Christ Within

Propers: The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 18), AD 2021 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

If there’s anything better than free food, it must be more free food. Right?

We pick up our reading of the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel this morning with Jesus having just fed the 5000. We preached on this last week, when we spoke of the blessings of bread; of how Jesus’ miracles embody the wonders God works for the world; and of the Eucharist understood as the Christian Passover meal. Which is all well and good—but do you have any more of that free bread we could have?

Today we find people following Jesus, wheresoever He may roam, because they want more free food. And Jesus says, “Very truly, I tell you, you are looking for Me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life.”

And so they say to Him, “Moses gave us free food: manna in the wilderness, the very bread of heaven! Can you maybe do something like that?”

And Christ replies, “First off, it was God who provided for your ancestors in the wilderness, not Moses. And second, manna wasn’t the true bread from heaven. The true bread from heaven is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”

“Okay,” they say. “That sounds pretty good. We’ll have some of that, please.”

And Jesus tells them: “I am the bread of life. I come down from heaven to give life to the world. Whoever comes to Me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in Me will never thirst.” And that right there is the lesson. That right there is His point. He fed them when they were hungry. Indeed, Jesus always starts out addressing our most basic needs: feeding the hungry, healing the sick, cleaning the dirty. But that’s not where His ministry ends. That’s only where He begins.

He goes on to teach the ignorant, to comfort the afflicted, to rebuke the sinner, to forgive the repentant, and to proclaim the God-given dignity of the poor, the mourning, the meek, and the merciful. He raises the low and lowers the high. Jesus proclaims the Kingdom of Heaven against the Empire of Rome, and so offers the true Son of God as an alternative to the divinity of the Caesars. So we’ve gone from the physical to the emotional to the social to the political, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Christ is here to claim the entire person, it would seem, the whole of humanity.

But again, He doesn’t stop there. Social justice is a necessary part of the path, but not the final goal. The final goal is for God to give His own eternal life for the world, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Christ is here to conquer death. He has come to make us immortal; to make us each a god, as it were, by bringing us into eternal union with the one true God in Him. In Jesus, God and Man are one. And in Jesus we too shall be one: one with God, and one with one another.

And so you shall never be hungry. And so you shall never thirst. And so you shall never die—for death itself becomes for us our birth to immortality. Not because we’ve earned it. Not because we’re better or smarter or more special than anybody else. But simply because we are loved. And to be welcomed into that love is to welcome everyone else into it as well. It is pure grace. And grace, like bread, demands to be shared. I love you, so that you are free to love others, to love all.

This is not a caveat, mind you. This is not a condition of our salvation. Rather, this is salvation itself: to live so immersed in God’s grace that He flows through your words and your deeds and your life. God doesn’t say, “I love you if; I forgive you if; I resurrect you if.” No. First He forgives, then must we forgive others. Not as a payment, but as part of the life of faith, as natural as a candle burning once it’s lit by others.

See, this is part of the whole works versus faith thing. And we hear it in the Gospel: “What must we do,” the people ask of Jesus, “to perform the works of God?” And Jesus gives perhaps the most straightforward response of His ministry: “This is the work of God: that you believe in Him whom He has sent.” How do we do the work of God? Believe in Jesus! There you go. Couldn’t be clearer.

But what does it mean to believe? What does it mean to have faith in Jesus?

Here we come to the heart of the Protestant Reformation, the heart of the Lutheran movement itself. How does one believe in Jesus, and thus do the work of God, and thus be saved? 500 years ago, the Church had gone heavy on works. It was all about “do good, get good; do bad, get bad.” And this is a recipe for religious mess. If salvation is about our works, what we earn, then either we’re royally screwed, or we think we’re better than everyone else. Quite the quandary.

So Luther said, no, it’s not that. We don’t earn heaven. We can’t earn heaven. We are given heaven. We are given forgiveness and healing and grace and love as pure gift, through nothing we could do, nothing we have done. It’s all the work of God. But then some people said, “Oh. Well, if all I have to do is believe that Jesus saves me, then I can just check that box and live a happy life of sin: hoarding, cheating, harming, killing. All things are pure for the pure, after all.”

This is an old debate in Church history, goes way back to St James and St Paul. Paul says the Christian is saved by faith and not by works. James says, “Show me your faith without works and I will show you my faith by my works!” Is the Christian not called to morality? Is the Christian not called to be a decent person? Nay, moreover, is the Christian not called to be a “Little Christ” for the world?

Nor is this solely some ancient debate. Plenty of Western Christians today live in ways indistinguishable from the values of the society around us: values of acquisitiveness, consumption, commodification, militarism, social Darwinism. If being a Christian doesn’t actually affect the way you live, then why bother at all? I’m sure there’s something on Netflix you’d rather be watching some Sunday mornings. Even the demons “believe” in God—and tremble.

Yet at the risk of my own Lutheran bona fides, I have to say, that this really is a false dichotomy. There are not two Christianities, a Pauline one preaching belief, and a Jacobian branch doing works. The debate between faith and works is like asking which blade of the scissors does the cutting.

It’s true that we are saved by faith, and not by works. But works are part of faith, the natural outgrowth, the fruit if not the root. The work of God, as Jesus says, is to believe in Him. But belief here is not a noun. It’s not a thing that you possess. Belief isn’t just a set of propositions for which one checks either true or false on a test.

For John, belief is a verb. Faith is a verb. It’s how you live; it’s what you do. As George MacDonald rightly put it, “It is simply absurd to say you believe, or even want to believe, in Him [in Jesus], if you do not do anything He tells you.” It’s not that if you want to be saved, you first must act like Jesus. Rather, to live like Jesus—to be as Jesus—that is salvation itself. That’s what eternal life looks like in the here and now. You want to do what God does? Be Jesus. Be Jesus! Not alone—but together, as a people, as a community, as a church.

Jesus is the bread from heaven. He comes down to give life to the world. And when we eat this bread, which we do in Communion, which we do in God’s Word, then the bread that we eat makes us into Him. The Meal that we consume consumes us. “This is My Body,” He promises, without any reservation. And when we eat of it, of the bread that is His Body, then we become His Body too. We become Jesus. We become the bread of heaven come down to give life to all the world.

You already know what Jesus does. Everybody knows what Jesus does! Faith in Him is trusting that He does His work through you.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.