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The Rev. Dr. Dennis E. Morey, Pastor
Scripture: John 6:24-35
The Savior of _____ Creation: Ours Or All?
Last week the scripture was the story of how Jesus fed the five thousand, then escaped to the hills before they tried to force him to be their king. He had walked around the outside of the lake during the night and got to Capernaum about the time the disciples’ boat arrived on the shore.
It seems that many of the people either came again to the place Jesus had been preaching when he multiplied the bread or they camped out there waiting for Jesus to come back. The next day, when the people discovered Jesus was not coming down out of the hills, many of them got into boats and went across the lake. They found Jesus. They said, “Jesus, where did you go yesterday? How did you get here?”
Jesus knew that they were not there to thank him, but to find out if he could do something for them again. They wanted another miracle. They wanted breakfast.
Jesus said, “You are here looking for me, not because you understood the miracle you received yesterday, but because you want more.”
Friends, the big miracle, God’s love reaching our lives, changes who we are and how we see life and our purpose on earth. But it doesn’t prevent us from thinking, “The God who saved my soul and made my body can certainly grant my every wish.” We want more and more and more and more.
Jesus came to earth not as a genie in a bottle ready to grant us three wishes, but he came to earth to connect us to God. It is from that connection to God that our faith grows and we learn to seek the advice of God on life, as we live it daily.
The great miracle Jesus came to give us was the possibility of knowing God and living in a relationship with God. God has reached out to us and, while we were still sinners far from God, God loved us.
From that we think that since that was such a huge accomplishment: God did for us what we cannot do for ourselves; therefore, God should be able to do all the little things we want God to do.
That means God must bend to our will and yield to our ideas of what life should be. When God fails to do that, we begin thinking we are not loved and that the big thing God did for us, saving our souls for eternal life, might not be real either.
In our reading of the book The Shack, by William Paul Young, we see the character Mack unable to deal with the tragedy of losing his little girl to a kidnapper and murderer because he was not convinced that God loved him.
God was not like a kind Heavenly Father, because he had experienced his own father as mean and hateful. He has to relearn his relationship with God, understanding God as “Papa” and seeing God as an old black woman.
Sometimes we have such a mistaken concept of God that we cannot experience the greatest miracle of God’s love.
Mack learns that God is not interested in punishment. God is not interested in revenge on us, but is interested in creating opportunities for us to know God, even when something terrible happens to us as the result of our choice or someone else’s choice. When our relationship with God is intact, we are able to pick up the pieces of life and go forward.
Those people who had gone out to hear Jesus preach and see the sick healed had no idea lunch would be included, but, when it was, that was the big news.
Certainly in our generation we like cheap groceries and a free meal. We go to great lengths to shop for bargains, clip coupons, and comb the ads to get the most for the least amount of money. Many grow a garden, not for the food value of homegrown vegetables, but because it is a way to save money.
Those people had found something better than cheap groceries. Their lunch was even cheaper than growing a garden.
The fact that Jesus had talked to them about God’s love coming to them, as predicted by Moses, about God fulfilling the promise made to their ancestor Abraham, and they were there to see it—the evidence Jesus produced that God was at work in the world, when he healed the diseased and the crippled—was all forgotten when lunch arrived.
They knew that they had not made any provisions for lunch. They were just going to go out and listen for an hour or so and then be home before lunch. But when they got there it was so interesting, it was so wonderful to see those people healed, that they got caught up and forgot about the time. Suddenly it was lunchtime.
This Jesus who had been talking about God meeting their needs took five small loaves of bread and two small fish, and suddenly there was enough lunch for everyone and it was the best food ever.
It not only tasted wonderful, it was so satisfying, like nothing they had ever experienced before. And as they began to discuss it, there was a kind of frenzy being created among the people.
They became more and more excited about the quality of the bread and the freshness of the fish that they decided to quickly make Jesus the king, set up a kingdom of just them, and just dare anyone to try to break up their newfound happiness.
This Jesus could do anything. Jesus would do everything for them, and suddenly the Savior of all creation became the savior of our creation.
They had created for themselves a savior that had nothing to do with the One God had sent.
I think we can most likely identify with those people. I know I can. If I had been there, I would have thought it was a good idea, too.
In fact it is still easy for us to think that, since we know Jesus and we love Jesus, Jesus should be about fixing everything broken in our lives and keeping us comfortable 100 percent of the time. We want a savior who can save the life we have created, so we end up with a savior we have created.
