When the people saw that Jesus and his followers were not there now, they got into boats and went to Capernaum to find Jesus. When the people found Jesus on the other side of the lake, they asked him, “Teacher, when did you come here?” Jesus answered, “I tell you the truth, you aren’t looking for me because you saw me do miracles. You are looking for me because you ate the bread and were satisfied. Don’t work for the food that spoils. Work for the food that stays good always and gives eternal life. The Son of Man will give you this food, because on him God the Father has put his power.” The people asked Jesus, “What are the things God wants us to do?” Jesus answered, “The work God wants you to do is this: Believe the One he sent.” So the people asked, “What miracle will you do? If we see a miracle, we will believe you. What will you do? Our ancestors ate the manna in the desert. This is written in the Scriptures: ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’” Jesus said, “I tell you the truth, it was not Moses who gave you bread from heaven; it is my Father who is giving you the true bread from heaven. God’s bread is the One who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” The people said, “Sir, give us this bread always.” Then Jesus said, “I am the bread that gives life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.
(John 6:24-35)
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Cecil the Lion is no more - and may he rest in peace. Cecil has been in the news a lot lately. Cecil was the alpha male of a pride in a national park in Zimbabwe - easily recognizable by his black mane and much beloved by locals and tourists alike. Cecil was killed a few weeks ago by an American trophy hunter. Now, I’m not an anti-hunting fanatic at all. I don’t hunt myself. I’m too soft-hearted to shoot an animal, to be perfectly honest with you, but if someone hunts and then actually eats the meat or does something productive with the animal, I have no complaints. But trophy hunting seems so pointless. It doesn’t meet any need except the need for self-aggrandizement in my opinion - and the need for self-aggrandizement isn’t a real need. It’s just a desire to feel important or successful. To me, it’s a way of compensating for something that’s lacking in a person’s life. Killing, to me, seems like a rather poor way of proving yourself. It doesn’t meet any real need that a person has.
I found myself thinking about poor Cecil as I read this morning’s Gospel passage. What I found both interesting and unsettling about this passage from John was that the focus of the crowd that was following Jesus was completely off what they really needed. Did you hear what they said to Jesus: “What miracle will you do? If we see a miracle, we will believe you. What will you do?” I found that very strange. You have to think about the broader context of the passage. John tells us that Jesus has been doing miracles all along. This is the same crowd that had seen the feeding miracle we looked at last week. They hadn’t seen him walk on water afterward, but they knew he shouldn’t have been where they found him, and so there must have been something miraculous about how he got there. Last week’s passage actually opened by telling us that the crowd was following him “because they saw the miraculous signs he had performed on the sick.” There have been miracles galore! So, why does the crowd have to see miracles when they’ve already seen them? Some commentators think that the crowd was still hungry and they were asking Jesus to perform another feeding miracle. But that doesn’t seem to me to fit the context. To me, this crowd just seems to have become captivated with Jesus the miracle-worker. It had become like a show to them. At this point it wasn’t so much that they needed anything - they simply wanted a miracle; they wanted to be entertained in a sense. But the miracles themselves weren’t important; Jesus was important. A 19th century commentator referred to Jesus’ miracles as mere “spiritual tokens,” whose only importance was that they revealed Jesus. But the crowd had become obsessed with the signs, rather than with what the signs were pointing to. Sometimes we do get our priorities get confused. Sometimes we start to focus on our wants rather than on our needs. And that’s not healthy.
Wanting what we need is a good thing. Wanting what we need is healthy. To want what we need is to yearn for something that our life is truly not complete without; perhaps for something that we literally can’t live without. To want what we need is to take care of our most basic needs: food, water, shelter, clothing - the things we literally can’t live without. The reading from the Book of Exodus tells us about the people of God having a basic need: wandering in the desert, they were afraid they would starve and so they asked for a basic need to be met. They needed food. And God provided. It wasn’t unlike the Gospel story we heard last week about the feeding of the five thousand. In this morning’s Gospel passage Jesus identifies one other thing that’s a basic spiritual need - the Bread of Life; himself; that which sets us free to live for God. “I am the bread that gives life,” he said. “Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” Maybe the best expression of someone understanding this basic nature of Jesus comes from Paul in Philippians: “I want to know Christ and the power that raised him from the dead.” Paul wanted what he needed! But there’s the other side of the coin. Some people don’t want what they need - some people need what they want, and that’s a problem.
