A Sermon preached at a Service of the Word on 4th August 2024 at All Saints Church, Penarth

Exodus 16:2-4, 9-15; John 6:24-35

https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=590361917

Manna from heaven; Bread of Heaven. Actually we’re not singing that hymn today. But apart from that, what are we to make of these lovely stories? 

When the people of Israel have escaped from Egypt, they are languishing in the wilderness, and moaning about it to Moses and Aaron; God sends manna from heaven, heavenly bread, and quails, bizarrely. The Lord seems to have gone for a Michelin-star menu – I mean, have you ever had quail at McDonald’s? – and indeed, we are not quite sure what the manna was. it’s been pointed out that ‘man hu’, the (transliterated) word in the original Hebrew, is almost a translation of “what is it?”, or it could be the fruit of the tamarind tree. Anyway, it was something that they could eat and it kept them going. 

In the New Testament, in the lead-up to the story which we have just heard from St John’s Gospel, the crowd, who had just had a massive meal, courtesy of the five loaves and two fishes, followed him round to the other side of the lake, and Jesus challenged them about why they had been following him around. 

Actually, that’s roughly the same question that’s behind the story about the manna and the quails in the Old Testament. The question is why? What is it all about? In the Old Testament, the Lord said that he had given the Israelites the food: ‘at twilight you shall eat meat and in the morning, you shall have your fill of bread’, because ‘then you should know that I am the Lord your God.’ In other words, the good things that had happened to the Israelites, escaping from Egypt, and getting fed when they were stuck in the desert, weren’t down to anything they had done, or because of the leadership of Moses and Aaron, but they were as a result of God’s care for them. God had given it to them. And they should recognise that. ‘All good gifts around us, are sent from heaven above’ as the hymn puts it.

It’s essentially the same message that Jesus gives to the people who followed him round to the other side of the lake. He says, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, miracles, of some kind, but because you had a big meal: you ‘ate your fill of the loaves’(and the fishes, actually, as well.) He says, don’t work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life. If you put yourself in their position, I think you might be a bit stuck at that point. What is this miraculous stuff that you can eat, and it will give you eternal life? Jesus was going to tell them, but first they said, how can we know that what you are telling us is true? Can you give us some kind of proof, some miraculous sign? And they referred back to the story in the book of Exodus. ‘Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness.  As it is written,  ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’ 

They were on the same page at this stage. Jesus was saying that this was the right bread, it was what comes from heaven, and they said, yes, we want some of that. But Jesus was correcting them a little bit about how it had come about. It wasn’t down to Moses, but it was direct from God. And they said, give us this bread always, that is the stuff we want. 

At which point, the miracles and the Michelin star come together, because Jesus says that he is the bread of life. ‘Whoever comes to me will never be hungry. Whoever believes in me will never be thirsty’. In other words, you should eat up Jesus, have a meal of Jesus. That’s what we are doing symbolically in the holy communion. ‘Feed on him in your heart by faith.’ When you eat the bread and drink the wine, you are symbolically eating Jesus. 

Some of the historians at the time of Jesus who weren’t Christians, for example Tacitus, in his account of the burning down of Rome, mentioned that the emperor Nero had made up a story that the fire had been started by Christians, who, according to Tacitus, were extremely depraved.

It seems that one of the elements of that depravity was that people mistook the idea of Holy Communion for a kind of cannibalism. As you know, if you are a Roman Catholic, or an Anglican of the catholic persuasion, you believe that at the time you have the bread and the wine in holy communion, it changes from being bread and wine actually to become, in a miraculous way, the body and blood of Jesus. It’s called transubstantiation. Whether transubstantiation literally happens is a discussion which has been going on since the Reformation, since the time of Martin Luther in the 1500s, so I don’t expect that you will want me to go into it that deeply this morning.

You can see, however, that it could be that people might misunderstand things and worry that we Christians are, in fact, some kind of cannibals. But especially, if you follow Flanders and Swann,[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjAHw2DEBgw] you will know that ‘eating people is wrong’, and therefore, when Jesus talks about being the bread of life, ‘I am the bread of life’, he is not talking literally. What does it mean? 

Maybe there is another idea which can help to shed light on this in Saint Paul’s letters. He talks about people being ‘in Christ’. It’s an expression which occurs in St Paul’s letters over 150 times. Being ‘in Christ’, ‘in the Lord’, or ‘in him’. What does it mean? It means to be involved with Christ, to have Christ in you, to be a Christian. It’s a spiritual thing as much as a practical thing. We understand God in three ways, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We are talking about Jesus the Son here, but in a sense also talking about the other side to God, the Holy Spirit, because God’s power, our involvement with God, comes through the Holy Spirit. it is the Spirit in us that makes us Christians. When we believe in, when we trust in the Lord, his spirit is in us. 

The Lord is here: his spirit is with us. I’m not sure about the quails.