To Be Fed By God

The Rev. Dr. Ruthanna B. Hooke, Professor of Homiletics, Virginia Theological Seminary

Proper 13: 2 Samuel 11:26-12:13a; Psalm 51:1-13; Ephesians 4:1-16; John 6:24-35

August 4, 2024

I have a dog who is what dog trainers call “food-motivated.” I gather that not all dogs are like this—I have friends who have a dog who, when they put food down for her, will eat a few bites and then walk away. Not our dog—when we put her food down, she eats it in approximately 15 seconds and then looks up at us, expectantly, as if to say: “is there any more?” 

Whether or not all dogs are food-motivated, I’d venture to say that all of us humans are, at one level or another, food-motivated. We are hungry beings. We are bodies that need to be fed, and this is why Jesus meets us through giving us food and drink. This is why the only one of Jesus’ miracles to be recounted in all four Gospels (and twice in Mark and Matthew) is the feeding of the multitudes. This is also why the feeding of the 5000 in John’s Gospel unfolds into Jesus’ longest discourse in John, and also, in the church’s lectionary, is spread over five weeks. We began hearing the story last week, and the implications of this miraculous feeding continue to unfold, in our Gospel readings, this week and for the next three weeks after that—because this feeding story speaks to our most basic physical need.

  The crowd following Jesus is hungry, and so Jesus meets them in that place of primal need, by feeding them, miraculously and abundantly, giving them “as much as they want.” One commentator points out that most of this crowd would have been very poor peasants, living on the edge of hunger at all times, and so to have “as much as they want” would have been a rare experience for them. No wonder they exclaim over the miracle that has been done, and say that Jesus is a prophet, and they want to make him king. And no wonder that, when he withdraws from them, they follow him across the Sea of Galilee. After all, they are food-motivated, and, on one level, quite rightly so. Jesus names this when they catch up with him, saying: “you are looking for me not because you saw signs but because you ate your fill of the loaves.” Jesus accuses them of following him for the wrong reason, but he does not stop with this criticism. Instead, he uses their hunger, their food motivation, to teach them and to lead them deeper. He has fed them with the loaves not only out of compassion for their physical hunger, but to tell them that what they are really hungry for is something beyond food: “Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life.”

What is it that we hunger for? Certainly we hunger for food, for water, for shelter, for clothing. These are our most basic needs. Beyond this, we hunger for love, for friendship, and for purpose, for a sense that our lives have meaning. But our hunger goes deeper than this, for most fundamentally what we long for is God, because that is how God the Creator made us. St. Augustine puts it best: “God, thou hast made us for thyself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.” We are made for relationship with God, to love God with our whole heart and soul and mind and strength, and in the end, nothing else will satisfy us but God. This is why Jesus meets the crowd’s physical hunger so as to point them toward this deeper hunger, urging them to work for the food that endures for eternal life, the true food that God gives them from heaven. “For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” Even without fully understanding him, the crowd seems to realize that this bread is what they have been seeking all along, and it was this bread that made them get in boats and go looking for Jesus across the sea, for they say, “Sir, give us this bread always.” They recognize a spiritual longing in themselves that goes deeper even than physical hunger.

Where is our hunger for God to be filled? Jesus’ next words provide the answer: “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” It is not only that Jesus is the giver of bread; he IS the bread. He IS the one in whom our deepest hungers are satisfied. He is all of this because he is the divine Word made flesh, he is God incarnate, as we are told right at the beginning of John’s Gospel. What we long for most profoundly is God, and that longing is satisfied by God coming among us, dwelling among us as one of us in Jesus Christ, Immanuel (God with us). 

We might think we have to DO Something to find this bread of life. The crowd asks: “What must we do to perform the works of God?” We often think that we have to work so hard to solve our problems, to meet our needs, to fill the emptiness within. We can drive ourselves so hard to do all of this, but Jesus says, the work you need to do is simply to believe in me. When it comes to our deepest need, which is for God, meeting this need is not about our working really hard and proving ourselves worthy of that love. It is more about receiving, allowing ourselves to be fed, letting go into God’s presence, which in Christ is so very near us.

If we find it hard to locate this bread of life, this presence of God in our lives, it can be helpful to look back to see God’s presence in our past. The crowd remembered the manna Moses gave their ancestors in the wilderness, and then Jesus tells them, that wasn’t Moses who gave you the bread, it was God. As we were living through our days we may not have been able to perceive how God was with us and providing for us, but as we look back, through the eyes of faith and with Jesus’ guidance, we can see that God’s provision, God’s nourishment and love, were with us all along, that truly, “twas grace that brought us safe thus far.”

And finally, if we seek the bread from heaven that gives life to us and to the world, we don’t need to look any further than this table, to which we come every Sunday, to this meal that is the center of our lives as Christians. This meal offers us Christ’s very presence and invites us take it into ourselves. In this most intimate act we become one with him, so that he may abide in us and we in him. Just as Jesus did with the crowd by the Sea of Galilee, so with us, he meets us in a meal because we are hungry, we are food-motivated. But it is through this feeding that we come to know our spiritual hunger and have it satisfied. That is why the Eucharist is only a morsel of bread and a sip of wine, to remind us that our physical hunger is only a sign of a deeper need, a need for God, and that only God incarnate among us can meet that need. 

It is through the very ordinariness of this meal that Jesus teaches us to seek him in our ordinary lives, in our everyday meals, our relationships, our joys and sufferings, because he is there, in the midst of all of this, longing to feed us with the bread of heaven. Once we allow ourselves to be fed by him, we are able to be his people in the world. We are able to bring nourishment to a desperately hungry world. We are able to love one another because he first loved us, because he has fed us with the bread of life. 

“Lord, give us this bread always.”