Eating the Bread – Missing the Sign

Our gospel passage (John 6:24-35) for Proper 13B is pretty tightly packed, so I’m going to write a couple of short articles about it this morning.  I’ve thought about many things as I was reading this passage, but I won’t have time to write about them all.

First of all, as I read this morning, I’m using the Greek and Hebrew Reader’s Bible, which presents the text along with lexical information, including morphology.  I will have some comments on this resource as a tool later today on my Participatory Bible Study Blog.  (I’ll correct that link to point to the specific post as soon as I get the notes written.)

In verse 26 Jesus tells the people that they believed not because they saw the sign but because they ate the bread.  I believe many people would regard those as the same thing, and this results in a continuing misunderstanding of the role of miracles in the church and in the world.  There’s a tendency to believe that seeing something that appears to be a miracle is simply a way to make people believe that God exists.  If you’ve seen the miraculous event, you’ve seen the “sign.”

But Jesus here points to a different reality.  Jesus didn’t produce bread for people to eat simply because he wanted some bread.  He had another purpose, a deeper purpose.  It was quite possible to witness what we would call a miracle, and at the same time miss the point entirely.

In modern times, particularly in charismatic or pentecostal churches, we expect God to work miracles on a constant basis to alter the physical reality of our lives.  (Note that I use “we” here because I tend charismatic.)  Then we complain when God doesn’t do what we think he should.  But God doesn’t perform miracles for the sole purpose of altering physical reality.  We’re living in the big miracle, the very universe, and then we complain when God allows (or causes) his universe to function consistently.

When a miracle comes, we are thankful for the physical result, but do we see the sign?  Do we see the work that God is wanting to perform in our lives?  Do we even use the results of God’s actions to build God’s kingdom?

The people who ate the bread began to think of Jesus as a good source of physical bread.  And God is the source of physical bread.  But the way God normally wants you to get physical bread is by following the patterns he has laid out in the universe and growing it.  This bread was to point people to Jesus himself, as the bread of life.

Thought question:  In what ways can we “eat the bread” but fail to see the sign in our lives today?