The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
It had been a very long day for both Jesus and the disciples. Jesus spent that previous day preaching to thousands and healing hundreds. He multiplied a few loaves of bread and some fish to feed 5,000 men, plus their entire families. As darkness was about to fall, Jesus sent the people home, and He put His disciples into a boat and pointed them toward the direction of Capernaum. He stayed behind there for a while to rest and to pray, undisturbed. But then some men from Tiberias came and went to the place where Jesus had fed the 5,000. But by the time they had arrived, there was really nothing to see. Jesus and the disciples were both gone. The men determined that they would go and follow after Him. And when they had discovered that He had gone to Capernaum, they noticed something unusual: namely, that the disciples had gone away in a boat by themselves, but Jesus wasn’t with them. But all the boats were accounted for. That left a question in their mind: How did He get there? But nonetheless, they got to Capernaum, and they approached Jesus, and they asked Him, “Rabbi, when did You come here?” It seems like an innocent enough question, but Jesus was more interested in examining the reason for which they had crossed the sea themselves to see Him. So He said, “Truly, truly, I say to you, you are seeking Me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.”
You see, signs — I saw a lot of them between here and Tucson, and Tucson on the way back. They point you to something. They tell you something about what’s about to happen, or what’s going to be where when you get there. Signs do more than inform. They also lead. It becomes kind of obvious: if you’re on a long trip, you have to follow the signs, not the GPS system all the time necessarily, but the signs, to get where you want to get. And that’s the point of Jesus’ query. Signs point to something — in this case, something noble and true. In regard to Jesus, a sign was usually some kind of miracle or thing that He did. Nicodemus understood the function of signs in God’s economy. Nicodemus, the ruler of the Jews, understood what the purpose was. He said, “Rabbi, we know that You are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that You do unless God is with him.” He understood that miracles, as well as the doctrine that Jesus preached and taught, was a sign of a kind of authority that could only be granted and given by the Lord God Himself. And now Jesus had performed a great, large-scale, very, very public ministry. He fed 5,000 men plus their families in one setting, using just five loaves of bread and two fish. He performed a sign for all to see. And the people, including those from Tiberias, responded to the signs in exactly the wrong way. They were more interested in bread than they were in the One who had given them the bread, or the doctrine of the One who had provided for them the meal. They focused on temporal bread rather than the Bread of Life, the Giver of eternal life. They were thinking: free food! Food, yippee!
And the Bible says that. And people say that what the Bible says today is completely irrelevant. But we have more government free programs today than ever before. We’re bankrupting the entire system because we want to give away free stuff to people who don’t contribute to the collective money. We have businesses begging people to come back to work, and still a great many stay away, doing pretty much absolutely nothing of value for their neighbors. We have people who get a monthly supply of food who don’t have to work for it. Businesses begging people to come back to work, and still a great many people stay home. We have created a generation, or two or three, of classes of people who live in the moment and don’t have any real function toward servicing their family, their neighbors, their neighborhoods, their towns, their country — and especially, they don’t have much to do, if anything at all, with the church. But the exploited underclass are not the only ones interested in getting free stuff, and placing a priority on temporal things and needs over what really matters in the world. Even the well-to-do boast about the rebates they can get buying EVs from the government, and how they can get the prices down because the government’s got all this extra money to spend in order to incentivize certain things and to discourage others. We love the fact that the government gives away more money than it takes in. It’s not just the poor that like it. The middle class and the wealthy too enjoy these benefits of free something to everyone.