We get very creative when it comes to our relationship with Christ, creating a job description for God. Like Mack in the book, we have certain ideas about what God should be doing.
And we get so focused on what we think God should be doing next that we forget what he has done for us. The people in today’s scripture weren’t there to thank Jesus for healing those people or for yesterday’s lunch; they were focused on what they wanted Jesus to do next.
Jesus told them, “I know you are here for more bread and now your life is caught up in finding your next meal. Don’t be so preoccupied with what you put in your stomach, and what you can accumulate in this life. Don’t go after what will spoil quickly, but go after what is eternal. This is the food that God wants you to have, and I have come to provide it because God has sent me.
The people said, “OK, we get it: eternal bread. What does God want us to do so we can have this eternal bread?”
Jesus said, “God wants you to believe in the One that God has sent. You don’t understand that I didn’t just provide bread; I am the bread of life. I am that which is central and most important. I am your connection to the Father, and that alone will satisfy your appetite for that for which you really hunger.
The people said, “OK, we get it! What miracle will you do to prove this so we may believe? When Moses and the Israelites were wandering in the desert God rained down manna for them to eat.”
They recalled the story how the people gathered that doughy substance and baked it for bread fresh every day. Jesus said, “That wasn’t bread from heaven. It had to be gathered daily or it would spoil. What God provides is eternal and will never spoil. God satisfies your hungry hearts with the One who has come down from heaven and he gives life to the world.”
Still thinking of their next sandwich, the people replied, “Sir, give us this bread forever!”
Friends, there is a hunger deep within each of us. I think one of the problems with obesity in our nation and in the world has to do with the fact that we are searching for some kind of satisfaction. We keep looking for what tastes good, and we crave more and more of it. The more we eat, the less satisfied our bodies are, and we eat more. Ah, but satisfaction must be in the next meal.
I believe what we crave is not physical but spiritual. We have to understand that what we put in our mouth is only to feed the body. The other part of us, the eternal part, our soul, needs to be fed too, and we get them confused.
We create a world with ourselves at the center, and more is never enough. Even those who are focused on health and fitness can never get enough and often go to the other extreme, so focused on what they eat they live in fear of some molecule entering their body that would harm them.
So we go about feeding our obsessions unaware of the fact the emptiness is only growing inside us.
In the book The Shack it is only when Mack admits his life is empty that Papa can begin filling him with the nourishment he really needs, the love of God.
The emptiness of losing a child would never leave him but he was learning that, even in the midst of that kind of heartache, God was there to give him the strength and even the forgiveness necessary to carry on.
Like the people in today’s scripture, we can get our appetites—physical and spiritual—blurred into one. We feed bodies but our spirits were starving.
We try to create a savior who will do what we want, which negates the freedom of choice in the lives of others. We try to create a savior who is obligated to take total care of me in the here and now.
Jesus said, “I am the bread of life. Those who come to me will never be hungry; those who believe in me will never be thirsty.”
Jesus came to be the Savior, not the one we create to do what we want done, but the One that God sent. This is the plan of God. How can we fit into what God has planned? Believe in the Savior God sent, and quit trying to create one for ourselves.
We hear a lot these days about designer clothes, and even designer dogs. It seems to me that there are a lot of us who would like to have a designer Jesus. I see some churches offering just that. They preach a feel-good religion, and most of the people are young and successful and have come from good homes and have never experienced the challenges of life. “Jesus is with you. So long as you have Jesus your life will be perfect. Didn’t Jesus say that we should ‘be perfect as the Father is perfect’?”
But when the consequences of our poor decisions—or someone else’s poor decisions of which we are the victims—come to us, or just the routine of growing older, the Jesus they have created is worthless.
When trouble comes they begin thinking that God really doesn’t care or has forgotten them, or that they have done something that has angered God and this is their punishment.
The best kind of Savior to accept is the One that God has provided. Although he does not promise us a 100 percent perfect life, we can be sure that when life’s challenges come—and they will—he will be there.
Don’t settle for a designer savior who is supposed to take care of the here and now and grant your every wish. Go for the real Savior, Jesus, who is the Son of God. He alone is the way to have a relationship with God whereby our souls are fed and we find eternal life.
Amen.
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John 6:24-35 Then they said to him, “What must we do to perform the works of God?” Jesus answered them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” So they said to him, “What sign are you going to give us then, so that we may see it and believe you? What work are you performing? Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’” Then Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” They said to him, “Sir, give us this bread always.” Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. (From the
New Revised Standard Version of the
Bible) |
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