This sermon is from the Rev. Charles G. Dennison sermon archive, part of the “Lord’s Supper” series, and was preached at Grace Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Sewickley, PA, during a worship service on Sunday, November 5, 1995.

Tonight we are reading from John’s Gospel. We are in the sixth chapter. We are at verse 41. Give your attention to the reading of God’s holy word. We are reading from the forty-first verse through verse fifty-nine.

The Jews were grumbling about Jesus because he said, “I am the bread that came down out of heaven.” They were saying, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How does he now say, ‘I have come down out of heaven’?”

Jesus answered and said to them, “Do not grumble among yourselves.”

No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him 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. Not that any man has seen the Father except the one who is from God. He has seen the Father. Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes has eternal life.

I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness and they died. This is the bread which comes down out of heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down out of heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he shall live forever. And the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

The Jews therefore began to argue with one another, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”

Jesus therefore said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in yourselves. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him.”

As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats me will also live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Just as the fathers ate and died, whoever eats this bread will live forever. He said these things while teaching in the synagogue at Capernaum.

For a moment, the thought crossed my mind. Our opposition to this man had a familiar quality. Our murmuring and grumbling reminded me of something from our ancient past, rising from our ancient history. But it was the difference in setting that struck me and caused me to dismiss the thought. This was a synagogue, after all—a synagogue in Capernaum, a settled place in the land of settlement, the land of our permanent inheritance, not the desert where we had lived in tents, moving from place to place. The temporary nature of that desert existence had given way to the settled, abiding life that we now know in this land of inheritance, which we believed was permanent. So yes, for a moment, my murmuring and grumbling about Jesus, who was present in the synagogue with us, brought to mind the murmuring of our forefathers in the desert. But I dismissed the thought immediately.

Certainly, I was justified. Or so it seems to me. For one thing, there was no disagreement among us who were there that day. We were all of one mind. Well, most of us, anyway. For most of us had followed Jesus the day before. From the shore, we had kept his boat in view as he crossed the Sea of Galilee from Capernaum to the territory east of the sea. He had ascended a mountain there, but when he saw us approaching, he descended to us. He came to us to minister. I suppose, to us. We had been following him because of the many wonders he had been doing. We had seen them. We were witnesses to them. Then, in this uncivilized terrain, we witnessed another wonder.

From a boy’s lunch, he fed us all. In this setting, though not at Capernaum at that moment, in this setting, though not in the synagogue at that moment, we had been struck by that note of familiarity. And we thought immediately about Moses and about the marvelous provisions given through him to Israel in the wilderness. And we thought, could this Jesus be the prophet like unto Moses promised to us in the Book of the Law? Could this Jesus be our leader, our Messiah, our King?

But before we could act upon our impulse, Jesus disappeared. He removed himself from us. His close associates, mostly a group of fishermen, had left. We knew that Jesus was not with them. So we stayed through the night, out there in the wilderness, despite the storm that came up and crossed over the Sea of Galilee. We stayed out there in the wilderness, waiting for our King, but he never came. And the next morning, when we could not find him, there, in that uncivilized terrain, we set out for Capernaum ourselves, hoping to find him in this place. And so we did, at the synagogue. But here, despite our readiness to believe, despite the form of faith we already possessed, here in the synagogue our real troubles began.

For after performing these wonders that piqued our interest, Jesus seems to distance himself from those wonders. He makes stinging criticism about our motivations, charging us with craving only food for our stomachs. We tell Him that we wish to please God, to work for God, and we ask Him in good faith, “What shall we do to please God, to work for God?” But after He gives us a cryptic answer about believing in the one that God has sent, we ask Him what He will do to validate Himself and to confirm our trust. And we judge this to be fair. We had already asked Him what we should do. He could have responded to us civilly when we asked Him to do something for us.

What work do You do, Jesus? We thought at the very least He should show us that He has the ability to give us a continual supply of bread, something comparable to what Moses supplied us in the wilderness—a continual supply of bread for our sustenance in this world. Moses, at least, was the one through whom the bread was provided day by day. We had a provision, did we not?

At the very least, Jesus should prove Himself now by providing us with evidence that He can supply us continually with bread for our existence in this life. But it is at this point that Jesus’ remarks become very strange. He began to talk as if there were limitations to Moses and his administration. He began to talk as if Moses’ administration was being superseded and displaced by something that centered in Himself, and as if a superior bread to the manna in the desert was now being made available.

We ask for something of the same kind. He claims He is going to give us something superior. We do not see it. Of course, some of us there leaped at the prospect of such bread. “Evermore, give us this bread.” But He then told us, and here things are stranger still, that He Himself is the bread of life come down out of heaven.

Who can understand such things? He went on to say that in coming down from heaven, He has appeared to do the will of His Father, which is to preserve those whom the Father has given Him and to raise them up on the last day. His language here also seems strange to me, for it appears to be strangely and inappropriately otherworldly and even universal in its implications.

If things are as Jesus seems to indicate, then what becomes of the promise to us and our special place in the economy of God? What becomes of the guarantees to us, through the patriarchs, through Moses himself, about the promise of this land to us? And our distinctiveness as the Jewish people? What becomes of that? It is at this juncture that I grumbled and murmured.

