Broken for You
John 6:30-35
August 5, 2012
The study of scripture is itself a kind of prayer, as we seek to come closer to God and know God’s will as it’s expressed in the Bible. I want to try a little experiment along those lines.
Instead of a formal pastoral prayer today, we’ll integrate our prayer time throughout the message.
We’ll pray for understanding and open hearts as we encounter this wonderful scripture from the
Gospel of John.
This experiment begins with a story.
The story takes place in Chile, but it could have happened anywhere there are hungry people. It was noonday Mass. Inside the great cathedral in the central city, the priest was speaking holy words over the host. They used loaves of bread instead of wafers, the wheat bread called tortilla de rescoldo. The priest, who was young and new at his call, thought this might make the sacrament somehow more real for his parishioners, most of them women, mostly women of a certain age.
As he recited the ancient Latin, something caught his eye. In the back, from the bright square of sunlight that was the open doors of the cathedral, came a small figure, dark and furtive.
A boy, and as he began to walk gingerly up the side aisle, the priest saw that he was one of the many who begged for pesos in the city square.
The heads of the faithful turned as the boy moved toward the altar. The church was not full, not nearly, and the murmurs of the faithful bounced harshly off the interior stone. The boy did not stop. He tiptoed up the five stairs to the altar, and as the priest fell silent, the boy stopped in front of him and held out his hands, cupped in supplication.
No words were spoken. Perhaps none were needed. The priest looked at the boy, skinny and scuffed and filthy from the street, his eyes hollow, and no doubt a family at home waiting for what he could bring them. The priest made the sign of the cross over the banquet before him, gathered up the tortillas, put them on a gold-rimmed paten and gave them to the boy. The boy bowed his head and scurried back into the sunlight.
The priest stood before the worshipers and raised his head.
“The Mass,” he said, “is over. Go in peace.”
Let us pray …
Today’s scripture immediately follows the miracle of the loaves and fishes, in which
Jesus feeds 5,000 people with five loaves of bread and two fish. Feeds them until they want no more, and there are leftovers besides. So the crowd and the disciples have full bellies and they have bread on their minds.
And they bring to Jesus a question that feels almost like a challenge: Why should we believe that you are the Messiah, the One sent to save us? We’ve seen some real miracles in our time, they say. And since we’re talking bread, remember when we were starving in the wilderness and bread came from heaven to keep us alive. How are you going to top that? they say to Jesus. Are you as great as Moses, who led us safely through the wilderness?
Jesus the scholar sets them straight. It wasn’t Moses who made bread fall from the sky, he says. It was God. And the true bread – the spiritual sustenance without which our lives are as

hollow as a stomach after a three-day fast – comes not from any human being but directly from heaven.
We want that, the disciples say. We want the bread of God. We want it forever.
And Jesus says, that’s me.
I am the bread of life.
God has sent me.
And I am forever.
Believe in me, and your hunger for meaning, your thirst for a life that means something, those things disappear. You’ll never again feel the dull ache of appetite for something more. In me, that longing is satisfied for all time.
Let us pray …
The disciples and the crowd had bellies full of bread, but such were their lives that even then they were looking for security. We would call it food security – a sense that we know where our next meal is coming from. The concept of food in security is a way of thinking about the problem of hunger. It’s different from hunger, and in some ways maybe it’s worse. Because when you’re consumed with the uncertainty of whether hunger will find you before bedtime, everything else – creativity, companionship, ambition, hopes and dreams – it all gets washed away by that uncertainty. Food insecurity takes over your life.
The crowds surrounding Jesus knew what that meant. If they had lunch, dinner was never guaranteed. And so maybe it’s no wonder that they follow this man who has made such abundant food appear seemingly from nowhere. Without effort, without struggle, Jesus has fed them a banquet. They follow him to see what’s next. Maybe this is where they’ll find security at last.
Jesus sees their motivation and calls them on it. You don’t want me, he tells them – you want what I can do for you. You’re following your stomach, not your heart. That’s your big mistake.
Because, he says, faith in him is not some sort of utilitarian choice, a calculus whereby belief translates into a life free from insecurity. Faith in Jesus is not a choice we make in order to have a better earthly life, a choice like eating your vegetables and doing your water aerobics.
Faith is really a surrender of control, an acknowledgment that it’s only through the Christ-Spirit that we can tap into the spiritual nourishment of God, the Source of all things. The security of faith is not the security of a well-stocked pantry, but the knowledge that, as the book of Hebrews says, God is not far from us; in God we live and move and have our being.
Let us pray …
Let’s close with a few lines of poetry that will point us toward the Communion that awaits us at the Lord’s table – a Communion in which we lose ourselves in Christ and in the holy community we share as Christ’s people. That alchemy does not come without pain; as Jesus says
“I am the bread of life,” we know that that holy bread will be broken on the cross. And yet ultimately it is only that brokenness that can lead us to wholeness; only the broken bread can get inside us as the nourishment, physical and spiritual, that we so desperately need.
As the yeast gives its life as the heat shapes the crust as the wheat loses self when it’s ground into dust as we gather at table with Christ at the head we give ourselves over, one body, one bread, our grief and our loss made suddenly bright: in darkness our God finds us people of light.