[Machine transcription]
In the name of Jesus, amen. Dear saints, Jesus came to do the will of his Father, and his will is this: that he would lose none that come to him. That he will by no means cast away those who come and look upon him and believe in him. And that’s you and I, in our confidence, because I think we are afraid sometimes that the Lord surely would not want us in his kingdom. It’s like some sort of high school dodgeball pick, and we will be last or left aside, but Jesus assures us in this passage, and this is for us and for our confidence, that He will by no means cast out those who come to Him.
So we come to Him in this confidence that He receives us, and more than that, we come to Him in the confidence that He brings Himself to us. So really what I want to talk about, we’re going to wander a little bit away from the text to come back to this because I’ve been captivated all week by this line from Saint Augustine talking about this passage where he says that here we have this mystery of bread looking for the hungry. Can you think about that? Because normally this life, the life that we live, is the hungry looking for bread, but here Jesus is bread looking for the stomach to fill, living water, looking for the thirst to quench, life, looking for the dead to raise. It’s not our looking and seeking for God, but His looking and seeking us.
This is the – but we – but let’s put that to the end of the sermon. Because I think first we have to deal with the problem of John 6. I don’t think we have to, but I think we get to deal with the problem of John 6, especially I know our young adult Bible study was looking at this text last week and sent me a question: “Hey, pastor, how do we think about this?” Because there’s quite a controversy on how to interpret the passage. It basically comes down to this: Is Jesus in John 6, as He talks about how He’s the bread of life, is He talking about the Lord’s Supper or not?
Especially when we as Lutherans read the words that come at the end of John 6, “Whoever eats my flesh,” and “Whoever does not eat my flesh or drink my blood has no part in me,” or even the verse that we had in the text, “Whoever eats my flesh will live forever.” And surely that must be talking about the Lord’s Supper, right? Where the Lord Jesus feeds us His body and His blood. It’s quite a surprise that in the history of the Lutheran church, it was not understood that way. We’ve got to think about it a little bit. But first, let’s go back to the Reformation and maybe think about why.
You know, the Reformation was about a number of things. It was probably chiefly about the doctrine of repentance. How do we come to God? How do we stand before Him on the Judgment Day? But a huge question in the time of the Reformation is, what is the Lord’s Supper? In fact, if you look through the whole corpus of Luther’s writings and you say, what topic did Luther write about the most? The answer is, the Lord’s Supper. It’s what he spent most of his time writing about and thinking about. And this was not only after the Zwinglian controversy; remember that they were trying to get all the different Protestants together, and they had this colloquy in Marburg. There was Zwingli and the other Reformers, and they agreed on all the things except for the last quarter of the last thing, which is where they discussed the body and blood in the Lord’s Supper.
Zwingli said, “No, no, the body is not truly there in the supper.” Calvin said something similar, and all the other Reformers said no. Therefore, Luther had to spend the whole last part of his career asserting the Lutheran doctrine that the body and blood is there. But it wasn’t, and I think this is important for us to know: it wasn’t just against the Protestants that Luther was arguing that, but also against the Catholics. There’s this, I don’t know if it’s famous, it should be more famous, when Luther, remember he went on pilgrimage to Rome when he was still a monk, and he later in life was writing about all the things that he saw in Rome. It was not that impressive.
But one of the things that was happening in Rome is that the priests, when they were sacrificing the supper, the Mass, would say the words of institution, “This is my body,” but then they would say, “But we know it’s not really the body.” In other words, it was already this kind of pre-Enlightenment rationalistic thinking that was getting into Rome. Now, this is not Rome’s official doctrine, but when Luther was asserting the body and the blood of Jesus, he was fighting against both sides: against the Calvinists and the Reformed on one side and against the Roman leaning towards enlightenment on the other side, and was confessing simply from the words of Jesus on the night when he was betrayed when he took the bread and broke it and gave thanks and said, “This is my body.”
It was always to those words that the Lutherans would point. In fact, I was telling a story this morning. I just remembered it during the sermon when I was on a podcast a couple of years ago with this Reformed guy in California, and he had me talking about the Lutheran doctrine of baptism. In fact, this is the guy who told me, “Brian, you’re my second favorite Lutheran.” I said, “Oh, thanks.” And he said, “That’s because I only know one other.” We were giving each other grief about our disagreements on doctrine, and he says, “You’re gonna have to come on to the podcast again to explain the Lutheran doctrine of the Lord’s Supper. I can never understand it. It never makes any sense to me.”
And I said, “I don’t, we don’t need an hour to talk about it. I can do it in 30 seconds.” And he said, “All right.” He didn’t believe me. He says, “Fine, here’s 30, try.” And I said, “Okay, it goes like this: Jesus says, ‘This is my body.'” And we say, “Okay.” And then Jesus says, “This is my blood, poured out for you for the forgiveness of sins.” And we say, “Okay.” I mean, that’s about as complicated as it gets, and it’s always on those words. This confidence that in the supper that Jesus gives us to do in His remembrance, He truly is present. His body is there. His blood is there. And it’s given to us for the forgiveness of sins.
Because we need it. We’re busy fighting day after day against our own sins and the sins all around us. The Lord Jesus wants us to have a good conscience. He wants us to know of His mercy. He wants us to know of His love. And so He’s instituted this supper as a reminder of His mercy and as a distribution of His absolution and as a way for us to fight the devil to say, as the devil says, “How can you call yourself a Christian?” And the answer is, “I don’t know, but I know that Jesus was pleased to put His body on my lips and His blood in my mouth and to give me the promise into my ears that all my sins are forgiven.” That’s what I know is true, and I stand on that confidence.
