Not a Cosmic Vending Machine

'The next day, when the people who remained after the feeding of the five thousand saw that neither Jesus nor his disciples were there, they themselves got into the boats and went to Capernaum looking for Jesus.

When they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him, “Rabbi, when did you come here?” Jesus answered them, “Very truly, I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For it is on him that God the Father has set his seal.” 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.”'

--John 6: 24-35

Following the miraculous Feeding of the Multitude from last week, we enter a section of the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John that we call the Bread of Life Discourse.  We can’t really begin to talk about the Bread of Life, though, without recapping where we were a week ago.  Through the faith of a young boy who offers his five loaves and two fish Jesus manages to feed a crowd of 5000 people out in the desert.  You might think that Jesus would take a moment to bask in the accomplishment, but if you remember last week’s Gospel, he heads to the other side of the sea under the cover of darkness and does so by walking on the water—I guess grabbing a boat would have drawn attention.  He does the deed, and then he moves on.  Our modern, celebrity-obsessed culture would not take so kindly to Jesus’ insistence on being so discreet!  

Not that much has changed, as that crowd was also rather obsessed with this particular celebrity in their own day, and so they chase after him, eventually catching up to Jesus on the other side of the sea in the town of Capernaum, which is where we pick up the story today.  Picture, if you will, that you are part of that crowd.  You have just witnessed something that is beyond explanation.  Each and everyday you and your family and friends experience real, painful hunger, and you have just seen a man feed more people than the population of Capernaum itself!  How might you react to him?  Would you try to get him to come back and stay in your town across the sea?  Like, forever, so that he can make sure you and your family never go without food ever again?  Would you try to get him to help with other problems in your life—a sick parent or lack of income?  Or perhaps overthrow the local politician and establish a better government?  If you find yourself agreeing with this questions then you have an idea of what is going on for that crowd when they finally catch up to Jesus.

When they find Jesus, the first thing they ask is:  “When did you come here?”  In other words, "When did you leave us?"  They’re persistent in tracking Jesus down, having tried the day before to make him king after he looked like he could be a perpetual food supplier.  Yet their persistence is misplaced, even self-serving, and Jesus knows that and calls them out on it.  They are preoccupied with the literal loaves and fish, the food that has just perished, and they’re looking for Jesus for all the wrong reasons.  Their primary motivation for going across the sea to find him is that they want him to do for them exactly what they want, and what they want is more bread for their hunger.  They want Jesus the Cosmic Vending Machine!  But Jesus points out to them that while satisfying their physical hunger is important—after all, he did feed all of them—they must not let that be their driving force.  The desire to satisfy an earthly need, even one as basic as hunger, should not be what compels a person to seek out Jesus. For this crowd, however, the appetites of this world, the desire to get more and more of those things that wither away, motivates their actions, and if they can get Jesus to do some more miracles he can satisfy all of those needs.  Show us some more miracles, Jesus, and fix all of our problems for us!  And while Jesus’ miracles are extraordinary deeds that rectify the situations of those in need, the results are not lasting unless the miracles are also perceived as signs pointing to something deeper and longer lasting than the satisfaction of earthly needs.  Much more so than the physical, Jesus is here to satisfy their spiritual hunger and show them the works of God.

NOT how Jesus works!

OK, they can get behind that.  So what must we do, they ask, to perform those works?  Again, their concern is surface level, it’s self-serving.  They only want to know how to perform the works of God in order to please Jesus, hoping that he will then do for them whatever they wish.  They are like modern church-goers who just want the preacher to tell them what to do so that they can make Jesus happy in order to get their Get Out of Hell Free Card, again treating Jesus like that Cosmic Vending Machine that’s there just to satisfy them. However, instead of giving them an explicit thing to do Jesus tells them that performing the works of God means believing in him; that is, paying attention to him, emulating his actions, and listening to his words.  If they can allow God through Jesus to break down their misconceptions of how the whole of existence functions, then they will be performing the works of God.  

