Several months ago, our family was watching the Disney movie “Tangled”, which is the Disney retelling of the classic Rapunzel fairy tale. As we were watching, a peculiar parallel to a Biblical story jumped out at me — a parallel that I had not expected to find in a fairy tale.
In the Biblical story of the Exodus, God provides manna — a miraculous bread from heaven — to physically sustain the Israelites as they wander the desert for forty years. The appearance of the bread itself is amazing, but its qualities pose some questions: couldn’t a bread from heaven have a shelf life longer than one day? And couldn’t a bread from heaven sustain an appetite for longer than one day — say, 2 weeks, or 2 months? Why couldn’t a miraculous bread from heaven not, well, do more than bread from earth?
The interesting thing is that, even in a fairy tale — a story where the writer has seemingly endless possibilities for development — the problem of short-term sustenance doesn’t go away. In Tangled, Mother Goethel (one of the main antagonists in the story), is centuries old. Yet she is able to maintain a very youthful appearance and physique because of the discovery of a magical flower in the forest, the powers of which extend her life and maintain her youth. But even though it is magical, the duration of its effect is limited, and she must continually visit the flower to harvest its magical properties. Eventually, others (protagonists) discover the flower, and her singular access to it is lost.
The question arising from these phenomena is, if real, miraculous bread from heaven won’t keep anyone alive forever, and if a magical flower even in a fairy tale won’t keep anyone alive forever, then is there anything that will? This is very much the question that Jesus addresses in his discourse in the latter half of John 6.
The discourse begins when the crowd, who had seen and profited from Jesus’ miracle of feeding the 5,000 from the previous day, find Jesus the following day in a region that is a fair distance from where the miracle happened. Apparently out of breath, they ask Jesus in vs. 25, “Rabbi, when did you get here?” However, in Christological fashion, Jesus doesn’t answer their question. Instead, and by way of his supernatural knowledge of people’s hearts, he addresses the matter of their appetites. In vs. 26, he says, “Very truly I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw the signs I performed but because you ate the loaves and had your fill.” In other words, “You all have scrambled across the countryside to find me today because you are more enchanted with the idea of a free lunch than with the miraculous or the spiritual.”
Jesus continues in vs. 27 by saying, “Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.” Certainly there are echoes in this statement of Deuteronomy 8, which contains the well-known verse, “Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD.” But already in John 5 Jesus has intimated that life comes not merely by the words of the Lord, but by what they ultimately point to. In an earlier heated debate with the Jewish religious elites, (in John 5:39-40) Jesus said, “You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life.”
What Jesus is saying is that the appetite of life- and for life – is ultimately satisfied by a regular diet of Jesus himself. Back in chapter 6, Jesus goes on to say, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” In fact, he goes on to be so emphatic about this point — that it is he who sustains life unto eternity — that he later puts it in very explicit, graphic, and controversial language: in vv. 53-54 he says, “…“Very truly I tell you, 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 them up at the last day.”
What is Jesus saying here? Let me suggest two things:
We Are Not Just Hungry for Food; We Are Hungry for Life
Inasmuch as we have an appetite for food — or relationships, or art, or material provisions, and even sex — we have an appetite for life. But too often we set our sights too low, and we miss the greater significance of these appetites, especially when the appetite resurfaces day after day. Now, of course, there are proper and improper ways of feeding these appetites, but here’s the thing: even the proper and moral ways do not necessarily satisfy the appetite forever. In no way does that categorize these appetites as inherently bad; on the contrary, many of these appetites are good gifts from God (though that doesn’t mean that they aren’t subject to the distortion of the fall). But as Jesus says about the manna in vv. 49 and 58, “Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, yet they died.”
Yet what we often miss is that our real need is not just another piece of bread, another song or another anything. Jesus basically calls his followers fools for spending so much energy just for food, and thereby reducing the significance of his ministry to just another free lunch. They were working to fulfill the temporal life, when the temporal life so frequently points to eternal life. What Jesus is getting at is that, after feeding ourselves so many times, we really ought to get to the point where we ask, “Does anything satisfy for longer than this? Is there not life beyond my last meal?”
