Lent 4

John 6:1-15 - Laetare Sunday - March 6, 2016
Receiving Our Bread with Thanksgiving

+

They saw signs and miracles.  God was with them.  He did good things.  They followed Him.  He did fearful things.  They witnessed ten plagues on Egypt by which they were set free.  They themselves crossed the Red Sea on dry ground and saw Pharaoh’s army drown.  They had seen marvel after marvel, and so they followed Moses the prophet of God deep into the desert.  There God assured them that they would be safe from their enemies.  The Almighty God was clearly on their side.  Yet despite every possible encouragement to just take things as they came, they still they complained.  All they saw was that God had brought them into the wilderness where there was no food.  Despite their ingratitude, God kept them alive by means of manna.  He did this certainly out of kindness, but also in order to test them.  He bypassed all the usual means by which mankind is fed in order that they might recognize more clearly that God has always been the source of their daily bread.  God removed all the middlemen so-to-speak – no field, no farmer, no market, no bakery – and He fed them straight from heaven – literally.  How much clearer could God have made it that their daily bread always came from Him?  God tested them to see if they would thereby learn to receive it with thanksgiving.  

And how did they do?  Did they pass the test?  No.  They grumbled.  “What is it?” they whined.   Despite all they had seen … they utterly failed.  

 The reason we fall into the sin of idolatry and devote ourselves more to our stuff than to God who gives it is not because it is somehow less than obvious where our stuff comes from.  No, it is perfectly obvious for anyone who can follow a dotted line that everything we have is from God.  It is God who waters the earth, giving seed to the sower and bread to the one who eats.  He gives strength to the worker, cleverness to the inventor, endurance to the mother, health to the child.  The reason our hearts are nonetheless so drawn to our mammon is not because God has failed to make these things more obvious, but because we are sinners.  We do not trust God.  There is a deep corruption in our hearts – a corruption not simply of our intellect as though it’s too hard to figure this all out, but of our will.  We would rather hold onto the stuff that makes life comfortable than hold onto the almighty and gracious God who gives it to us — no matter how obvious he makes it that it all comes from Him.  We therefore do well to consider those words which we sang a couple Sundays ago from Psalm 100:

Know that the Lord, He is God;
It is He who has made us, and not we ourselves;
We are His people and the sheep of His pasture. 

Lent 4

John 6:25-35 - Laetare Sunday - March 15, 2015
Jesus is the Bread of Life

+

Our introit this morning is where we get the name for this Sunday in the church year: Laetare.  Laetare means rejoice, as in that portion of the introit that is taken from Isaiah 66:

“Rejoice with Jerusalem, and be glad with her, all you who love her; that you may feed and be satisfied with the consolation of her bosom” (Isaiah 66:10-11). 

As I preached last Sunday, and as we heard in this morning’s Epistle lesson, Jerusalem is the Holy Christian Church.  She is our mother.  She gives us birth through Holy Baptism.  But like any mother who cannot give birth without there being a father, so also the Church cannot give birth to us apart from our Father in heaven.  The mother bears.  The Father begets.  St. Peter writes concerning the new birth of Baptism when he says that we have “been born again, not of corruptible seed but incorruptible, through the word of God which lives and abides forever” (1 Peter 1:23).  The power of Baptism is the word of God.  What our mother gives us she first receives from our Father.  So likewise, we feed at our mother’s bosom by hearing and keeping the word of Christ, which he gives to his Church.   His word sets us free from our sin and ignorance.  St. Peter writes about this in the next chapter of the same letter:

Lent 4

John 6:1-15 - Laetare Sunday - March 30, 2014
God Tests the People He Loves

Jesus did signs.  We usually call them miracles or wonders.  They are the things that Jesus was able to do because he is God.  He healed the sick, cast out demons, gave sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf.  They are the things that we cannot explain according to natural causes.  But we don’t have to.  Jesus did not exercise his power and authority as the eternal Son of God made flesh in order that we might figure out how he does what he does — no, but rather why he does what he does.  Jesus did miracles for two reasons: 1) to have compassion on the people God loves, and 2) to direct them to where this love of God is constantly accessible to them.  That is why St. John calls them signs. 

A sign points to something.  A sign draws your attention to itself only for long enough to draw your attention away from itself and on to something else.  Take, for instance, the signs on the side of the road. 

Lent 4

John 6:1-15 - Laetare, Lent IV - March 18, 2012 

Bread of Life

For 40 days, Jesus fasted in the wilderness.  He went entirely without food, and drank only water.  He was incredibly hungry.  This exercise was not intended to provide some sort of health benefit.  In fact, by today’s fitness-obsessed standards, this was physically reckless of Jesus.   Neither was this exercise of hunger intended to drive Him deeper into Himself for some sort of soul-searching journey.  No, but as Jesus says in John 4, “My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me, and to finish His work.”  In His hunger, therefore, Jesus sought the will of His Father.  He did not seek council in the wanderings of His human mind, but found solid refuge in the written word of God. 

And that’s what we do—because Jesus teaches us how.  At the end of these 40 days, when He was tempted by the devil to use His divine power to feed Himself, Jesus resisted by quoting from Deuteronomy 8: “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.”  This was the lesson that God had given the children of Israel by feeding them manna as they wandered in the wilderness for 40 years.  These events were recorded for our learning.  And so by the patience and comfort of the Scriptures, Jesus learned the same lesson Himself during His 40 days of fasting.  He hungered and thirsted for us.  And in His self-denial, Jesus fulfilled what we have left undone. 

It is Lent.  It is a time for repentance.  During these 40 days we give special consideration to the sin of which we ought to repent, and to our need for God to have mercy on us.  We do this first by solemnly listening to His word and consenting to its verdict of guilty; and second by seeking refuge in His word that pronounces us innocent.  We need to hear both words – both the law that exposes and kills us, and the gospel that covers and revives us.  Both words are necessary.  We live by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.