So many times, I wish I had lived physically in the time of Jesus. I wish I could have been one of his Disciples, sitting at his feet and learning from him. Yet, I wonder if I could have believed him and followed him if I had seen him grow up next door. Would I have been able to believe he was truly the Messiah? Some of the things he taught are difficult to wrap my mind around even now. And how to teach them to others is beyond me. Oh, how grateful I am for the wisdom of the Holy Spirit to guide my thinking and explain things to me!
Over time and miracles, Jesus has managed to gather quite a crowd around him. These people became followers and disciples of the teacher. Good things happened when you hung around this guy. Who wouldn’t want to follow him?
Then one day he was teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum. His teaching confused the people. Miracles they liked. Teaching about God the Father and Jesus the Son scared them.
First of all, he was telling them that he was God’s Son. But to them, he was the kid from next door who grew up and now was doing these great miracles. They liked the free bread, but they were missing the whole point of his life. When he outright told them who he was, they started to grumble about him. Then Jesus made another statement that can be confusing unless it is read and understood in context. “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him up on the last day. It is written in the Prophets: ‘They will all be taught by God.’ Everyone who listens to the Father and learns from him comes to me.” John 6:44-45
This does not mean that only a few select will be drawn by the Father to the Son. But rather that “Everyone who listens to the Father and learns from him comes to me.” John 6:45 God’s voice is out there for everyone to hear if they are willing. And he will always point us to Jesus Christ because that is the way he made for us to begin an eternal relationship with God the Father.
There are two things here that my ‘feet-on-the-ground mind’ stumbles on. One, it is difficult for me to comprehend the spiritual realm that I cannot see or touch. And two, I live on a time line. I am born and then I die. Infinity or eternity is not an easy concept for me to fully grasp.
Jesus was trying to move his followers from the physical bread (they thought they didn’t have to work anymore, just follow Jesus around and he would feed them) to the spiritual bread that God was providing for them through Jesus. He was talking about living bread and his flesh being that bread and telling them they needed to eat his flesh and drink his blood. “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him. Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your forefathers ate manna and died, but he who feeds on this bread will live forever.” John 6:56-59
Here we are again at a place where we cannot understand Jesus’ teaching if we are thinking only in the physical realm. God is Spirit. Jesus is the bridge between the physical and the spiritual. We have to understand that there is a difference between physically eating bread or flesh and spiritually eating bread or flesh. Jesus gives us a little help by referring us to the manna. The manna was a very unique food provided by God for the Israelites while they were in the wilderness. It was only available in the morning. They could only gather enough for a day at a time. If they gathered more, it rotted. But there was an exception. On the day before the Sabbath, they could gather enough for two days and it would not spoil. There was always enough, but they had to trust that it would be there each day. Exodus 16
Now if we move that to the spiritual realm and Jesus being the manna from heaven, we can see that what Jesus is saying is that our spirits need to be fed and that he is the food they need. Each day, we need to spiritually feed on him and he will give us enough for that day. We need to trust that there will be spiritual food tomorrow when we need it and the next day and the next. I don’t need to try to gather enough for the rest of my life and then not come back anymore, but just enough for one day at a time.
Each day, Jesus bridges the gap between my spiritual self and my physical self. Each day I wake up hungry for physical food and each day I wake up hungry for spiritual food. So while I eat my physical bagel and coffee, I also eat my spiritual food by meditating on the recorded words of God, Moses, the Prophets, and the Apostles that we know as the Bible. And I pray that the Holy Spirit will fill my mind with the teachings and explain them to me when I get hung up.
I can’t help but keep coming back. I’m hungry!
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