Did you see what Jesus said? “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” Jesus promises to feed us in such a way that we will live forever. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, along with the gift of his Holy Spirit, these satisfy and nurture our longings for real life. Jesus calls it eternal life and speaks of it as something that begins in this life and then extends to next.
Even Though We May Find The Taste Unpalatable, We Must Eat All of Jesus
The second point is that we must feed on all of Jesus. Jesus was speaking metaphorically to explain how his followers must approach his ministry: “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them.”
Shortly after Jesus said these words, John records that many disciples found this teaching offensive, and stopped following him. Indeed, this is very graphic language, and there is a sure parallel here to what we practice in the Lord’s Supper. The likelihood is that, if the crowd was shortsighted about Jesus’ miracles, they were also likely undiscerning about Jesus’ words. But all is not lost, for the Twelve declare, in a glimmer of insight in vs. 68, “You have the words of life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.”
A thread running through John’s gospel is the connection between faith in the miracles of Jesus and faith in His words. Jesus exhorted his followers to believe in him on the basis of his miraculous signs and went on to connect these to faith or confidence in the things that he said. The power implied by His words were demonstrated by miraculous signs. The signs in turn pointed to the reality – explained by the words of Jesus. Yet there were many who did not make that connection. As late in the ministry of Jesus as the Passover, even the 12 found it hard to stomach what Jesus had to say.
Yet neither their subjectivity nor ours are the standard for that which is “real food” and what is “real drink”. This is put in place by the origin of the words themselves — the Father in heaven – and He is the one who determines their goodness and truth. The result is that, like learning to eat our broccoli and brussel sprouts when we were children (or adults!), we may run into propositions or commands from Jesus that are bitter or unpleasant, but which are nonetheless what we need to consume.
He promises to feed us and to give us life, often in ways that we do not expect. But because of His omniscient knowledge, we need to be willing to trust that he is feeding us with the spiritual food that we actually need, and which will satisfy our inner being.
The apostle John relates a beautiful example of this in John 4, when Jesus met the Samaritan woman at the well. At the beginning of their interaction, the woman held the words of Jesus to be suspect and perhaps even an annoyance. But Jesus persisted, revealing to her not just truths about the kingdom of God, but truths about her own private life. Eventually, she came to the conviction that if Jesus was able to speak openly about these hidden parts of her life, then he must know other hiddent truths as well, including spiritual ones pertaining to God’s kingdom. What began as a seemingly unwelcome encounter ended with a woman of faith hurrying back into town to tell her friends about Jesus. She had been fed and was overflowing with joy. Though she still had yet more to discover about Jesus and what he could mean for her life, the seed had been planted was already transforming her life.
If we consider our own lives in light of John chapters 4 and 6, we ought to ask ourselves: “where is our bread coming from?” Our temporal appetites should alert us to the need for that which is eternal. And if we are to live eternally – our spiritual lives must begin now. The eternal life that the Lord gives, depends on a steady diet of the Bread of Life…Jesus of Nazareth. May we never go hungry again.
Stoney Creek
Whenever our family heads out to my mom and sister’s place in Fenwick, the small Niagara town where I grew up, we usually take the backroads as opposed to the highway – it’s more scenic, and much quieter. Bismark is one of the small villages that we pass on our way to Fenwick, and just outside of the village centre is a farm with a very structurally compromised barn on the property. The roof, walls, and upper floor in the centre of the barn have all dropped one level. Each time we pass that farm, I think to myself, “Is that barn still standing?”
Maybe you’ve seen something similar, with a kitchen appliance, or an old lawn mower, or a shed: these things really should have broken or died out long ago, but they’re still working or standing for some reason. It’s puzzling. And that’s something of what we see when we come to the end of the book of Ezra in chapters 9 & 10.
The story of Ezra is a marvel of God’s sovereignty and steadfastness, as he returned busloads of people from exile in Babylon and Persia back to their homeland of Jerusalem. And not only that, but along the way God turned the tables such that, as the Jews began resettling, some of their most hostile opponents were conscripted into subsidizing a number of the Jewish civic and cultic building projects.
