Satisfaction

Rev. Rob Jones

August 11, 22024

John 6:35, 41-51 NRSVue

35 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.”

41 Then the Jews began to complain about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” 42 They were saying, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” 43 Jesus answered them, “Do not complain among yourselves. 44 No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me; and I will raise that person up on the last day. 45 It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. 46 Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father. 47 Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life. 48 I am the bread of life. 49 Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. 50 This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. 51 I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

Pain, heartache, hunger, and thirst are words that writers and poets use to describe the sufferings some face in life. In my younger days, I heard a lot about what sociologists and psychologists call teenage angst. Anyone who can remember being a teenager or has had kids old enough understands what I’m talking about. Angst is defined as the argumentative, over-emotional, often sullen behavior teenagers portray as they learn to deal with emotions, hormones, and life while growing into adults. Most people experience this to some extent in one form or another. If we are lucky, we “grow out of it” without incident, aside from a few poorly written poems, interesting hairstyles, and the lingering effects of a first crush. I can remember my angst-driven years vaguely, although they are probably more romanticized in hindsight than I would like to admit. I was very well cared for as a child. My parents were tough but fair, allowed me to “find” and “define” myself, and when I got overwhelmed, scared, or just plain tired, they offered me shelter in a familiar place called home.

Many blame Baby Boomers, saying they were the first to experience this phenomenon, but in fact, the idea of rebelling against one’s parents is littered in pop-culture history. Some examples might be Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, Peter Pan, Romeo and Juliet, and even The Wizard of Oz. Phycologist G. Stanley Hall coined the term Adolescence in his 1904 book of the same name. defining it as the “elongated hiatus between childhood and adulthood.” (II) I admit, however, that as our modern world makes life seem more and more “comfortable” with luxuries not afforded to our grandparents and great-grandparents, the adolescent years seem to grow longer and longer. For my son’s generation, the expectation is that they should be old enough to be self-sufficient by the age of 26. For my generation, it was 18; for my parents, by the age of 16, and for my grandparents, it was 15. I am not insinuating, just observing a trend.

I could attribute modern adolescent behavior to social media like many people do. Still, the arguments made by our top commentators, claiming that “social media makes young people lazy,” seem like repackaging old arguments for things that they, and frankly, I, don’t completely comprehend. After all, we all have claimed life was more challenging for us back then, right? At least more so than it is now for our kids. However, in the 14th century, a Benedictine Abbot named Johannes Trithemius wrote that the printing press would make monks lazy because they would no longer have to hand-copy bibles in order to produce them for study (III), and in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it was said that the internet would do the same to my generation because we would not read paper books. “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?”

My point in all this is that we are missing something important when we compare our lives to history, and especially when we compare our history to the lives of the next generation. There always seems to be something missing… a hunger that can’t be satiated, pain that can’t be subsided, heartache that lingers for far too long. The problem I find when I look at these situations as they are presented is the same one I nostalgically remember facing as a child. The pain, heartache, and the hunger are manufactured. In our heads, we make our journeys harder than they were, and we remember decisions as more dramatic, all in an effort to justify the angst we felt growing up. We try to give it meaning and reason.

This may not be the case for you, but I have come to realize that I have never felt true hunger, actual pain from an unforgiving world because I was blessed to be born in this country and raised by at least one responsible parent. I also understand that my story is ordinary for life in middle-class America. The same can be said for almost everyone in my congregation because, statistically, they, too, have had a somewhat comfortable life. However, the life that Christ experienced, as well as those he is speaking to, was much different from the world today. Even if I have never experienced it, most people have known actual pain, heartache, hunger, and thirst. They have gone by many names such as other, least of these, slave, or servant. Sometimes, we call them people of color, the poor, or urban. Unfortunately, the situations stay the same, even when the names change.

Our modern issues stem from the fact that most working- and middle-class Americans never experience something like food scarcity or its resulting physical weakening. In most places, not considered “first-world,” in an average day, a single meal is consumed by the typical person, while 10,000 more individuals perish due to lack of food. In America today, 44 million people are food insecure. 13 million are children, and 100% of US counties, that’s in all 50 states, have someone who is food insecure. (IV)Historically and right now, hunger is distressing! I remember the ads on television of the starving children in Africa when I was a child, but they didn’t seem real. Like the adventures of the Lone Ranger, Captain Kirk, or Detective Joe Friday, it was all too far removed from my everyday life to have any real effect. I could not appreciate what those children were living every day. However, Mom was quick to tell me that I needed to clean my plate because “There are starving kids in Africa who would kill for steamed broccoli.”

Looking at the situation in John, we see Jesus continuing his teachings about the Bread from Heaven because physical hunger for food was an assumed experience during 2nd Temple Jerusalem, no matter who you were outside of royalty. Hunger was a shared experience, and it is within this universally understood context that Jesus delivered the controversial statement, “I am the bread of life.” This assertion was undoubtedly attention-grabbing. Jesus knew it would be, and the reaction by some was akin to the actions we take to justify ourselves when we think about the kids of today. “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” Jealousy is like a hunger that cannot be satiated. They tried to tear Jesus down so they could feel better about themselves, but Jesus dismissed them out of hand because he knew that not all would believe, not all would seek, and not all would submit to the will of God.

“Do not complain among yourselves. No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me; and I will raise that person up on the last day. It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me.” Jesus gives them a wake-up call, telling them that complaining is useless. It does them no good to try and bring Him down to their level. It will not work, and it doesn’t matter anyway; God the Father draws those who believe toward Jesus, and if God does not draw you to Jesus, then, well, the future looks as bad for you as you say your childhood was. This passage should be a wake-up call for them, and it should be an actual one for us as well!

Are you drawn to Jesus? Do you seek a relationship with him? Or do you stand around and tell everyone about how bad it was when you were a kid? God does not look back, and neither should we. Isaiah 43:25 tells us, “I[God], I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins.” And, again, it is repeated in Hebrews 8:12, “For I will be merciful toward their iniquities, and I will remember their sins no more.” It does not matter how Jesus came to be among us, which is the question they asked. What matters is that he came to be among us, to save us. God doesn’t look back, and neither should we. (V)

What Jesus offered those he was teaching, what he provided us on the cross as the Bread from Heaven, is true fulfillment in the sight of God. Never go hungry, never be thirsty; in other words, true satisfaction. God will satisfy our hunger, our thirst, and our emptiness. God will comfort us and bind us to Him. No matter what we have done, no matter what the past holds, no matter how you came to be before the Lord. If you have not felt the call to go to the foot of the cross and seek forgiveness, ask yourself why. There is nothing you can do, nothing that has ever happened, no decision, no choice, no crime that Jesus can not forgive. We must only be willing to come, repent, believe, and be filled with the Spirit. God will feed you the Bread of Heaven, and you will be satiated, you will be fulfilled, you will be satisfied. Will you let the Father draw you to the Son?

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. AMEN.

Works Cited:

II. Hall, G. Stanley. Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education. 1904. D. Appleton and Company, 1904.

III. “Johannes Trithemius.” Wikipedia, 30 Dec. 2022, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Trithemius.

IV. “Hunger in America.” Feeding America. Accessed August 9, 2024. https://www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america.

V. Kimbrel, Joanna. “Does God Forget Our Sins?” The Gospel Coalition, 6 Jan. 2022, www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/god-forget-sins/.

Douglas Presbyterian Church

Satisfaction

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