Hallowed Hunger

August 14, 1994

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Scripture: John 6:51-58

We pick up today, in a sense, right where we left off last week. I hope you were here a week ago, when we celebrated Holy Communion. Amy Peed in an excellent Communion Meditation, used as her text and springboard, the story from the first part of Chapter 6 of the Gospel of John about Jesus taking, blessing, breaking, and giving the bread to the people who were hungry. She found in the narrative and shared with us levels of meaning that go beyond, or transcend the literal meaning of the words in the plot line. She showed us that there is more in the story than just an account of a Man performing a miracle of feeding hungry people. She helped us see that this story is about MORE than just the filling of the gastronomical vacuum; it's more deeply about the filling of a spiritual vacuum. THAT’S NOT BAD BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION, IT’S GOOD BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION, because that’s exactly what the author of the Gospel wants us to see. That’s exactly why he wrote.

THERE IS HUNGER AND THERE IS HUNGER. There is the biological, gnawing ache for physical food, and there is the internal, restless yearning for spiritual food. That John, or whoever wrote the 4th Gospel, is aware of and is speaking to this duality of drives becomes clearer and clearer as the 6th Chapter unfolds. We pick up where we left off last week, looking at John’s expansion on the loaves and fishes episode, and focusing our attention on the profoundly Biblical theme of HUNGER.

It’s not something we largely overweight North Americans are intimate with. Hunger to most of us means the discomfort of postponing supper for an hour or so. It means not having what we want in the refrigerator to snack on before we go to bed. Not many of us are truly conversant with what it means to be without food entirely, over an extended period of time..... what it means to feel the tightening of the stomach muscles due to deprivation. I have read that as long as the feeling of hunger is present, there is hope for a person starving. There comes a time when the hunger pangs themselves go away, and that’s when life reaches the point of jeopardy.

A prayer has been recorded from one of the African tribes trying to struggle through a long period of drought: “O Lord, make us hungry again.” We don’t know that kind of experience. We see the images on the television screen of emaciated, sticklike bodies in Somalia  or Zaire...or we look at the pictures of holocaust victims barely human any longer, and it’s all so foreign a to seem almost unbelievable. BUT HUNGER REAL HUNGER, undiluted physical hunger, is not just a bad dream, or an illusion that disappears when you flip off your T.V. knob, it’s a reality for millions of people on this planet. To be without food, proper, nourishing food, in sufficient quantity to sustain life, is a specter that haunts many parts of our world.

The Bible knows about it. It’s known about it all along. Hunger, in fact, is a major Biblical theme. When you begin to count the references in Scripture that in some way relate to hunger... references to eating, drinking, food...the number is staggering. Drop down almost anywhere and there they are.

Hunger plays a role in the account of the original divine/human estrangement. Right at the start, in the first part of the first book of the Bible, there is that disturbing, troubling scene concerning the consumption of a piece of forbidden fruit. Hunger brought on disaster. How modern it all sounds. Eat the wrong things and you get into trouble.....Well, maybe it’s a little bigger than that.

DISOBEDIENCE TO THE BUILT-IN LAWS OF LIFE INEVITABLY WREAKS HAVOC.

Hunger is used as a symbol of that. It’s how the whole sad saga begins.

And it ends with a reference to hunger, the alleviation of it. At the conclusion of the Book of Revelation, the last book, there is a vision of the coming reign of God where there is the promise, among other things, that the people of God “shall hunger no more....” a magnificent statement of faith in both the capacity and the willingness of God to satisfy. Hunger as an image both begins and ends the story.

And think of all the references in between--- Abraham prepares a feast for 3 hungry strangers as an act of hospitality, not knowing that he is entertaining angelic representatives from the Lord.... It is hunger that gives Jacob the advantage over his famished brother, Esau. That changes the line of blessing and alters the story. It’s famine, as the result of drought which drives the Hebrews down into Egypt in the time of Joseph, and it’s hunger and thirst that almost foments a rebellion during those long Wilderness years. The people survive only because God sends manna to fill their empty bellies.

The theme of hunger plays a prominent role in the Book of Ruth. The Psalmist writes about a God who “prepares a table before me in the presence of mine enemies...” Jeremiah, in a passage which depicts the hell of war when the city of Jerusalem is under siege by the Babylonians, cries out to the people, “Lift your hands to the Lord for the lives of your children, who faint for hunger at the head of every street.”

How well the Bible knows the horror of the empty stomach.

And while it’s true that the enemies of Jesus in derision once referred to him as “a wine-bibber and a glutton”, there is ample evidence to show that he was not unaware of the effects of food deprivation. In the Temptation experience, we are told that he fasted out in the desert for 40 days... Matthew’s cryptic comment on it is, “And afterward, he was famished.” He knew about hunger.

The reason he cursed the fig tree for not bearing fruit that day in what appears to be an out-of-character response may be found in the verse that immediately precedes the incident. Mark says, “When they came (into town) from Bethany, he was HUNGRY.” Maybe that shed light on it. Hunger can drive even the most serene of spirits to irritability if it goes on long enough.

