In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
In his account of the Gospel, John does not include what we have come to call an institution narrative, an account of the blessing of bread and wine at the Last Supper, the language of take, eat, this is my body.
This institution narrative does appear in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and even in 1 Corinthians, but not in John.
In John’s Last Supper scene, he chooses to focus on something less appetizing than bread and wine, the washing of dirty feet.
More specifically, on the disciples receiving of their own feet being washed.
So John does not have an institution narrative, but that does not mean that John has nothing to say about the night in which Jesus was betrayed, or about the very bread and wine that we are to consume here this morning.
John moves Jesus' teaching about his body and blood from the Last Supper to this collection of teachings and miracles that we have come to call the sixth chapter of John.
And he does this for a reason.
We started reading this chapter last Sunday, and the lectionary has us spending the next several Sundays in John chapter 6 as well.
So with all of this in mind, I want for us to think for a moment this morning about this Gospel passage with two questions in mind.
By moving Jesus' words about his body and blood from the Last Supper to this scene, what is John trying to show us about ourselves, and what is John trying to show us about Jesus?
Now here’s where I’m going to do something a little bit different.
Instead of spending the next several moments guiding you to this climactic conclusion and then closing in prayer, I’m just going to tell you the main point of the sermon right off the bat.
You can then choose.
Take it at face value and tune out the rest of the sermon, or continue to chew on it with me in the moments that follow.
I’m not offended either way.
I probably won’t even notice which choice you made.
So here’s the point.
Here’s what John is doing.
Here’s what he’s telling us, in other words, about ourselves.
We are creatures of appetite, and we will work tirelessly to fulfill our desires.
And here’s what John is trying to say about Jesus.
Jesus alone will fill or fulfill or satisfy those longings, and he will do so, in fact, he will only do so once we stop trying to work out those longings ourselves.
That’s it.
Now here’s how John gets us there, if you’re interested.
Again, if not, you just got the gist of the sermon.
So do what you will.
John says that the crowd got into boats and went to Capernaum looking for Jesus, and they wound up finding him on the other side of the Sea of Galilee.
Here in John chapter six, in last week’s gospel reading, in fact, we witnessed one of the staple miracles of Jesus’s ministry, the feeding of the 5,000.
In a moment of desperation, a hungry crowd is miraculously fed by a relatively measly amount of food.
And if you remember, John tells us that everyone ate as much as they wanted, and there was food left over.
And yet, our passage begins today with a scene that should be familiar to each of us as humans.
This crowd of people who just yesterday were miraculously fed to the point of being full wake up hungry and begin a frantic search for more.
Yesterday they were full, but not today.
They went to bed satisfied and woke up hungry.
We are beings of appetite, and we have insatiable appetites.
We will follow our appetites just about anywhere, whether it’s across a sea or into dark places we never thought possible.
We live in pursuit of an appetite, a hunger.
This appetite, these longings, are for a variety of things, or at least they seem to be on the surface.
Food is perhaps the most universal of those longings.
This is why language about food permeates our way of thinking and talking about all of our desires.
We hunger for recognition.
We are starved for attention.
We might decide to fast from social media.
In a 20th century classic that takes its title from this gospel passage, Orthodox priest Father Alexander Schmemann repeatedly describes the human as a hungry being.
And this hunger can be satisfied in any number of ways, some more healthy than others, but only for a moment.
Our hunger of all varieties will inevitably return, which is what makes Jesus’s words shared with this hungry crowd the day after they were filled full all the more intriguing.
You are looking for me, he said, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the bread.
Do not work for food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life.
He saw that day the same hungry crowd coming back for a second day in a row and told them to seek the sort of food that would never make them hungry again.
Perhaps it was the way he said it.
Perhaps it was the fond memory of that fresh bread and fish still in their minds from the day before.
Or perhaps they were growing tired of chasing their appetites day after day.
Whatever the reason, something clicked.
In the minds and hearts of this crowd, they realized they were ready for whatever this food was that could endure for more than a day.
They were tired of chasing, tired of working day after day in pursuit of things that do not endure.
So when they found out that there is this food that lasts, they did the next natural thing.
What must we do, they asked, to be doing the works of God?
In other words, how do we get this food?
Jesus’s response to that question causes them to pause.
The crowd was hungry yesterday.
They received food.
They were full.
They went to bed and they woke up hungry.
This was the pattern of their entire lives.
Wake up hungry, seek food, work hard for it, eat it, go to bed full, and then wake up hungry.
So when Jesus tells them that their ultimate desire should be for a sort of food that endures more than that, they’re interested.
But the only paradigm they have in their mind is this, hunger, work, and food.
Hunger, work, and food.
It’s a paradigm of earning their way towards the fulfillment of their desires.
And it’s that paradigm that Jesus’s response to their question turns on its head.
What work must we do to get this food?
Jesus’s answer was simple, believe that I will give you the food.
The hard work needed to receive this enduring bread of life is to receive it.
Don’t earn it, don’t deserve it, don’t posture for it, but simply take, eat, and receive.
Now it doesn’t take a wild biblical imagination to pick up on the reality that Jesus is talking about more than food here.
Alexander Schmemann did say that man is a hungry being, but he said more.
Man is a hungry being, but he is hungry for God.
Behind all the hunger of our life is God.
All desire is finally a desire for him.
Or as our favorite northern African bishop once put it, our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.
We are creatures of appetite, and our instinct is to work tirelessly to fulfill our desires.
Part of the reason John has taken Jesus’s teaching about himself as the bread of life and placed it here is to remind us that the way towards a life of health and fullness is this, recognizing that there is a single source at the end of all our desires, a true and ultimate object of our desires, without which we will remain restless.
The object of that desire is God himself.
Life with God.
An entering into the love that already exists between the Father and the Son, and the Son and the Spirit, and the Spirit and the Father.
An entering into the fellowship of his children that has endured throughout the ages and exists in a variety of contexts around the world today.
And an entering, the key to entering, into that life of love and fellowship with God is realizing that it is being offered freely, that it cannot be earned, that the biggest barrier to receiving it is thinking that it has to be the result of our hard work.
Receiving is a deeply formative task.
Every week here we are presented with an opportunity to practice a posture of receiving something that we did not earn.
So if you are here this morning because you ought to be here, you are missing the point.
In fact, if you’re here and you don’t really know why, but there’s this sense within you that you’re hungering for something you can’t name, you’re on the right track.
You’re actually closer to receiving it than others might be.
Leave any notion of earning your keep in the pew this morning when you make your way to the altar.
Reject the idea that your presence in church this morning is part of negotiating a grand deal with the God of the universe.
Approach the altar ready to receive that which you did not earn.
This is part of what Jesus means when he tells his disciples to enter the kingdom of God like children.
Children are happy to receive things they did not earn.
This is part of what drives us crazy about them.
If you haven’t in a while hand an ice cream cone to a small child, you know what they won’t say?
I didn’t exercise today, so I don’t think I have the calories for this.
I can’t afford that ice cream cone.
I’ll buy the next round of ice cream.
These are things children don’t say.
What do they do?
They take and they eat.
And there’s something about that childlike faith where children are actually in a position to better see the universe than we are.
They know that their daily life depends on somebody outside of them feeding them.
We can recover that sense of dependence week after week by receiving bread and wine that we did not produce from an altar that we did not set, one that we won’t even have to help clean up thanks to our altar guilt.
And if we continue this practice week in and week out of freely receiving that which we did not earn, we might just become the sort of people that can say, Lord, give us this bread always.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.