Shouts of "Amen!" were quacked throughout the duck congregation. And at the end of the service, the ducks left commenting on what a good message it had been, and they waddled back home. But they never flew.
In the gospel today Jesus began to lay claims to his standing with the first of his ‘I AM’ sayings recorded in John’s gospel. He said, ‘I AM THE BREAD OF LIFE’(John
In these statements Jesus is outlining very clearly that he has to be taken seriously – It was these statements that led C S Lewis to state that "A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic - on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg - or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse…. let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."
Bread has, for as long as it has been made, been a staple part of a person’s diet – in some of the most basic conditions, bread and water have been the things that have been required to keep a person going. So Jesus is here making the claim that without him we cannot survive, there is, in fact, no life.
By the way, did you hear the joke about the new restaurant on the moon? It has great food, but no atmosphere.
People live without Jesus, and many live lives which seem happy and full, so what in fact is Jesus offering that will make a difference ? To try and answer that I think we need to think about what we consider as our bread, in other words what we consider to be important in our lives.
Firstly I want to think about the Church. Hopefully for those of us gathered here today the Church will be important, both as a building in this place, and as the wider family of God. In Church we become part of a fellowship offering praise and worship to God, offering up prayers together for ourselves and for those in need, offering prayers of thanks for all the good things we have in our lives, and so on. We receive support from one another, and hopefully just enjoy the time we spend together.
Many people say going to Church isn’t an essential part of being a Christian, and in many ways that is true, but going to Church makes the Christian life much easier, because it is there that we can be part of the family that God intends us to be part of, it is there that we can be honest and open with God and with other people about our fears, our insecurities, our doubts… It is there that we can receive the support and friendship of people, and seek their prayers and their advice…. And it is there that we can receive the boost and encouragement to go out and live as Christians in a very sceptical world.
So Church is a kind of bread for us – important for our lives. But there is a danger that we can forget what is really important about Church, and get hung up on doing the right thing there, on saying the right words, on particular prayers and symbols, on the clothes we wear, on the actions that we perform, on tradition and so on – none of these are essential to Church, none of these count as bread.
And if we’re not careful at times these can actually stop us from getting at the bread – these can get in the way of our relationship with God.
And then I want to think about comfort and material things. However well off we are or are not in this country, we are extremely well off when we are compared with most of the people in the world… We are used to living in comfort, we are used to having basically what we want, and that is usually far above what we ever need.
But we would now consider some of these things to be essential. We would consider them to be part of our daily needs. Again, like some of the trappings that we have in Church, there is nothing really wrong with having things, as long as we are not bound by them. I read recently about a Christian worker who had taken communion to a small
Small bits of bread, representing the body of Jesus, were actually helping to feed these people literally. As we use the bread as a symbol of the body of Christ, these people were using it as ordinary food as well – being fed by Christ for them was literal.
When we look at what we have and what we don’t have – the column for what we have will massively outstrip that one for things we don’t have, but have we got what is really important – time and time again we say money can’t buy happiness, and it is not money that can buy the most precious and life sustaining, life saving, bread of all – a relationship with Jesus.
And for some status may be what is important. It’s always good as a Priest to get put down occasionally because we’re often treated with a respect that we don’t actually deserve. We’re often put up onto a pedestal which can actually make us believe we are something special. For others it may be a position in the community, or in government – status can be what we regard as important in our lives, but at the end of those lives status will be wiped away – we will be stripped before God of everything we have had and been in our earthly lives, and God will see only the real person.
There was a man one day who ran the hospital cricket team, and he was returning some borrowed equipment to it’s owner. This happened to be a cricket bat – As he walked down the corridor to find the surgeon who was the owner of the bat he passed several patients and their families, in a surgical room waiting area, and one of the men commented to his wife who was awaiting a minor operation, "Look, here comes your anaesthetist."
Jesus knows the real person inside us – he knows what we are, what we have been, what we do – he knows about our relationship with him, and whatever that relationship is or has been, he wants to get closer to us – he wants to be the person who we rely on totally in our lives. ‘I am the bread of life’ is a statement that is calling us to come closer to him, and eat of that true life changing bread.
The story is told of a minister who was disturbed to see a rather scruffy man going into the Church at noon each day and then coming out again after just a couple of minutes. The minister asked the caretaker to keep an eye on him, because after all there were valuable things inside the building.
And so one day the caretaker asked the man what he was doing, and the man replied that he was going in to pray. The caretaker scoffed at this thought saying that the man was never in there long enough to pray, and the man replied, ‘I can’t pray a long prayer, I haven’t got the right words, but I go in and I say, ‘Jesus, it’s Jim.’ And then I wait a minute and come away. It’s just a little prayer but I guess he hears me.’
A little time later Jim was injured and was taken to hospital, where he had a wonderful influence on the ward. Grumbling patients became cheerful and often there would be great laughter in the ward. And one of the nurses asked Jim why he was always so happy and he said, ‘you see sister, it’s my visitor, he always makes me happy.’
‘Your visitor’ she replied. ‘Yes’ Jim said, ‘every day at noon Jesus comes stands at the foot of my bed and says, ‘Jim, it’s Jesus’, and he smiles and he goes.’
Jesus, in his I AM sayings is calling us to take him seriously, and he is calling us to come close to him – and the closer we allow him to come to us, the closer we will feel him. AMEN
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