48 I am the bread of life. 49 Your forefathers ate the manna in the desert, yet they died. 50 But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which a man may eat and not die. 51 I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.”
Jesus repeats his divine claim: “I am the bread of life.” Now he explains this more completely. The manna came down from heaven in Moses’ time, but it stopped. But Jesus is the bread that came down from heaven and lasts for us all. The manna gave life in the desert for forty years, but Jesus is the bread that gives life forever.
Now Jesus gives us something that is hard to understand. He says that his own flesh is bread, given for the life of the world. It’s easy for a Christian to imagine that Jesus is talking about the Lord’s Supper. But the institution of the Lord’s Supper was a year away. But if we just look at what Jesus has been saying, we will remember that in verse 47 Jesus said that what gives eternal life is believing in Jesus. It’s faith.
The key to understanding what Jesus means seems to me to be his words, “I will give.” What Jesus gave for the life of the world was his body on the cross. Giving his body, which is to say his life, was the sacrificial act which atoned for our sins. When the Old Testament believers ate the meat of a sacrifice, they took part in the atonement it brought to them and were brought into fellowship with God. Now Christ’s own flesh and blood were going to be offered on our behalf, and by trusting in him we take part in this same offering, given on our behalf, just as the family of a man offering a sacrifice in the temple waited while the offering was made and trusted that it would take place. We trust our Savior. We are given life, eternal life, because of his sacrificial death for us.
At this point, some of the Jews could not handle what Jesus was saying:
52 Then the Jews began to argue sharply among themselves, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” (NIV)
They knew what he meant, but they chose to stumble over his words. He would explain himself one more time, because he knew that he was rocking their world. Everything in Judaism had remained the same, without any change for hundreds of years. But now, just as in the days of Moses, God was bringing a change to his people; a fulfillment of promises. Before Moses came, the people were oppressed, but their world was stable and constant. Then, with Moses, came deliverance and freedom but also new laws, including the Ten Commandments. From that point, they were to remain faithful until the Messiah came. But now Jesus was before them, proving again and again that he is the Messiah. But the Jews were faced with change once again.
If Jesus were the Messiah, then their world, their lives, and even their understanding of their faith would be different—it would never again focus on a hope in the future, but on facts in the present and in the past.
And that’s what makes our world of faith in Christ so blessed and so irrevocably joyful: Our faith is based on what has already been accomplished for us by our Savior God.
Something extra:
Ecclesiastes 2:4-6
4 I undertook great projects:
I built houses for myself and planted vineyards.
5 I made gardens and parks
and planted all kinds of fruit trees in them.
6 I made reservoirs
to water groves of flourishing trees. (NIV)
Solomon goes into detail now about some of the other pleasures he undertook. In verses 4-6, the pleasures are bright and done in full view for all to see. Verse 7 will show us a darker side of Solomon’s culture and of Solomon himself.
Solomon would have needed houses, many houses, to provide for his vast harem of a thousand women (1 Kings 11:3). We are told in the Bible that he also provided his many foreign wives with shrines and temples for their detestable gods and goddesses, like Ashtoreth, Milcom, Molech and Chemosh.
The Hebrew word for “garden” is common to several languages. It’s the word paradise, which occurs in Assyrian, Babylonian and Aramaic. The Greeks also borrowed it. It’s usually a reference to an enclosed garden with shrubs, trees and a water-source; what we would think of as a park. In the Bible, the Hebrew form only occurs here, in Song of Solomon 4:13 (“orchard”) and Nehemiah 2:8 (a reference to “the king’s forest”), although the Greek word paradise is of course on our Savior’s lips on the cross (“today you will be with me in paradise,” Luke 23:43), on Paul’s mind when he describes his own vision of heaven (2 Corinthians 12:4), and it’s the word that comes to John’s mind when he, too, sees a vision of the world to come (Revelation 2:7). In the Greek translation of the Old Testament, the word paradise is used more than a dozen times to describe the Garden of Eden.
Finally in verse 4 Solomon refers to “reservoirs” and “groves.” Perhaps these are the same reservoirs Solomon calls “the pools of Heshbon” (Song of Solomon 7:4).
Solomon’s parks and gardens were a wonderful undertaking; Israel bloomed and became green under his leadership. Perhaps his public works resembled the ideals of President Roosevelt in the days of America’s recovery from the Great Depression. But notice that he keeps saying, “I made…I undertook.” Solomon did these things for himself, in his own interest.
But making the world a better place, as noble as it sounds, is not our main goal in life any more than enjoying wine or having fun. Solomon is systematically weeding out his garden of pleasures to see what will remain when he finally burns away the last of his vanities. It shouldn’t surprise us at all to find our relationship with God standing there alone, with all of our pleasures and all of our good works missing, and nothing at all besides.
What counts for us in eternity is our Savior. And his forgiveness surrounds us on every side like new flowers blooming in an early spring. The nightmare of our sinfulness is ended in the dawn of Christ’s resurrection.
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in New Ulm, Minnesota. His wife, Kathryn, attended Chapel from 1987-1990 while studying Secondary Education (Theater and Math) at UW-Madison. Kathryn’s father, John Meyer, was also the first man to serve as a Vicar at Chapel.
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