This is where the crowd gets anxious.  Their hunger has returned, and it's clear Jesus is not going to just give them what they want.  So they ask what they must do to perform God's works, hoping if they do those things he will give them the thing for which they ask.  He tells them to believe in him.  Fine!  What signs, they ask, can Jesus give them so that they may believe??  Seriously?  Were they not just paying attention?!  He just fed 5000 people!!  But that’s the power of their earthly hunger, the power of the Gospel of scarcity that they have preached to themselves.  So they resort to Scripture, telling Jesus that Moses, after all, fed the people everyday with manna, gave them just enough to survive, so surely, Jesus can do that, can’t he?!  Jesus once again doesn't bite and instead puts on his biblical scholar’s hat and reinterprets this passage that they have obviously taken out of context. Jesus points out that Moses didn’t give it to them, God did, and what’s more, Jesus intentionally changes the tense of the verb from ‘gave’ to ‘gives,’ reflecting to them that God is a present reality, still giving freely and without limit.  God still satisfies the needs of every living creature, but the hunger that they need to be satisfied is deeper than that, so God has given them Jesus himself to be their bread.  By the end of today’s passage any ambiguity is gone:  Jesus is not like bread, Jesus IS the Bread of Life, the one who can satisfy their deepest hunger.  But they remain confused, which is why our Sunday lectionary stays with the Bread of Life discourse for the next four weeks!

We might look at this exchange between Jesus and the crowd, and through the lens of time and with hindsight wonder how they didn’t believe him.  But that’s how strong their earthly hunger was and how loud they preached the Gospel of scarcity.  To be fair, those same hungers are felt, and that same Gospel is preached today. The world dangles all sorts of things at us, taunting us, telling us that we NEED this or that in order to survive, and if we don't get more and more we will run out and ultimately die.  We become like a kitten pawing after a piece of yarn, but even if we catch the whole ball, it will eventually unravel, and then what are we left with?  Nothing!  That's when our temporal appetites become so insatiable that we get desperate to satisfy them—with physical food (like the folks in the Gospel today), with money, with drugs, alcohol, and lust.  Give us these remedies, and all will be well, and we will be satisfied!  

What we forget is that the longing we feel is not shaped like any of those things, but rather it is shaped like God.  Augustine of Hippo, himself a sufferer of earthly physical hunger, tried to satisfy himself with one of those aforementioned remedies:  lust.  He came back to it over and over again, famously praying once, "Lord, save me from temptation, but not yet!"  Eventually, though, he found himself literally face down in the mud and came to realize that only God could fill the void in his being.  The crowd that day in Capernaum wanted Jesus to do something for them, to fill their void with whatever they asked, but Jesus doesn’t play that game.  He is NOT a Cosmic Vending Machine that we come to from time to time to get a snack that will satisfy us.  He doesn't do what we want so long as we punch in the right code!  What he offers is deeper than that, it is a relationship that truly does save us.  He is the Bread not of mere sustenance, but the Bread of Life.  Such Bread saves us from the lies that our consumerist culture tells us, that we NEED this or that to make our lives meaningful, and it saves us from that Gospel of scarcity that says we need more and more.  It saves us from believing that our salvation lies in anything out there except our all loving, all knowing, and all powerful God!  We are no different, brothers and sisters, than that crowd who wanted Jesus to stay with them just so he could feed them bread and fish everyday because they thought that’s what would satisfy them, what they needed, in spite of the fact that what would really satisfy them was standing right in front of them.

Augstine of Hippo, a man who knew earthly hunger very well.

But while our earthly appetites rage, he is still standing there in front of us, inviting us into relationship with him.  No, the remedy he offers will not satisfy us the way those other things will.  His remedy, his very self, unlike those others, is not a quick fix, but a life-long, life-changing experience.  At the Eucharistic table we meet him in bread and wine made holy, and we mortals taste the bread of angels.  That table prepares us to meet him in the world, and with every day and every person we meet the opportunity is there to re-enter into that experience with him.  As you head into the rat race of your day-to-day lives this week, into that consumerist culture that will preach that scarcity Gospel, may you see him inviting you into that relationship, that experience, in the face of the poor, in the laugh of a child, in the beauty of creation, and in that moment may you taste the Bread of Life and know that every hunger that you have ever known can and will be filled by him, and may you be satisfied.