Sermons
Wednesday of Oculi
Emmaus Lutheran Church
St. John 6:41-59
March 15, 2023
The Bread that I Will Give Is My Flesh
Jesu juva
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Last week Jesus referenced the Old Testament Scripture in which Moses lifted up a serpent on a pole to save the people of Israel from the burning poison of snakes and said it was a picture of His crucifixion. In His Passion sermon today He refers to another, more familiar, passage of the Old Testament. In it the people of Israel, after passing through the Red Sea, complained when they ran out of the unleavened bread they had carried with them from the Passover meal. They had been led by the Lord into the wilderness desert of Sinai, and now there was no food available to them. But when they woke up in the morning, they found bread on the ground. Manna, that the Lord had given them from heaven.
It's hard to see how the gift of bread in the desert is a Passion sermon, a sermon about Jesus’ crucifixion and death.
Nevertheless it was a sermon. For the forty years in which Israel wandered in the desert and in which their bodies fell there, every morning when they arose, there was the gift of bread from heaven on the surface of the desert. It is not possible for a group of three million people to find food in the desert, not enough to sustain all of them. But just as God had done what was impossible and led them through the sea, and also given them victory over the most powerful army in the world by drowning them, so He did the miracle of sustaining His people in the desert with the gift of bread from heaven.
In our text, Jesus had just done a similar miracle. A crowd of five thousand people came to Him in the desert. He asked His disciple Phillip how they were going to feed this crowd. Phillip told Him it was impossible. “Two hundred days’ wages wouldn’t be enough for everyone to get a bite.” Of course, they didn’t have that much money. Then Jesus took the five small barley loaves and two sardines of a young boy, broke the bread, and gave it to His disciples to hand out to the people. Everyone ate as much as they wanted. Picture Jesus miraculously extending the bread, but more importantly, giving it to the people to eat. He gave to them this gift of a full meal so that they would not faint in the desert.
The two miracles were meant to draw the people of Israel to faith. What were they meant to believe? That just as God provided them bread in the desert where it was impossible to get bread, so He would provide them with bread in the desert of their flesh that would sustain them to eternal life.
Our flesh is a desert. “I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh,” says St. Paul. There is no water in a desert, so nothing can grow in it, at least, not the sorts of things you can eat. You can’t eat sagebrush or goat heads. And you can’t grow wheat in a desert without irrigation. Your flesh and mine is a desert. It can’t produce righteousness. So it is devoid of life. Jesus says, “Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood you have no life in you.” That is how our flesh is—a desert, void of life. That’s how you are in the flesh.
But when God gave the Israelites the manna, and when Jesus broke the loaves and fed the crowd, it was a sign of the Gospel, that He was going to give them bread in the desert of their flesh which, when they ate it, they would be filled with eternal life in this dry and weary land of their flesh.
But did the Israelites believe what God was teaching them? No. The fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. They ate the bread with their mouths, but they did not eat spiritually. They didn’t believe the promise. And their children, the Jews of Jesus’ day, were the same way. They ate the loaves and the fish that Jesus gave thanks for, broke, and gave to them. Their stomachs were filled, and they were so impressed that they sought Jesus out so that they could make Him king by force. But they didn’t believe that He was the bread that came down from heaven that a man may eat it and live forever.
So Jesus told them, I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, He will live forever. And then He takes it a step farther: And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.
Jesus is the Son of God in the flesh. Your flesh and mine is a desert, a wilderness, that cannot produce righteousness and as a result has no life in it. But in Jesus there is flesh and blood of the same substance as ours, yet it is filled with life and righteousness. It is not a barren wilderness. It is a fruitful garden, filled with the life of God who in the beginning said, Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, on the earth. And it was so (Gen. 1:11).
God has given us this bread from heaven. True God and man, a righteous man whose flesh is living, whose flesh gives life. He bears fruit in every kind of righteousness, and He is for us, to fulfill the Law for us, that His righteousness might be ours.
But that is not all. Not only has God sent this living bread from heaven, not only has the Father given Him, but He gives this bread to us. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.
How does Jesus give His flesh to give us life in the desert of our flesh? He gives His body to be crucified. As His body is threshed with flails, pierced by thorns, driven through with the nails, baked in the oven of God’s wrath against us, as His blood seeps from His hands and feet, back and head, as it streams from His side, He is giving us the food and drink of eternal life. In the wilderness of our flesh, where there is no righteousness and no life, we eat His crucified body. His body which was full of life, given into death for our offenses. Our flesh, which would otherwise thirst for eternity in hell, has its thirst for righteousness satisfied with the blood of Jesus that was shed for us.
Jesus gave the crowds as much bread as they wanted in the desert. Long before, the Father had given Israel bread in the wilderness. When we see the image of Jesus crucified, whether in preaching or in the art of the church that comes from the Gospel, we are looking upon Jesus’ gift of His body and blood that we may believe, that is, eat and drink, and have righteousness and life in the desert of our flesh.
When we eat Jesus’ body and drink His blood in the Sacrament, it is this spiritual eating by faith that makes it salutary. If we only eat Jesus’ body and drink His blood with our mouths, and not by faith, it does not give us life. But when we look upon the crucifix with our physical eyes or the eyes of our heart, and believe that He was giving His living body into death to give us life, then we are eating His flesh and drinking His blood. We are receiving His life.
Many Lutherans receive as their confirmation verse Jesus’ words from the 15th chapter of John: I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. (John 15:5) Jesus says it again. We are a desert in our flesh. We have no life in us. But if we abide in Jesus and He in us, we bear much fruit. His life-giving body and blood give life to our mortal bodies. We bear the fruits of righteousness and life because His body, which is full of life, abides in us.
He uses the same language in this passion sermon. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. (John 6:56) We feed on Jesus in this desert of our flesh like this. As we live in this desert and see our barrenness, we look upon Him giving His flesh for us on the cross, and we believe that He gave Himself for us, just as He gave bread to the five thousand, just as He gave the manna in the wilderness. They were not supposed to be able to live in the desert, but God miraculously provided the bread.
We see Jesus giving us the miraculous bread to us in the wilderness when we gaze upon the crucifix. He gives His body and blood for us that we may eat and drink it by faith and not die.
When Jesus told the crowd that God gives them the bread from heaven, He who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world, they said, “Sir, give us this bread always.” They didn’t understand what He meant, but we do. He meant His living body, crucified for us. So we say, “Lord, give us this bread always.”
Amen.
The peace of God that passes understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.
Soli Deo Gloria
About the Rev. Karl Hess
Rev. Karl Hess, pastor of St. Peter Evangelical Lutheran Church, has accepted a call to serve at Emmaus Lutheran Church in Redmond, Oregon.
Hess first served as a vicar at St. Peter in the fall of 2004 and returned to Concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne, Indiana August 2005 for his final year. Upon his completion at seminary, St. Peter extended a call to him.