“The Bread of Heaven, Part 2" (Salter) | John 6:41-59

Fellowship Hall 

05-24-2026

Transcript

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Please stand for a reading from John chapter 6, verses 41 through 59. So the Jews grumbled about him because he said, I'm the bread that came down from heaven. They said, Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How does he now say, I have come down from heaven? Jesus answered them, Do not grumble among yourselves. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me down draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day. It is written in the prophets, and they will all be taught by God. Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. Not that anyone has seen the Father except he who is from God. He has seen the Father. Truly, truly I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life. I'm 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. I'm 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 you for the life of the world is my flesh. The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, How can this man give us his flesh to eat? So Jesus said to them, Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Whoever feeds in my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever feeds on me, he will also live because of me. This is the bread that came down from the heaven, not like the bread the fathers ate and died. Whoever feeds on this bread will live forever. Jesus said these things in the synagogue, as he taught in Capernaum. This is the word of the Lord. Please be seated.

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We are on the bread of heaven, part two. Jesus is still teaching in the synagogue, and we broke it up into two parts. Last week we looked at the first part of the sermon, and this week the second of his teaching. Let's pray that he would feed us. And we live not by bread alone, but by the word of God. So feed us now. We pray in Christ's name. Amen. But there's a video that has made the rounds online. You may have seen it. It's a baby just a few months old, sitting in his mother's lap, and they're looking face to face. She's right there, she's inches from his face, smiling at him, and he cannot see her. He is looking, but nothing is resolving. And then someone over the top of his head slides a pair of glasses on him, and his eyes brighten up, and he smiles and grabs his mother's face. It's beautiful. He was not deficient in sight, this little boy, because he was stubborn. He was not failing to see because he refused to try. He simply did not have what he needed to see. The apparatus wasn't there. John starts and calls the people grumbling at him the Jews. And he means something specific by that. They are not casual skeptics. They are people who have been in the synagogue their whole lives, who know the Torah, who are waiting for the Messiah. They are looking, but they can't see. And Jesus tells them exactly why. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. They are sitting inches from the face of God. And they can't resolve what it is right in front of them. They need the Father to draw, to give, to open, and we do too. Sight in this passage is a gift. And what happens when that gift is withheld or refused? We stumble. Twice in this passage, the crowd stumbles. And notice what their stumbling produces. It is not humility. It is not hunger. Their stumbling does not produce a cry of, oh Jesus, help me see. It's just grumbling, this complaint that calcifies into rejection. And so this is what blindness looks like when it won't confess itself. When it won't say, I can't see, and I want to see. The grumblers in Capernaum cannot see him. And what's interesting is they're treating their lack of seeing as his problem and not theirs. This passage gives us two stumbles. Verse 41, they stumble over who Jesus is, where he comes from. Verse 42, they stumble over what he offers, what he gives. Same crowd, same synagogue, and the offense is going deeper and deeper. So let's start with the first stumble in verse 41, the origin of Jesus. They are stumbling over Jesus' origin. Verse 41 through 42. So the Jews grumbled about him because he said, I am the bread that came down from heaven. They said, Is this, is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose mother and father and mother we know? How does he now say, I have come down from heaven? Jesus has been saying, I am the bread. I am the bread of life. And now he has said, just before this question, I am the bread come down from heaven. The source is not Moses. The source of this bread is not a miracle. The source of this bread is not heaven in a vague sense. What he is saying there is, I am the divine son come down from heaven. I have been sent by the Father, and I am standing right in front of you. And they stumble. They can't see. You know what they're like? They're like God's people who grumbled over the provision of the manna in the wilderness. Same word. So now this group is doing the same. Their objection sounds reasonable. We know this man. We know his father. We know his mother. But how does he now say he's come down