line up with Pentecost Season, and the tension is relieved (at least until Advent). Pentecost Season, which is often called Ordinary Time, is the long season of ordinary discipleship. It is focused on living our normal lives faithfully by being missionaries at work, at school, and in the home and by participating in the regular rhythm of the Church’s worship and prayer. The Spirit is given to the Church at Pentecost, and what flows out of this is ordinary life, lived faithfully, as God’s witnesses in the world. Going back to “ordinary life” in the secular sense fits the Church’s focus in Ordinary Time.
Over the next couple weeks, you will hear about the ordinary patterns of discipleship that we will be engaging in this fall. Bible studies are being revamped, New Members’ Class begins again, Sunday School restarts, Small Groups kick off—pay attention to emails and announcements! But before those announcements, there is the more important reminder:
Pentecost Season is about living our ordinary lives in the power of the Spirit.
As fall gets underway in your home, don’t lose track of this core element. In the Spirit, our ordinary lives become more than we can imagine. The ordinary activities of each day become acts of worship, discipleship, and mission as we are filled with the presence of God.
Steven+
Scripture Reflections
On Sunday, we heard Jesus’ words from John 6:27, “Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life.” Jesus is echoing the prophets, who said, “Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread?” (Is. 55:2) and “My people have…hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water” (Jer. 2:13).
A life-coach or mentor might also say that we often spend our lives on empty things, but the prophetic warning is more pointed. It isn’t just, “Don’t waste your life; pursue your true goals.” God’s message to his people is that there is only one goal, one food. We spend our energy on things (no matter how good and noble they are) that cannot deliver what we ask of them. In the end, there is only one source of life—God himself—and all good things derive their goodness from him. To make pleasure or success, or even friendship or family, our goal is counter-productive. These are places God blesses us with life, but they are not life itself, and when they displace God, they cease to be blessings. In other words, we are made for him; our lives are meant to be filled with his life—nothing else is big enough.
One of the startling aspects of the prophetic warning is that we have to spend energy on these other things (we work for the food that perishes), and yet the true food—God himself—is free. In the words of Isaiah 55, “he who has no money, come, buy, and eat!” Jesus offers himself freely; the only “work” is to come to him and believe in him (Jn. 6:35). This is something that worldly wisdom cannot understand; earning and deserving what we get is deeply engrained in us! That we do not deserve this overflowing life, and yet are given it freely, is difficult for us to accept.
The offer is free, and yet it is very costly. God does not tolerate rivals, and those who turn to him for this free gift of life must relinquish their false gods. Success, pleasure, even friendship and family, must be put on the altar when they vie for God’s place. But perhaps the biggest cost is our pride. It is our pride, after all, that makes it so hard to accept the fact that we cannot earn God’s life. It is our pride that struggles to acknowledge our poverty before God. It is our pride that makes us say, “I deserve what I have received.”
The fullness of God’s life is offered to us freely. Jesus came that we might be delivered from the sin that destroys and have life in abundance. And yet, to come to him and receive, our pride must be killed. The two—our pride and God’s life—cannot coexist.
Steven+