Sure he knew what hunger was all about. His language is filled with references to it--- “Which of you, if your son asks for bread, would you give him a stone?” “I was hungry, and you fed me....” “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after their righteousness.....”

He likened the Kingdom itself to a great banquet where there would be an unlimited supply of food....And when He wanted to choose a symbol for Himself, something to represent His very life, an intimate, personal symbol that His followers could have with them to remember Him by when He was gone from them physically, HE CHOSE THAT SIMPLE, earthy, commonplace, everyday element which is a staple of life all over the world, and an antidote to hunger---the symbol of BREAD. “This is my body, broken for you.”

Everybody knows what bread is. Everybody knows what bread DOES....it nourishes, it sustains; it tastes good; that is, it provides flavor and palate as well as filling. It’s a wonderfully rich symbol, even for people who need to go on a diet, even to the wealthy and overweight, because it conveys a connotation that goes beyond the simply physical.

And that’s the sense the author of this passage in John is seeking to impart. There’s a preacher at work here, with extraordinary skill and insight. He’s taken a story, right out of the life of Jesus, a good story, a straightforward, meaningful, touching story, about a little boy and the compassionate Jesus, who knew about people being hungry because he’d been there, too.....HE TAKES THAT STORY, already in place, and uses it to say something more, something on another level, something additional about Jesus, something in his preacher’s heart he wanted the world to know: THE JESUS WHO MET THE PHYSICAL HUNGER OF PEOPLE THAT DAY ON THE LAKESIDE BY GIVING THEM BREAD, IS HIMSELF THE BREAD OF LIFE, the One who can supply the satisfaction for our human spiritual hungers.

What an interesting thing it is.... This story of the feeding of the 5,000 is the only story out of the public ministry of Jesus that is common to all 4 Gospels. It’s the one, single incident before the events of Holy Week, that is found across the board. Matthew, Mark Luke and John all tell it. No other happening in His ministry is better authenticated.

But look at the difference. When Matthew, Mark and Luke tell it, they do so to emphasize the magnificent sense of caring Jesus had for people, especially people who are suffering. They were hungry; he saw that they got something to eat.

John’s emphasis is on something else, or something MORE, not to take away from that, but to add to that. He wants his readers.... US....to see not just what Jesus DID, but who Jesus WAS, and really, to make it even more timeless and timely, and personal and pertinent, he wants us to see and come to know WHO JESUS IS. Here is the One who can feed you, in every inclusive, broad, glorious sense of the word.

He fed people physical bread to stave off physical hunger...and that’s great! BUT THE EVEN BIGGER NEWS ABOUT HIM NEVER ENDS, NEVER GETS OLD. A living relationship with Him fills and overflows the very depths of your soul.

“I am the living bread that came down from heaven”, John says Jesus says. He puts the words on the lips of Jesus himself, because that’s how he’s come to experience it himself-..I am the living Bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread shall live forever.”

And here is where this story grabs us, it seems to me, where it ceases to be just about something back there, and becomes something right here, about where we are right now. You and I may not know a great deal on a first hand, personal basis about physical hunger, but I’ll bet there aren’t many here who don’t know what it is in some sense to long, to yearn, to crave, to ache, to hunger for a more abiding sense of fulfillment. Why is it that we seem to feel empty much of the time?

What’s missing? Why is it, even when our tables almost buckle under the weight of pans of lasagna, casseroles, cheeseburgers, and fries, we still can’t get rid of that persistent deeper hunger?

Why do we come to Church? What’s the point? Why bother? Well, some don’t, of course, and maybe some here wish they hadn’t.... The lure of the beach, or the golf course, or that lavish breakfast buffet at the hotel, or just the prospect of perusing the Sunday morning newspaper in peace may offer a much more compelling appeal. There are a lot of other things we could do that maybe on several levels would be more “fun”.

But most of us, I suspect, are here, and we come regularly, because we get hungry.... that’s the simplest and best answer. We get hungry, hungry to be in touch with a Reality none of those other experiences provide.

If hunger isn’t the perfect metaphor, it certainly comes close... Something gnawing in-side of us, akin to physical hunger, churns away annoyingly until we feed it. You almost suspect it’s something God has put there to let us know He’s around.

Augustine wrote years ago in one of his most famous statements: “Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our souls are restless until they find their rest in thee.”

We know that restlessness, don’t we, we busy, driving, well-fed Americans. We know that hunger which no amount of physical food, or activity, or acquisition can totally satisfy. We know so well the incompleteness of “having it all”, the vacuum of what someone has described as a “God-shaped blank” down inside of us. That’s why we come, and why we come back, and why we keep coming back. We know if we don’t, we’ll starve, we’ll slowly waste away to nothing. “O Lord, make us hungry again”, for the Bread which truly nourishes.

What John is saying, to everybody within earshot, to everybody who’ll listen, to everybody, anywhere, who can identify with that inner emptiness, is, THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST, GOD’S SON, CAN FILL THE VOID YOU HAVE INSIDE, and can give you, when you receive Him into your life, when you welcome Him into your being, the soul equivalent of a full and contented stomach.