from heaven? Those confronted with this clear revelation concerning his origin must now respond either in belief or rejection. There's no middle ground. Based on this claim, there is no middle ground response. This may seem an interesting place to pivot, but if you've seen Pixar's ratatouille, there's a rat named Remy. And he's given his life to the vision of the great chef Gusteau, whose motto was simple: anyone can cook. That's not true. Remy ends up in Gusteau's Paris kitchen, cooking through an unlikely and completely unqualified young man named Linguini. The film's great skeptic is the food critic aptly named Anton Ego. He's thin as a skeleton, but he's precise as a scalpel. He has spent his whole career deciding in advance what he will approve and what he will not before he even tasted. The source, where the food comes from, for ego is everything. And so when he shows up at Gustave's Paris Kitchen, his verdict is already written. He has measured the kitchen and found it wanting before he got there. And so he will not let the food be what it really is because of where it came from. That's what the Capernaum crowd's doing. We've seen the father, earthly father Joseph. We've seen his mother. Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph? They have already assessed and decided the source. The case is closed. What they cannot see, what they need their father to open their eyes to, is that this is the most extraordinary bread from the divine kitchen. They can't see it. Jesus corrects them in verse 43 through 47. The crowd thinks the problem is intellectual, they just need more information, and Jesus reframes it. Look at verse 43. Jesus answered them, Do not grumble among yourselves. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. All human beings are born with a moral inability to receive Jesus by faith. That inability is overcome only by God Himself. The grumbling is not only blind, listen, their grumbling is dangerous. Because it presupposes that divine revelation can be sorted out by talking the matter over. By, and in doing that, that presupposition says they are diverting away from attention and dependency on the grace of God, thinking they can figure it out. And in verse 45, Jesus cuts. He quotes Isaiah 54, 13, they will all be taught by God. In its original context, this is a promise spoken to a scattered, humiliated people, speaking of the day that is coming when God Himself will be your teacher, when you return from exile, when his instruction will no longer come from outside, but reach all the way into you when you get a new heart, as Ezekiel would say. Jesus is saying before them in verse 45, that day Isaiah spoke of is here in me. The Father will draw you through my word, Jesus' word, the word that is now flesh, standing in a synagogue at Capernaum, a place where I stood in the ruins of that synagogue, knowing this was the very place where Jesus preached this sermon on the bread of life. And he is saying, You are now finally fully being taught by God through the person of himself. Verse 46. No human being has ever seen the Father except the one who is from God. Only he has seen the Father. What he's saying there, people that say Jesus never claimed to be God haven't read. The distance is simply too great, too holy. But there is one who is from God, John 1, the Word, who was with God and is God, and he, speaking of Jesus, has seen him. He alone knows the Father from the inside, and he has come to make him known. He is claiming divinity, Son of God, sent from heaven. You are now being finally fully taught by God. You either reject or believe. And so he says in verse 47, truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life based on his terms, his grace, and his revelation. Now, this correction of their grumbling is not only for Capernaum, it's for every one of us in this room. Maybe you are still trying to think your way to faith. Maybe you are still trying to reason yourself across the threshold to faith. The grumblers weren't stupid. These folks are religiously capable and smart. They're doing exactly what capable people do. They're weighing the evidence, they're talking it over, they're assessing the credentials of the speaker, and Jesus tells them that will never be enough. The Father has to draw you, and you have to receive me by faith. If that faith feels out of reach for you this morning, I want you to hear what Jesus is saying. The barrier is not one more answered objection. The barrier is what only God can remove. So the right response is not to stumble to doubt, but to stumble to dependence and cry out to God, Lord, draw me near. Open my eyes. I want to see. It's a prayer he answers. It's a prayer he answers. And for those of us who believe, this opening section of this passage is a standing rebuke to pride. We did not reason our way to Jesus. We did not come to him before he came to us. The Father drew us. The blur resolved into reality, not because we were more spiritually perceptive, but because the Father put our glasses on. That kills pride, which is why Christians should be the most humble people on the face of the earth. He drew us near. He then goes to the answer after correcting them in verses 48 through 51. He finally answers their question. This is kind of how Jesus always works, right? They ask a question, he goes into correcting them. And I admit, sometimes I'm like, could you just answer? Just say, I'm from heaven. But he knows that's not how you talk in the synagogue. You you engage in these arguments. So now he returns to the original theme to answer the original question. I am the bread of life, verse 48. 