For a hungry heart - John 6:50-55

   All humans experience hunger.  Yet lingering hunger for any person who does not have enough to eat is a tragedy.  Back during the early summer of 2005 I was unemployed after a tough period of time where I was spending much time my grandma who was in a nursing home.  Being in such a poor financial situation I was drastically short on food.  I normally have milk every morning for breakfast, yet I went several weeks without drinking milk.  Seriously, I could feel something lacking in my body.  No one else could probably tell, yet physically I was lacking.  I do add the good ending to this story; at a genuine hour of need I was given a part-time temp job which turned out to be a great job which I successfully worked for over one year, and which enhanced my volunteer ministry work during that period.
   To be honest, I do not know why God allows so much suffering for so many people, such as children who do not have enough to eat.  And I do not know why even some sincere followers of Jesus do not have enough food.  I do know food shortage started as a consequence of the disobedience to God of Adam and Eve and continues because of the sins of some people.
   I talked in my previous writing of Jesus offering living water and of how Scripture reveals living water is a metaphor for the Holy Spirit.  An invitation to the hungry is also given by Jesus, an offer of living bread.  “I am the living bread that came down from heaven….” (John 6:51 NIV).  What is this living bread?  Here in John 6, Jesus teaches “living bread” is a metaphor for Himself!  And again it involves His true love for your heart.
   When it comes to me visualizing drinking living water, the Holy Spirit, for me personally this seems rather natural.  Yet with the subject of living bread, Jesus starts to talk about eating flesh and drinking blood.
   “‘But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which a man may eat and not die.  I am the living bread that came down from heaven.  If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever.  This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.’  Then the Jews began to argue sharply among themselves, ‘How can this man give us his flesh to eat?’  Jesus said to them, ‘…I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.  Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.  For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink’” (John 6:50-55 NIV).
   Just as living water was a spiritual metaphor, the living bread offered by Jesus, which is Himself, likewise is a spiritual reality (see John 6:63).  Jesus was God incarnate, meaning God in the flesh (see Matthew 1:23).  Yet He is still fully God.
   My ‘Introduction to Theology’ class with Professor Matt Jones at Colorado Christian University was a super class because Professor Jones is a cool, caring, and gifted professor.  One of the basic premises of “orthodox” theology in “Christology,” the theology of Jesus, is that He is fully God and also was fully human.  With all due respect to my Roman Catholic and Lutheran brothers and sisters in Christ who advocate transubstantiation and consubstantiation, Jesus was not speaking here on physical terms.  He was speaking on spiritual terms.  He was giving a metaphor to a spiritual feeding.  There is a need to feed on Him in our hearts, the only One who can sustain a person eternally.
   Heaven is a key focus for Jesus.  His parables often start off, “The kingdom of heaven is like…..”  In the “Lord’s Prayer,” which Jesus gave for us as a focus for our prayers, heaven is key in the first sentence.  The manner of heaven is the sole model for the way things should be on earth.  And as recorded in John 6, as a physical man on earth teaching at a synagogue in Capernaum (John 6:59), Jesus clearly teaches He came from heaven, and in a spiritual manner, He offers Himself to people.  And that spiritual feeding is done by many Christians in corporate worship as we partake of the Lord’s Supper, receiving the bread and the fruit of the vine which symbolize the body and blood of Jesus.
   And the Lord’s Supper is a reminder there was a physical aspect to the offering of Jesus.  The One who offers living bread to all people, even today, is the One who made the sacrifice on the cross of His body and blood.  Jesus Christ died on a cross for the forgiveness of sins of anyone.  He physically and spiritually died; the physical body of God incarnate was lifeless as it was taken off of the cross.  Yet that leaves one more huge question for me.  Why would living bread from heaven die?  Seems contradictory that the One who offers eternal life physically and spiritually died Himself.  The fact is Jesus chose to die as the substitute for people who were going to spiritually die in hell because of our sins.  Jesus’ death was the mercy we needed to be saved from spiritual death!  Jesus, who was from heaven, died on a cross, and then was physically and spiritually resurrected three days later.  Thanks to the mercy and grace of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, eternal life is available for you and me.  It is offered to every single human being.  Jesus said, “This is the bread that came down from heaven.  Your forefathers ate manna and died, but he who feeds on this bread will live forever” (John 6:58 NIV).  Amen.
Hunter Irvine