He can replace your drive to have to keep proving yourself with an acceptance which undercuts the need for that. He can take your obsessive compulsion to drink, to gamble, to lust, to grasp after things as a source of satisfaction and put in the place of that a new and charitable orientation, one that is outward turning instead of inward clutching.

He can take your need to run away from responsibility and honesty, and help you see that it’s all right to be grown up and mature, that facing the truth with Him, though maybe painful at first, is far more comfortable in the long run than trying to live in the darkness. He can remove the guilt of your burdensome past by taking it on himself and hauling it away to the garbage heap.

HE CAN FLOOD YOUR EMPTINESS WITH RICH, SUSTAINING NOURISHMENT.

How? “I am the living Bread that came down from heaven”, John says Jesus says. WHAT KIND OF LANGUAGE IS THAT? Well, of course. it’s SACRAMENT language, it’s eucharist language, it’s Holy Communion language. “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them....”

If we weren’t so familiar with it, if we hadn’t taken Communion so many times, across so many years, if those words hadn’t been drummed in our ears so often, it would be almost too much to stomach.....I mean that literally. Eat His flesh and drink His blood? Gross! No wonder the Jews who heard it had their hackles raised.

It’s almost an “in your face”... or should I say “in your mouth” way of expressing it. How far can Incarnation go? Here is intimacy, oneness, identification, stretched to just about the ultimate limit. Yet how else could John express it and begin to do justice to the sheer audacity of it?

How can Jesus Christ, God’s Son, who came to us in rescue from the Father fill the void, the emptiness, the hunger we know is inside and make us whole again? Using the language of food, John says he does it when we receive him, when we take him into our very bodies, into our lives, when we ingest him, and let him be one with us. When we do that. He abides in us, John puts it....the deeper gnawing hunger goes away, and we are made over. In spirituality as in nutrition, WE BECOME WHAT WE EAT.

The New Testament uses a number of graphic images to express the intimate relationship between Christ and those who believe in Him.... Paul uses an anatomical image: Christ is the head and we are the body.... John elsewhere uses the image of the shepherd and the sheep and the vine and the branches....All depict closeness and indissolubility.

Here, though, the capacity of language to express is almost exhausted. Receive Jesus, the whole Jesus, the incarnate Jesus and his redeeming life cling to your bones and courses through your veins. Let Him in sincerely, receptively, and you will be filled.

Now here’s the shocker. The surprising thing about all this---astonishing, really, when you think about it... This is Lord’s Supper talk obviously... flesh, blood... eat, drink... clearly Lord’s Supper talk, and yet there is no account of the institution of the Lord’s Supper in the Gospel of John.

In the Upper Room in John’s Gospel, Jesus washes the feet of the 12 but there is nothing there at all about the Sacrament. He doesn’t tell us that Jesus broke bread and gave it to his disciples, saying, “Take and eat, this is my body.”

He doesn’t inform us that after the meal he took a cup of wine and passed it among them, saying, “Drink from this, all of you. It represents my blood.” None of that in John.

We get that information from the other Gospels and from Paul, who describes it in the First letter to the Corinth. John no doubt knew that tradition. His language reflects his familiarity with it. Yet for him, who also doesn’t tell us about the Baptism of Jesus, SACRAMENT, which is a channel of grace, a conduit, if you will, a pipeline of the unquenchable and unbounded love of God for people...”an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace”....SACRAMENT, God’s breakthrough into human life may take place anywhere, anytime, under almost any circumstance, WHENEVER GOD’S PRESENCE IS RECOGNIZED AND RECEIVED.

The sustaining reality of Christ as Bread isn’t restricted to an ecclesiastical environment and a liturgically correct worship service. Isn’t that refreshing? Isn’t that wonderful? It may have frightening vocational implications for preachers and other professional religionists, but isn’t that a glorious and liberatingly expansive concept?

As here in this story, John is telling us, any meal, indeed, any experience in which the spiritual presence of Christ is looked for, is sought, expected anticipatingly may be a moment of life filling nourishment as He comes in to bestow the Bread which is HIMSELF. That’s big.

What a poor thing Christianity would be if it were confined to churches. John is telling us that we can find Christ anywhere in a Christ-filled world.

It’s not belittlement of Sacrament. It’s an expansion of Sacrament. WE meet Christ at the Table, here, and ingest Him, and then we go out and meet Him out there, where men and women, and boys and girls work, and struggle, and cope. Don’t ever doubt, He is there, too.

A fire ravaged a church in England a number of years ago, and burned it to the ground. During the blaze, one person raced inside to try to save whatever could be salvaged. He managed to drag out a life-sized statue of Christ standing with arms outstretched.

The statue was propped up on the sidewalk beside the smoldering ruins. Someone passing by a short time later, seeing it there, said, “Well, finally, they got Jesus out of the building and into the street.

John in heaven must have smiled. The great and glorious good news that he wrote about with such verve and insight is that Christ is out on the street, and everywhere in a spirit-filled world with arms and hands outstretched offering bread, and the Bread of His own nourishing life, to feed the hunger of our empty souls.

Hungry? Take, eat, and be filled.