John 6:24-35
James R. Gorman
August 6, 2000
An acquaintance of mine tells the story of walking home from the grocery store with his mother. His mother was holding his hand with one of hers and her other arm was wrapped around a bag of groceries. Out of the top of the bag of groceries was a loaf of Wonder Bread.
Coming toward them in the street was the delivery man, who was selling his bakery goods from a yellow delivery van. She said to her son, "The baker has wonderful bread but it is just so expensive." Just then the delivery man stopped his cart and walked over to the woman with the bag of groceries. He pulled the loaf of Wonder Bread out of the grocery bag and said, "Nothing but air!" And then he smashed it like he was playing an accordion. He said that the bread was worthless, all air (as he had just demonstrated).
She was speechless when the baker then reached into his van and pulled out a freshly baked loaf of bread. He handed it to her and said, "This bread is nutritious and it has substance." He handed it to her, and in her anger she tried to do to his freshly baked loaf of bread what he had done to the Wonder Bread, but alas, it did not collapse. It was a bread of substance.
In our own world, there are competing breads.
Put another way, there is a deep spiritual hunger in our world that we try to fill with various less-than-nutritious substances. As the 17th century French mathematician Blaise Pascal has put it, "There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every person, and it can
never be filled by any created thing. It can only be filled by God, made known through Jesus Christ."
There is a God-shaped need for each of us to belong to a cause greater than ourselves and it cannot be filled entirely by our loyalty to the Packers, to the Democratic or the Republican party, or even to our nation. This need is a God-shaped need to find a community of common concern. It is in the shape of a God who will then turn our hearts toward those of lesser station and stature. Filling our spiritual hunger with other less nutritious things will only point back to ourselves. But filling our hunger with the bread of God in Jesus Christ will cause us to find ourselves in the service of the poor, the lost, the forgotten and the most deeply hungry. Seeking the satisfaction of our own deepest hunger in the God of Jesus points us to the hunger of all the children of God. In our commitment to the prayer that one day "sharing by all will mean scarcity for none," we feed ourselves with a commitment that all will be fed. Only then shall we ourselves be truly and completely fed.
This is the marvelous irony of a truly substantial bread. A truly Wonderful Bread offered to us without price, and yet we chase after the loaf of Wonder Bread in the plastic wrapper that is mostly air even though it promises to "build strong bodies 12 ways." It is a quick fix for our temporary hunger, which does not fill us in our deepest and most enduring hunger for God.
Material things are not bad in themselves. They are, after all, created by God. But when they are used to fill the God-shaped vacuum in the human heart, they are inadequate to do so and ultimately disappoint.
Imagine that your life consists of lying in the hospital in traction. For several months, this is where you live. You cannot get out of bed and you cannot go home. You have no family and no way to take care of things at home. You are horribly worried, not only about your own disability, but also about what is not getting done at home.
It is now late fall, the rains are about to come, and you have not finished repairing the roof. There are plants to water, bills to pay, and animals to shelter and feed.
But just then someone comes into your room and over to your bed. This person whispers in your ear, "Don't worry, I will finish your roof, I will pay all of your bills, I will tend to your animals and your yard. Your house will be in perfect condition when you return home. And this will all be done for FREE... I promise!"
You try to speak, but the person motions for you to lie still, and then leaves the room.
You have two choices. You can choose to disbelieve. You can choose to NOT trust in the gracious offer, in which case you confine yourself to the death of worry, and bury yourself in the tomb of anxiety and fear... OR... You can choose to believe, to have faith, to trust in a promise that seems too good to be true and too gracious to be real, but you will trust anyway, in which case you will live in peace and be able to dream good dreams and think lovely thoughts.
And they asked Jesus, "What must we do to perform the works of God?"
Jesus answered them, "This is the work of God, that you believe in the One whom God has sent."
This is the extraordinary risk of faith, isn't it? That this Christ, this Jesus, could be the one who will fill us deeply with the bread of abundance-fill us like no other bread. And the question before us is whether or not we are willing to take, what Blaise Pascal called, a "Wager on Hope."