A Nourishing Word
Texts for the Thirteenth Sunday After Pentecost | 11 August 2024
In Deuteronomy 8 we hear this recounting of the Exodus narrative when God teaches Israel a lesson that “man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” This is a verse we hear on the lips of Jesus during his wilderness temptation. According to Deuteronomy, God’s word isn’t just something Israel hears. It’s something they eat. Without receiving God’s word, they’ll starve to death.
In this passage we not only learn what God wants to teach Israel, but we also learn something about the way that God teaches his people. He gives them what they don’t know and that their parents never knew so that they might learn through fresh, firsthand experience that God is faithful, trustworthy, and true. God leads his people into uncharted territory so that they can learn by experience what they couldn’t learn otherwise.
In short, God teaches them by confounding them. They have habits to unlearn before they can learn what he wants them to know. What he wants them to know is that humanity is sustained by God’s word.
Surely enough time has passed that we have learned this lesson, right? Or are there other words we internalize that drown out God’s sustaining word? It’s worth considering the other modes of speech that echo off the walls of our minds and threaten to drown out God’s life-giving word. What are those modes of speech that we try to live on but that don’t actually sustain us? Here’s a brief list of what we’re conditioned to hear:
falsehoods that diminish our hope,
platitudes that reinforce our preconceptions,
cheap assurances that masquerade as good news
half-truths that ignore reality,
simple answers that go down easy,
prosaic proclamations that dull our imaginations,
vitriol that dehumanizes our neighbors,
urgent calls to action that stir our anxiety,
advertising that reduces us to consumers.
Perhaps you could expand upon what’s here.
Without a sustaining word from God that can counter our steady diet of these words that diminish our humanity, we will waste away.
I’m reminded of the song we sing regularly on Sunday morning by the Porter’s Gate from their 2020 album Justice Songs. The song is called “All of your ways are peace,” and it includes the line, “Though we have heard so many lies, we trust your words are true.”
In light of this barrage of speech forms that diminish us, it’s a wonder we’re still here.
Perhaps you’ve felt this desire to hear a more substantive, nourishing word. Perhaps you feel it acutely during an election year. Considering all the cheap substitute words that leave us wanting, it’s no wonder Jesus instructs his disciples to pray, “Give us today our daily bread.” Don’t we long to taste something different?
But if indeed we are ingesting all these malnourishing forms of speech every day, and if, against our better judgement, we’ve become accustomed to trying to live on these words, even developed a taste for them, we shouldn’t be surprised when a sustaining word from God becomes unrecognizable to us. His sustaining word might even confuse or repulse us.
This is exactly happens to Israel in the wilderness: God’s provision of manna is bookended by complaints. Before the miracle, the Israelites say, “If only the Lord had killed us back in Egypt.” After the miracle, instead of responding in gratitude, they ask, “What in the world is this?”
We see the same thing happening in the gospel text assigned for today from John 6, which occurs on the heels of a feeding miracle earlier in the chapter. (We’re invited to see the parallel between Jesus’ feeding of the 5,000 and God’s provision of manna in Exodus).
After the feeding miracle, the crowd seeks out Jesus to ask some logical follow-up questions, such as, “Do you mind if we have more of that?”
In response, Jesus expands upon the significance of the feeding miracle and declares his intent to offer his own body as nourishment—not just for a hungry crowd on a hillside, but for the life of the entire world.
Notice how the crowd’s response to Jesus’ miraculous provision of bread in John matches the Israelites’ response to God’s miraculous provision of manna in Exodus.
Twice in John 6, Jesus paraphrases the lesson that God teaches Israel that man does not live by bread alone.
Jesus says, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty” (John 6:35).
Further down, he says, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever, and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh” (John 6:51).
In response to both statements, the crowd is perplexed. Listen to how the their responses:
“Then the Jews began to complain about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven’” (John 6:41).
The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” (John 6:52)
Even the disciples express their frustration:
When many of his disciples heard it, they said, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” (John 6:60)
The disciples might as well be the Israelites, staring blankly at the manna-covered ground and asking, “What’s this supposed to be? What do you expect us to do with this?”
God intends to teach Israel that they are sustained by every word that comes from the mouth of God. Likewise, Jesus intends to teach the crowd they are sustained by the Word made flesh, broken and given for the life of the world.
If the Israelites had to learn this lesson, and the disciples had to learn this lesson, perhaps it should come as no surprise that you and I will have to learn this lesson. We, too, will have to acquire a taste for God’s sustaining word.
It's also possible that God will teach us this lesson in the same way that he taught the Israelites in Exodus and the disciples in John: God gives them what they don’t know and that their parents never knew so that they might know through fresh, firsthand experience that God is faithful, trustworthy, and true.
The same God who offers his word to Israel offers his word to us afresh today.
The same Jesus who offers his body to the disciples desires a firsthand encounter with us today.
Weaning ourselves off the diet of destructive words and acquiring the taste for God’s word is not an easy task, but it’s a necessary one. It takes a lifetime. The author of Hebrews likens the process of being formed into Christlikeness to moving from milk to solid food, of developing discerning taste.
12 For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic elements of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, 13 for everyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is unskilled in the word of righteousness. 14 But solid food is for the mature, for those whose faculties have been trained by practice to distinguish good from evil (Hebrews 5:12-14).
Discipleship involves acquiring a taste for the only word that will truly nourish us.
In Ephesians 4:14, Paul suggests that one of the dangers of trying to live on words that malnourish us is that we’ll become frail enough to be “tossed and blown about by every wind of new teaching. We’ll be easily influenced when people try to trick us with lies so clever they sound like the truth.”
I don’t think it’s inappropriate to consider the practical analogy between what happens in our spirits without God’s sustaining word and what happens to our physical bodies when we’re hungry. We become irritable. