Touching Eternity
Eternity. It’s a long time. The idea of eternity is a hard one to wrap our heads around…some might say impossible. Thinking on things eternal can seem like a head-trip, an unhelpful abstraction. Why try to think about something we can barely understand when we consider our actual lives and all the difficulties in them? We want something more concrete. We want something that meets our needs right now. We’re hungry, we’re broke, we’re tired, we’re lonely, we’re hurt, we’re lost – our eternal situation is not often on our minds; it is not what we are often most concerned about.
An old evangelistic tactic that was very popular back in the 80s and 90s, and I am sure is still used frequently today, was to actually boil it all down to the eternal. It began with the question: “if you were to die tonight do you think you would go to heaven? Where will you spend eternity?” Did anyone ever ask you that? A well-intended youth group leader perhaps or the speaker at that summer camp where you had your first crush? The question was an attempt to get us to think more broadly, to think on an eternal level and to introduce some urgency to the situation. What if you died tonight?
The truth is that we don’t really think that way on a daily basis. If we’re honest, I think most of us think about the trajectory of our lives following a pretty similar path. Grow up, go to college, maybe go to grad school, figure out a career, find that special someone, get married, have some kids, etc. Most of us think all of that is supposed to happen in our 20s and 30s by the way, which is why so many of us are stressed out beyond belief. Worried about trying to make sure this all happens at the right time OR terrified about why it hasn’t happened yet. Did we miss our opportunity and are destined to die alone in our apartment only to be found days later by our neighbors who couldn’t stand the smell any more? Sorry…too much. I was channeling Bridget Jones. Then when you hit your stride in yours thirties you’re supposed to work your way up the ladder until you have some sort of financial stability, send the kids off to college in your 40s, become financially unstable again, become empty nesters, try to become financially stable once more, retire, and someday die quietly in our beds surrounded by family and loved ones. It’s the American dream in a nutshell, the good life. You’re all about to have a panic attack right now, I know, but it is often the way we think about our life trajectories here in the wealthy West.
Now you may have your own variation but, the point of all of this is to say that we do not think anything is going to happen to us in the immediate. We do not concern ourselves with the eternal. We don’t care because that’s a long way off. We care more about right now. We want to know what Christianity has to say about the issues in our world right now. At least when we’re trying to be really altruistic, but the more honest statement is we want to know what Christianity has to say about the issues in our own lives right now. We’re very practical in that way.
At the same time, there are hints that we are always thinking about eternity in the back of our minds. Actually we usually apply it to things that are little less tangible, a little less practical maybe, but probably are the most important to us in our lives. Our need, desire, and search for love for example. Consider some famous love songs: Diana Ross and Lionel Richey singing “Endless Love”, Whitney Houston and “I Will Always Love You”, Donna Lewis and “I Love You Always Forever,” and of course Shania Twain singing “From This Moment On” and “Forever and For Always.” And these are just the ones from my workout mix. I hope you’re all thinking: he’s strong, but he’s sensitive. In many ways we don’t care at all about eternity, and at the same time we are desperate for something that endures, something that transcends our immediate, temporal existence; we are desperate for the eternal.
And this makes us just like every single other person that has ever existed on the face of the earth. We are human, a mixed bag of deep concern over the right now and a profound longing for something bigger than our right now, something transcendent. Jesus knows this about us and he knew it about the crowd in the Gospel passage in John 6 from the lectionary readings for this week. They too were a mixed bag, and we can see it in their interaction with him. This crowd in our passage today is the same crowd of over 5000 that one day earlier Jesus had fed with the five loaves and two fishes, which interestingly is also the name of a little local prepared foods place in the Hamptons here on Long Island: Loaves and Fishes. A wonderful name for a place, but they clearly did not get the concept of Jesus’ miracle because it is ridiculously expensive. Anyhow, this crowd was the same crowd that had been fed miraculously and the next day went looking for Jesus, who had literally walked on the water the night before, but they didn’t realize that. When they find him on the other side of the sea a very interesting dialogue begins. And we see Jesus highlight this jumbled mix within them, and he sets it straight. He puts things in their proper order.
I want to focus in on the context of what Jesus is says here. First, Jesus does what he so often does and that is he exposes where their hearts are; what their main focus is; what they think is most important. He does this to quite frankly make the proper distinction between the Law and the Gospel, between law and grace, because he knows what they ultimately want to put their hope in – their own ability to perform and earn salvation. He says to them, “You don’t seek me 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 to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you. For on him God the Father has set his seal.” Translate, you’re only interested in me because you think I met your immediate need. I fed you, but I’m telling you that there is something way more important. That’s where their hearts are, that’s their perspective, and as we said earlier, it is often ours as well – the temporal/immediate over the eternal.
Then Jesus sets them up a bit by saying do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you.” All they hear is the word WORK. Everything else just sounds like the adults in the Peanuts cartoons: “wah wah wah WORK wah wah wah wah.” This is how we all hear by the way. We are so tuned to trying to earn our way, we are so predisposed to performance and merit based living that we can’t even hear anything else. He said the word “work” and the old sinner in each of us is like, “Boing! Ready and reporting for duty sir!” Listen to how they respond. They ask, “What must we do, to be doing the works of God?” Could you even hear what they missed? I missed the first few times I read the passage myself. Jesus said, “don’t work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you. For on HIM God the Father has set his seal.” The food that Jesus is talking about is a gift from him. The one whose work matters is his not theirs…“for on him God the Father has set his seal.”