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. The manna in the wilderness was real bread. It was real provision. It was real grace. But it could not bestow eternal life. What he says is, all the fathers who ate it died. Jesus is saying, I'm the better manna. I'm the final manna. I'm the bread that comes down from heaven, and when you eat it, you don't die. And then verse 51 turns, 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. And man, if you could have seen the scene when he made that statement, it was like, You want us to eat your body? What are you talking about? Jesus identifies here the bread as his flesh. It's a deliberate and striking word choice. It is not the word when we celebrate communion, when we say, This is my body. It's a different word. It's the word flesh. He's connecting all the dots from John 1 1.14. The word of God became what? Flesh. He's saying, I'm going to give my flesh, my very self, the incarnate one, is saying, I'm going to offer myself willingly and vicariously with a substitution for those who are in me. Because just as was announced in John 1, the Lamb of God who takes away what? The sin of the world. He's now saying directly, the bread given is my flesh. It is given for salvation. And the crowd up to this point has been willing to argue with him about where he came from. But now he's saying what he came to do. And they can't tolerate it. The offense goes deeper. They stumbled over his origin. Watch what they do with his offering. Point two. They stumble over it. Verse 52. The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, How can this man give us his flesh to eat? Now, let's be gracious to them. They are only thinking rationally and according to what they can see. And they're thinking, he just said he is promoting cannibalism. How can we eat what? I mean, they're understandably confused. They cannot hear what he's saying. Why? Because they haven't got the glasses. The father has to draw them. Same blindness, but deeper darkness. What happens is the answer. Verse 53. What does Jesus do when they stumble? Watch, he intensifies it. He's watching them struggle. And he says these two words, which is like, let's escalate this thing. Truly, truly. That's thus saith the Lord. Here you go. I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Now the addition of drink his blood took it up a notch. Because Mosaic law forbidding the drinking of blood. You couldn't even eat meat with blood. So now he's messing with Moses. Now he's messing with their little law. And what is he doing here? Don't forget the context of chapter 6. Don't forget. What time is it in the calendar year? It's the second of these in John. It's around Passover. At Passover, flesh and blood language was understood through a lamb that you slaughtered. And Jesus is taking now and tying his offering, his giving of his flesh, and tying it directly to the sacrifice of the Passover lamb. Verse 53 will put it negatively. Unless a person depends on his death, they have no life. And then verse 54 puts it positively. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. He said that twice in the previous passage. That the feeding is not just for forgiveness. The feeding is for resurrection. It is forgiveness, but it's more. It's a more beautiful vision. What he's doing here is he is pointing to fulfillment that Jesus is the better meal come down from heaven. He's better than the Passover meal. Verse 55, my flesh is true food, my blood is true drink. So that Passover meal that was celebrated by a generation in the wilderness was always pointing towards a better meal. And he's saying, dinner time, I'm here. You have to feast on me. Again, not merely forgiveness at a distance, not merely clearing a debt. It's the living God through the Son taking up residence in those who feed on him by faith forever. The man in the wilderness couldn't do that. It fed the body for a day, but Jesus says, I'm the better manna, and I'll feed you for eternity. Verse 58 closes the loop. The manna sustained a generation, but this bread sustains into eternity. I want you to think about this. Think about what you ate this week. My original list had just all meat, and I was like, I gotta diversify this a little bit for the vegetarians among us. I mean, I had like chicken, steak, salmon, like a whole, but imagine what you ate the chicken, the steak, the salad, the vegetables. There's almost nothing on your plate, and there's gonna be an asterisk to this, and somebody's gonna come up and tell me that something's on my plate. That don't worry about that. Just stick with the illustration. There's almost nothing on your plate that arrived without dying. Death