This man, Jesus, takes too much upon Himself, I am convinced of that. How can He be the one who comes down from heaven? We know His parents, His lineage. But at this objection from me and others, His response is that only the work of God the Father enables anyone to understand His truth. It is this one, then, whom God has gifted, He says, whom He will raise up on the last day.

Only this one, or those like this one, He says, know God truly. At this point, He cites Old Testament text as if appealing to Isaiah and particularly to Jeremiah and Jeremiah’s great prophecy about the coming new covenant of God. It would seem that Jesus is saying only those who are prepared to accept His transcendent, heavenly origin truly believe in Him, despite how they might be drawn by signs and wonders, or how intrigued they might be by these things. Only these truly believe in Him. Only these have true faith. Only these have been affectionately drawn by the Heavenly Father. Only these have eternal life.

It is as if he were saying, even if Jesus were to give us bread like that which came through Moses in the wilderness, it would not be enough. Such bread can preserve life only in this world, and only temporarily. Your fathers ate that bread and they died. On the other hand, Jesus said, I am the bread of life, the true bread—that is, the bread of the true, permanent, eternal, and satisfying realm above. To eat this bread, of which I am the person, means you will not die. As if to deliberately provoke me and those with me, we of Jewish lineage and heritage, we who have inherited the practice of avoiding the eating of flesh in our sacrifices—practices associated with pagans and Gentiles—Jesus says, seemingly in our audacity, that the bread he gives for the life of the world is his own flesh.

Now we know that this man is not only wrong and dismissible, he is insane. He is out of his mind. And further, he does not know when to stop. He goes on to add insult upon insult by telling us that we must drink his blood, as well as eat his flesh, if we are to have life in ourselves.

We are astounded. This is in the synagogue, the place for the proper preservation of the law and the commandments of God—the enduring authority of the commandments given through the Old Testament. He has the audacity to say such things. It is as if he sees himself as the culmination of the entire sacrificial system, yet also as one in whom that system is being transcended by requirements and definitions that take us beyond, even contrary to, the law’s prescriptions, such as the eating of flesh and the drinking of blood. These things are prohibited in the law. And there seems to be something else in his words.

It seems, if I am understanding the words of this man, that he is calling us beyond the physical provisions of the offerings themselves—beyond the physical food and drink—to something of a different order altogether. As if, for one moment, my mind sees something there, faintly, as if his use of the terms flesh and blood is in the context of this different order of thought and religious reality. But upon further reflection, I am convinced that the different order in the mind of Jesus—the different order to which the flesh and blood point—is not a postulation of madness.

What about you? Does the different order to which Jesus’ words beckon—this world of supposed madness, as seen by a Jewish audience—appear to you as utterly sane and spiritual, in the highest sense? Do you believe that Jesus had a pre-world existence with his Father in heaven? That he came from heaven to fulfill and to displace the old Jewish covenant, that his flesh and blood point us to a higher world beyond any sacramental element, and to a higher order in which we participate in the spiritual significance of the flesh and blood of this individual?

If that is what you believe, then you are as mad as he. Of course, it could be that neither he nor you are mad, but right. And that my murmuring, my grumbling, is just one more instance in which an Israelite has grumbled at God’s provision, and at the One whom God has sent to supply that provision. And if that is the case, then things are indeed desperate for me. Because I sense, if these things are true, then what I am observing in Christ and hearing from him is God’s final call. But again, this is but a fleeting thought, and I dismiss it.

Our great God, we acknowledge that our hearts go out to your ancient people. We would confess with the Apostle Paul that our heart’s desire is for their salvation. If we ask our Father, even at this late hour, that through the ministry of your Spirit, by the word of the gospel, and even by the testimony of the sacraments, you would be pleased to open their eyes and hearts to the message of truth.

We know, our God, that physical Israel is in anguish today. There is distress in the streets and in the cities of Israel, the nation. We know, our God, that these people are also scattered throughout the earth. But we ask you, Father, that it would please you to save many, that the darkness would end for them, that their confidence in the old system would fade, that the veil would be removed, and that the light of Jesus Christ would shine upon them. Convict them of a better inheritance, of a better mediator, of a better entrance into glory, in which their boast is in you and in you alone, through Jesus Christ, the King. And benefit us, our God, yes, as we profit from the scriptures of the Old Testament. But also, Lord, as we are instructed by your word through Christ, teach us how to pray and how to speak, so that the nations of the earth might see. We pray this, yes, in the interests of physical Israel, but also, Lord, in the interests of all the nations of the earth, that there would appear for your church and by your Spirit the one new man in Christ, in whom there is neither Greek nor Jew. Prepare us now for our participation in the sacrament, that the spiritual meaning of it all would make sense to us, and we would affirm your wisdom. We would affirm your glory.

The sermon text provided above is derived from the sermon audio recording making use of generative tools. It has not been manually edited. While transcription tools have a high degree of accuracy, the output may include generative textual, punctuation, and/or formatting errors.