But before Jesus fed the 5,000 with the bread and the fish, He fed them the Word of God first. He preached and taught and healed and forgave sins all day long. They were signs that pointed to the fact that Jesus was, in fact, the Son of the Living God, who had authority to do all those things, especially to preach the Gospel, and to heal, and to forgive sins, for only God could do these things. In John 6:15 we’re told that right after the crowd had finished eating the bread and the fish, they tried to take Him by force to make Him king. They wanted somebody to give them free stuff too. Having followed after Jesus, the second group from Tiberias might have had the very same idea when they approached Christ. But Jesus was primarily concerned with the most serious human condition of all: the condition that causes all other harmful conditions in this world, namely sin. He tells people: “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.” In the subsequent verses, the words “signs” and “works” go back and forth like a ping-pong ball. Jesus said to them, “You seek Me because you saw signs,” and then goes on and continues, “Do not work for food which perishes” — there’s the word “work” — “but for food which endures to everlasting life.” And they respond: “What must we do, to be doing the works of God?” The word for “works” is: what do we have to do? They’re looking for a list. They want a to-do list. Which, by the way, we have no trouble with the government providing those these days either. You have a list of things that you are to believe, to say, and to do, if you’re going to be considered a good citizen and worthy of both the merit of the government and of whatever god they have established. Jesus replied, “This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent.” In this context, the work of God is the work that is done without human aid. There’s no synergism in one’s conversion. It is God doing all the work, and the human being the one upon whom He is working, receiving that which He gives. It’s the work of God. It’s the work God accomplishes in and through the Word and Sacrament ministry of the church. The work that God does is the creation of faith in the human heart. Luther wrote and spoke frequently about the nature of faith. Faith is the hand that God gives you to receive the gift of faith itself.
These men from Tiberias said to Jesus, “Then what sign do You do, that we may see and believe You? What work do You perform?” A verse that should come to mind is: “Thou shalt not put the Lord your God to the test.” But here we have these men putting the Lord God to the test. “You prove to us. You answer to us by doing the sign we want You to do.” In essence, they’re telling Jesus He needs to provide evidence if they are going to follow and believe after Him, even though they’ve already seen the works of God. They’ve heard the teachings of Christ, the Son of the Living God. They demand more. And that’s just pure simple nature. If you give somebody one thing, the next day they’re going to want a second thing, and the next day a third thing. It’s the nature of sinful human beings. We’re seeing it played out in our own day. The more you give people, the more the people demand that you give to them. We become addicted to freebies: free income, free food, free rent, free utilities. In many places, people can simply walk into a store and walk out with whatever they want, and now it belongs to them. No compensation needed. “Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.'” They’re trying to bait Jesus. They want the specific, the very specific gift of free food. After all, in Rome, in the Colosseum, if you went to see the gladiators or a spectacle, you were given free bread. If Rome can do it, then the King of the Jews ought to be able to do it too. They’re trying to bait Jesus to do what they think Moses did. But they forget — they forget that their ancestors quickly turned against both quail and manna and complained about it. Numbers 21:5: “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we loathe this worthless food” — that is, manna and quail. The old nature is never satisfied. It always asks for more. More proof that God is God, right? How many times over the time of our life cycle do we cry out to God: “Show me that You’re still here, God. Prove to me in my circumstance that You still are with me.” It’s just human nature. It’s never satisfied. It always asks for more.
John the Evangelist added this personal commentary in John chapter 2 about the people who follow Jesus: “Many believed in His name as they observed the signs which He was doing. But Jesus on His part was not entrusting Himself to them, because He knew all people.” In other words, Jesus knew they were following Him simply because of what they were getting out of Him. That’s all. Luther wrote in his commentary on this text: “The announcement that the Gospel would fill their bellies, that it would provide plentifully for this life and afford a good living, pleases the people. They say, as it were, ‘This man is a man for us. Who would not like him? We too would like such a preacher.’ They pay no attention to Christ’s words, to learn what He wants to teach them. They go not where He wants to lead them, but they are happy over the prospect that He will fill their bellies and give them only earthly goods and money. But that is not the point. The Gospel does not fill the belly. It has something different to do.” End of quote.