is a part of the table. Why? Because life runs on death. That is a pattern that's woven in. Something died so you could live. Something died so you could eat. That's the grammar of eating. Well, now go to Israel. Every Israelite in the synagogue knew this grammar better than we do, way better than we do. Unless you're a farmer and raise your own animals and slaughter them. They watched animals die. They watched the Passover lamb have his throat cut and blood caught in the basin. They watched the burnt offerings ascending in smoke. They smelt it on their clothes. The entire sacrificial system ran on one logic. Listen to this. Life comes through death. You are sustained by what is given for you, and you do not approach God except through what? Blood. This was not abstract theology for them. It was their calendar, it was their temple, it was their feast, it was their smells. So when Jesus says, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink the blood, you have no life in you. The shock for them is not that the imagery is foreign. It's that he's claiming to be the fulfillment of all the promises. That's the shock. Every lamb that ever bled, every grain offering that was ever crushed and burned, those were the pictures pointing to the reality itself. The pattern that was confirmed at every altar was always pointing to the divine Son. Calvin saw it clearly. I love what he says here. John Calvin. Christ does not present himself to us as something to be admired from a distance, but as food and drink. He must be consumed. You stand before a table of food and you say, man, that looks nice. That's impressive. Man, that looks like it tastes good. And walk out. Are you sustained? Are you gonna live? No, you gotta sit down and what? Eat. You got to close the distance and get that food in you. That's why he uses the imagery here. Jesus is not offering a religious system for people to participate from afar. He is offering himself. He is to be received by faith. His death is the meal. For those of you who've been coming to church for years, you know the vocabulary, you can follow the argument, you even come when it's foggy. This passage is a direct confrontation. The crowd in Capernaum knew their Bible. They had been in the synagogue their whole lives. And they couldn't see. They wouldn't eat. Why? Because knowing about the bread is different than eating it. And that's one of the dangers of being in the church at a distance or being baptized as an infant and relying on your baptism. No, you got to eat. You got to eat. You got to consume, you got to receive him by faith. The question this morning is: have you fed on Jesus by faith? What does it mean to feed on him? He doesn't stay at a safe distance, no. He's no longer outside of you. What? He's in you. Yes, we feed on him in his word. We feed on him in prayer. We feed on him in the sacraments. But never mistake. Those are the means. They are not the meal. The meal is Jesus Himself. Think of the word in prayer and sacraments more like a fork and a spoon to get it in you. Don't mistake the means for the meal. The meal is a person, his offering. It is not religion at arm's length. It is the living bread taken by faith that then produces what? Life from the inside out. That is the hunger you have always felt. That is the restlessness that's not quite settled because what? We go feed on all these other things. But if you feed on him, you'll live. And that ache of the soul will be answered. So the crowd stumbles twice over his origin, over his offering. They will not receive. Here's their main stumble. They won't receive what they cannot explain. And they cannot explain what only the Father can reveal. So they don't stumble to dependence, they stumble to doubt and death. This passage calls us away from that. Don't stand at a safe distance and analyze all the complexities. The same Jesus who stood in that synagogue stands before us now by his word and spirit and says, I am the bread that came down from heaven. I am not a teacher to be admired. I'm not a moral example to be followed from a respectful distance. I am bread given for you. Eat. Consume the person of Jesus. There's only one response for life. It's not grumbling. It's not deeper analysis. It's not form a committee. Find out his credentials. Here's the instruction from Jesus himself. Eat and live. Let's pray. Father, thank you for your word. Jesus, thank you for your teaching in the synagogue. What a word. We thank you that you are the word made flesh. And that you give your flesh and your blood as an offering for us to satisfy the wrath of God. We receive you by faith and we live. Even for those of us who have received you by faith, let us not get bored with the great meal that we get to feast on every day, the person and work of Jesus Christ. May we not merely contemplate you, may we consume you that our life would pour out of us from inside. And Father, for those who today are feeling the ache that they can't see and they want to, I pray that right now, by the power of your spirit, you would put the glasses on that they might see and receive. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.