Now, in that context, in that confession of the true body and blood, we would expect that when the Lutherans came across John 6 and saw this, “Whoever does not eat my flesh and drink my blood has no part of me,” they said, “Well, that’s obviously talking about the Lord’s Supper.” But they didn’t. And part of the reason why is because the words that Jesus ends His sermon with in John chapter 6, where He says, “The flesh profits nothing,” those words were taken up by some of the Reformed, John Calvin and so forth, to say that it’s not really the body and blood that actually gives any sort of benefit, but it’s just the spiritual things that benefit us and so forth and so on. They used those words to argue against the real presence of the Lord’s Supper.
And so the Lutherans had to go back and look at John 6 again. And here’s what they saw. And I want to suggest to you that they were right. It’s not maybe the first impression that we would get when we read the text, but after careful reading, they said that what Jesus is talking about in John 6 is not the gift of communion, but rather the gift of the incarnation. When he says that he’s the manna that comes down from heaven, he’s not referring to the gift of His placing His body and His blood on the altar at the Lord’s Supper, but he’s talking about his incarnation when He comes down into our human flesh in the womb of the Virgin Mary.
And in that way, to eat his flesh and to drink his blood is to confess his incarnation, to trust in the work that he has done, that he has accomplished in his life and his death and his resurrection. Now, this is a beautiful picture then, that to have faith in the flesh of Christ is to know that this baby, Jesus, that this man, Jesus, in the river being baptized, that this one who is being crucified and laid in the tomb and now is risen from the dead, that this one is God in the flesh to rescue us and to redeem us, and that we eat his flesh and drink His blood when we trust that promise, when we believe in Jesus.
Now, there are a lot of things that this implies for us; I just maybe want to highlight one of them. Because while we are practicing, according to the Lord’s Word, trying to practice a faithful distribution of the Lord’s Supper in closed communion, which says that not all Christians are even communing with us because we don’t confess the same thing, we confess that every Christian who believes in Jesus feasts on His flesh, eats His flesh, and drinks His blood by faith, and shares an eternal life with us. It’s a marvelous thing that even Lorelei, just now baptized, will wait for 12 or 13 or 14 years until she comes to the Lord’s Supper to receive the gift of the body and blood of Jesus, but all of these years she is feasting according to John chapter 6 on the flesh and blood of Jesus by faith and rejoicing in this gift.
So that while we say that John 6 is not referring to the Lord’s Supper, although certainly that same flesh and blood we eat when it comes to the Lord’s Supper, it’s talking about this faith which grabs onto the doctrine of the incarnation. And this is wonderful in so many more ways, and here’s where I want to maybe lean into it devotionally in line with the way that St. Augustine teaches us. That here in the incarnation of Jesus, in the bread that comes down from heaven, we see the mercy and kindness of God chasing us down.
When we leave the refuge of the Lord’s church, when we depart from here in a few minutes and we go back into the world and when we go home and when we wake up tomorrow and go to work or when we open the newspaper or turn on the news or when we go back into the hustle and bustle of life outside of God’s sanctuary, things are totally different. We are stomachs looking for something to eat. We are bodies looking for something to be clothed in. We are people who have needs who are going about working and doing and striving so that those needs might be met.
There’s a busyness that defines our life here below. Not only the practical stuff, but even more. We are defined, I think, and Paul talks about this in the epistle lesson from Ephesians, that we are defined according to our fallen nature by our stomachs, which are just always this desire that we just want what we don’t have, and we’re just kind of driven around and forced by our, like Paul says, “Their God is their stomach.” We’re just looking for something to satisfy our desires.
But here, when we come into the Lord’s sanctuary, something entirely different happens. Rather than seeking, we come here to be sought by God. Rather than grasping, we come here so that God can take hold of us. Rather than our striving and our looking, the Lord God gathers us here so that He can give Himself to us. He is, again to quote Augustine in this way, bread looking for an empty stomach to fill, water looking for thirst to quench. He, Jesus, your Jesus, is life looking for death to raise, holiness looking for sins to forgive.
Every single one of your problems, every single one of them, Jesus is the answer, but He comes to solve them even apart from your even wanting it or recognizing that you need it. He is the one who’s called you here because He loves you, desperately loves you, and desires your life and that life to be eternal so that it will be with Him forever. So that He comes now even today to do the will of the Father who sent Him: to call you, to rescue you, to cleanse you, to forgive you, to welcome you, to fill you, to satisfy your hunger and your thirst, to bring you through death to life eternal, to forgive all of your sins, to take away your guilt, to cover your shame, to call you His own righteousness, to give you the confidence that you can stand before Him on the judgment day afraid of nothing at all, to rescue you from the devil and the world and the sinful flesh, and to give you all that you need, even that that you don’t even know that you need, to give all of that to you. He is, for you, the living bread, the bread of life, and all who eat his flesh, all who trust in him, all who see and believe his promises—that’s you—will never die, but will live forever.
So that Jesus is bread looking for a stomach to fill. He is bread looking to fill your stomach, to meet your needs. He is the living water to quench your thirst. He is the life that overcomes your… He’s all of these things for you. So we, with great confidence, rejoice in hearing this sermon from our Lord Jesus: “I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven so that one may eat of it and not die.” May God grant us to feast on Christ, amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ our Lord, amen.