After they ask their question about what works they need to do, Jesus drives it home even more and says, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” I want you to hear that, Jesus himself saying the work of God is that you believe in him. This isn’t something Kate and I made up. It’s not something the Reformers made up. It’s not something that even St. Paul made up. Grace, not works is God’s deal. God himself made this up and sent Jesus to tell us about it and to do it for us. And, just in case anyone wanted to try to take the line of argument, “Well Jesus said our that belief is a work, so it’s still something that we have to do.” He goes on in the passage to say very explicitly that even their belief is still all up to God. Remember it is all a gift. He says, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day” (6:39-40). So, Jesus exposes their hearts for having a rather limited perspective, in other words they do not even really understand their own true needs, and then he drives home the fact that what they actually truly need has to come from him. What they need depends on him and the gift he will give them.
As I said before, we are this crowd, and they are us. They are just a bunch of skeptics just like us. After all of this they still ask Jesus what sign he is going to perform for them to believe in him. What sign do you do that we might believe? (v.30) He just performed the miracle of multiplying the loaves and fish for them, but that wasn’t enough. They were comparing him to Moses, to whom they wrongly gave the credit for the constant supply of manna while Israel wandered in the desert. Jesus doesn’t take the bait, at least not in the way that they expect. Instead of saying, “What do you mean? I just did it yesterday for you people! What is your problem?” And instead of doing some amazing miracle right in front of them there, Jesus proclaims the truth about WHO is truly responsible for the manna, who is the true provider. And all of this points ahead to what they could never anticipate: the cross. He tells them that “[he] is the bread of life; whoever comes to [him] shall not hunger, and whoever believes in [him] shall never thirst.” Then again in our passage, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
Here Jesus drives home the bigger perspective. He reveals that the gift that he is going to give to them, this food that endures unto eternal life, is his own self, his very own body and blood, his life. And this freaks the crowd out again. To be fair to them, when he tells them of food that gives them eternal life they want it, but they have no way to understand or even to comprehend what it actually is. Jesus exposes their true need for eternal life, to be saved from death, and then he points to himself. And it sounds cannibalistic at first, but it makes perfect sense in light of the larger context of the passage, which has been all about food, but more importantly in light of what he is going to do for them, his very purpose for coming. He would give up his body and shed his blood as a sacrifice for them, to save them, to do the work that they could not do, that was never theirs to do in the first place. Their salvation and freedom from death was his work, his job…for on Him God the Father has set his seal.
Still it sounds very weird. Why does he put it into those terms? Well, sitting here on the other side of the cross and over two thousand years later we know that he was laying the foundation for what would become a very important part of Christian worship, the Lord’s Supper. At the same time, he is making a much more profound point about what the Lord’s Supper is and in fact what the cross itself means. As one commentator said, “To eat of this bread means to appropriate (to take possession of) Christ as one’s life. It is a figure of speech for believing.” The believer’s life is intimately bound up with Christ’s. It’s the idea of consuming him – having him become a part of us or more accurately having us become a part of him. This whole passage has been in light of sustenance and food, that which gives us life and keeps us alive, we cannot live without it – that is the picture Jesus is painting here. He is our true food and true drink. Without him we most surely die. The crowd kept referencing the manna because it was this profound example of God’s provision for their people that was deeply seated in their collective psyche, Jesus points out that even it was temporal and did not ultimately sustain – the body would use it up and would need more to stay alive and ultimately it could not keep the person alive. They all eventually died who ate the manna. But with Christ the Father sustains forever. His flesh and blood make us alive for eternity.
This teaches us something important about the Lord’s Supper. The sacrament is not like the manna. We do not need to keep taking it repeatedly in order to stay alive. Remember, it is not a work. It is not something that depends upon us doing it. It is a physical sermon of what Jesus has done for us once and for all on the cross. He gave up his actual life for us – his real flesh and blood – so that we might be forgiven and set free from our sin. The sacrament is Jesus himself proclaiming to us once again that he has done it all for us, it is finished, and our partaking of it is also symbolic of our appropriation of the benefits of his work for us. As the 25th article of religion for the Anglican Communion states, it is not just a sign of our faith in Christ, but it is also a sure witness and effectual sign of grace and God’s good will towards us, by which he works invisibly and not only enlivens and stirs up our faith, but also strengthens and confirms our faith in him.
We celebrate the Lord’s Supper to remember and to receive him and what he has done for us on the cross…to receive his love. His “Endless Love…” It is an instrument of grace from God that connects with us on a deeper physical level about our need for Jesus and his awesome provision, his awesome gift of himself. Amazingly, the Lord’s Supper is that place where our concern over the right now and our deep longing for something bigger than our right now, something transcendent, are met perfectly. Jesus loves us and ministers to us on an immediate level through the actual food of the bread and wine, AND he loves us and ministers to our hearts on an eternal and spiritual level pointing us to his finished work on the cross for us, easing our consciences and calming our fears. It is truly a holistic experience in worship. It is all a gift for you and me, one that stands firm now in our everyday and for all of eternity.
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