As the rebuilding of the Temple neared completion, this sense of wonder in God’s restorative hand culminated in a great worship ceremony at the end of chapter 8, and all seemed well and good. But when you turn the page to chapter 9, the skeletons begin to come out of the closet. The godly priest Ezra, who had only just arrived in Jerusalem shortly before this celebration, was informed by a number of officials that a many of returned exiles who had been back in the land for some time – including not a few religious leaders – had been living in sin by taking wives from the surrounding pagan nations. Having learned this, Ezra broke down and launched into an incredible lament. He tore his clothing, ripped hair out of his head and beard, and fell on his knees before the LORD, weeping, praying, and fasting.
Why such a dramatic response?
This was exactly the kind of intermarriage that had led God to remove the Jews from Jerusalem in the first place. It was like plugging a punctured tire, without removing the nail.
Ezra prayed, “O my God, I am too embarrassed and ashamed to lift my face to you.” (Ez 9:6)
Basically, “Did we spend 70 years in exile to learn nothing? Are we actually this stubborn?”
Resettled Israel didn’t seem to look much different from pre-exiled Israel, and as Ezra prayed, he may have feared that this relapse into sin might send them back into exile once more. Embarrassing to say the least.
At the beginning of chapter 10, as people watched Ezra and heard what he said to God (quite a spectacle) they began to be convicted of their sins. And, by the end of the chapter, their repentance was fully underway.
Returning to Ezra’s prayer in chapter 9, an interesting theme emerges: he acknowledged that he, his people and their ancestors had always been sinful. He confessed that “our iniquities have risen higher than our heads, and our guilt has mounted up to the heavens (vs 6-7) From the days of our ancestors to this day we have been deep in guilt,” and he recognized that this was the reason they had been driven into exile. But as he continued to pray, he arrived at an undeniable observation, admitting – that God had punished them less than they deserved, and had continued to preserve the people in the remnant that returned to Jerusalem from exile. (vs 13)
Israel was like that barn in Bismark: it should already have collapsed. It was living on borrowed time. When will it finally fall?
Ezra saw this about his people: we shouldn’t be here. We have not learned our lessons, we have not grown up, we have never matured, and we do not deserve to be around. He puts it this way in vs. 14:
“The time has passed for God to have already completely destroyed us, without remnant or survivor.”
I remember hearing a summary of this as a response to a Wednesday night Bible study question several years back. The teacher asked our class, “What do you learn about God in the Old Testament?” And someone had answered, that “God was bewilderingly patient.”
Ezra doesn’t ask the question here, but it seems somewhat implicit: “When will it be, O God, that you finally come down on us as we deserve?”
God’s answer arrived some 450 years later, on a hill at Calvary. This is not the answer that we would anticipate. God never came down on his people as they ultimately deserved, because he intended for that punishment to come down on his Son, who did not deserve it. The cross was a demonstration not only of God’s bewildering patience, but also of His unstoppable love. And then, having taken our punishment upon himself, Jesus empowers us to break the cycle of repeated sin.
Like ourselves, the Israel that Ezra knew, continued to sin. Repentance in Ezra’s time (ch 10) was followed one generation later by relapse, so that by the time of Nehemiah, they had once more intermarried with pagans.
Now, in Christ, in the new covenant – God fulfills his promise to give his people a new heart that is soft and pliable. One that is able to receive God’s laws and actually live them out, corporately and consistently. We are aided by his Holy Spirit, who is able to teach, to convict, and to lead us.
This is not to say that the church may not have its own blind spots or weaknesses (flaws, even), but it is to say that – over the course of history – the church as a whole is an effectively different enterprise compared with ancient Israel. The change that God brings about within his people through the blood of Jesus is lasting. His people are given to prayer and fasting, their praise and testimony are on their lips, their money and their hours are given to those who are in need.
In Jesus Christ and by God’s grace, we are not living on borrowed time, like a barn ready to collapse. Our life in Christ is altogether new and is being renewed day by day. We do not have to fear that time is running out, or that God’s wrath is about to come down upon us. Instead, our confidence is in God who loves us and who has saved us through his Son, Jesus Christ.
Hamilton ON