Needing what we want is unhealthy. That’s an addiction that simply shields us from the things in life that we don’t want to face. It’s not wanting things that’s the problem - it’s NEEDING the things that we want! When we reach the point of actually needing the things we want, then these things no longer enhance our lives, they control our lives. They don’t set us free; they enslave us. We see lots of examples of that all around us. We know what sorts of things people get addicted to: drugs and alcohol and gambling spring to mind, but there are other things. I suppose you can get addicted in an unhealthy way to pretty much anything. And the problem is that whatever we’re addicted to, we’ve allowed that thing to become our god, and we live for that thing.
Years ago, when I was serving in Sundridge, we had a homeless person come to our door - one of many really tragic figures of men (because they were almost all men) who seemed to do nothing but hitchhike up and down Highway 11, stopping at churches and the homes of various clergy for food. Lynn and I gave him a couple of hamburgers. It’s what we had available at that time. He took the hamburgers and the whole time he was eating them he complained that we hadn’t given him steak. But he didn’t need steak; he needed food. He was just obsessed with needing what he wanted.
Let’s go back for a moment to the Exodus story. This was just the start. This passage contained a perfectly reasonable request. The people were hungry. “Give us food,” was their response. Of course it was. And God provided manna. I’ll be the first one to admit that - though it may have been from heaven - manna doesn’t sound particularly appetizing. But it was food. Later in the story we’re told that it tasted like wafers made with honey (which doesn’t sound awful, but I don’t know that a steady diet of it day after day would be appealing) and that it looked like coriander seed. Over the course of 40 years, the people continually complained about their food, and God continually provided the manna. God met their needs. After a while, the complaints started to get silly. If we were to fast forward to Numbers 11:5-6, we would find that the complaints by then were no longer that there wasn’t enough food, but that they wanted different food. "Some ... wanted better food, and soon all the Israelites began complaining. They said, 'We remember the fish we ate for free in Egypt. We also had cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions, and garlic. But now we have lost our appetite; we never see anything but this manna!'" In other words, freedom was like a hamburger. It wasn’t as good as a steak, and it certainly wasn't worth it if it didn't at least come with onions!
To be addicted - to need what we want - is to lose sight of what I refer to as the Christian imperative that we always place the needs of the other first. We truly “need” only that which enables us to do the work of Christ - which is essentially the Holy Spirit at work within us, empowering us to serve others. It’s all right to have other things, but when having those other things becomes our priority then we lose sight of Christ - the one thing we truly do need. What did the crowds identify as what they wanted? Again - “What miracle will you do? If we see a miracle, we will believe you. What will you do?”
Like all addicts, they had lost sight of what was truly important - their relationship with Jesus. The Israelites had become consumed by food. Not because they were hungry, but simply because they wanted something else. Having onions and melons and garlic in slavery was more important than having all the manna they needed in freedom. They were held captive by their desire to satisfy not their stomachs but their tastebuds. The crowd following Jesus had become consumed with miracles, and if Jesus wouldn’t do those things over and over and over again they wouldn’t follow him. The miracles were more important to them than Jesus himself. The more miracles they saw, the more miracles they wanted to see - which is classic addictive behaviour. They were held captive by their desire to follow Jesus to see miracles, instead of simply following Jesus to share in his work.
Jesus knew the human condition. Jesus understood that we would - all of us - have an ongoing tendency to put our faith and trust in those things which can’t really meet our deepest needs, which is why he pointed those he encountered to himself. Jesus told us that he is the bread that fulfils all our hunger. Jesus told us that he is the bread of heaven - he is the one who sets us free from the temptation to serve only ourselves so that we can take on his ministry of serving the world - of restoring the world to what God created it to be and restoring humanity to what God intended us to be. That means we have to put God rather than our own desires for the things we don’t really need at the center of our lives. Jesus is the Bread of Life. Jesus really does meet our most basic need of all. Jesus is the proof that we’re important to God just as we are and that God loves us with a love that will not let us go.
Rest in peace, Cecil the lion. You fell victim to the human tendency to need what we want; to become consumed by our unhealthy desires and cravings rather than to focus on what’s truly important. For we who are here today - may our focus be Jesus, and like Paul, may we truly want to know him.
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