People invoked the miracle of manna, but did so without understanding. “Truly, truly, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but My Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is He who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” Jesus wants to make sure they understand three fundamental things about His work, about His person, about His ministry. First, who was it that gave their fathers the manna? God Himself. Moses is merely the vehicle. Second, who is giving them real bread, the bread that gives real life? God the Father Himself gives them eternal life. Third, what is the bread that comes down from heaven? The bread is Christ Himself: His person, His perfect life, His work, His substitutionary death on the cross, and His glorious resurrection and ascension to heaven. They said to Him, “Sir, give us this bread always.” Hear the word “always.” We want this bread to never end. Just keep giving it to us. And Jesus says, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to Me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in Me shall never thirst.” Chapter six is known as the Bread of Life discourse. It’s a fancy way of saying the Bread of Life sermon. At the beginning of His sermon, bread, hunger, eating, thirsting, and drinking are all metaphors for Christ, for the Gospel, and for true Christian faith. They are all about Jesus and believing in Him. Later in the sermon, Jesus moves from using those metaphors to speaking about sacramental eating, in true Christian faith, partaking of His body and His blood in the Lord’s Supper, in true Christian faith. As remarkable as the manna from heaven was, it was meant to point to a greater miracle yet to come: God sending His Son, to be born of a virgin, and accomplishing the work of salvation, the atonement for the sin of the whole world.
Here, then, are the signs that God works for you. First, let’s do the works of God. Jesus did them all for you. He obeyed every one of the commandments, to the letter and to the spirit. He obeyed perfectly the will of His Heavenly Father, accomplishing the mission for which He was sent into the world. He led the perfect life and died the death of a sinner. Jesus has done all the good works needed in your stead, and gave you all the credit for the good works that He had done throughout His whole life. His works became your works. He took your place. He took your sin unto Himself. And He imputes unto you His perfect righteousness, holiness, and innocence. As for the signs: the first sign is, in fact, the preaching and the teaching of the Law and the Gospel. That’s why, before Jesus does just about any miracle in the Gospels, He is found first preaching and teaching doctrine. Just think of it as He’s holding over and over again the new members class, in which He’s clearly preaching and teaching in a way that is different than everything they’ve ever heard from their local rabbis throughout their life. He preaches with authority that no one else had or employed. And faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God. The second sign is the sign of Holy Baptism: being baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. That combines His Word with His water, washes you clean, creates a new nature, adopts and grafts you into the family of God, and seals you in true grace. The third sign is Holy Absolution: when the pastor stands before you, after you confess your sins, and he says, “In the stead and by the command of my Lord Jesus Christ, I forgive you all your sins. Amen.” When the pastor says that, he’s not merely describing something. He’s actually doing something: namely, imparting to you the forgiveness of sins and grace Christ has given to you already. He’s doing it to you. The fourth sign given to you, that you may have true Christian faith, is Holy Communion, the Lord’s Supper. Christ is the living bread which came down from heaven. In Holy Communion, He joins Himself to the elements of bread and wine, and He forgives you your sin as you partake in true Christian faith. The bread and wine are not just symbols of forgiveness. They impart it. In, with, and under His body and blood, you receive the remission of all of your sins.
Through the world, these signs appear mundane, silly, for the weak-minded: ancient rituals which have lost all meaning, value, and power. That’s how the world, and quite frankly an awful lot of non-sacramental churches, also see it that way. All the happy-clappy things that are all about contemporary — well, you need to grow out of those things and come into sort of a new kind of experience of Christian faith. And in so doing, they lead people away from the true Christ and the work of the church. To the world, these signs simply are silly. But we’re told in 1 Corinthians 1:27: “God has chosen the foolish things of this world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of this world to shame the things that are strong.” Christ is the one who gives you salvation. He’s the one that has said to you, “I am the bread of life. He who comes to Me will never hunger, and he who believes in Me will never thirst.” And thus you are filled. You’re filled on the bread and the wine of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, for your sins have been forgiven. Amen.
May the peace that surpasses all understanding keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.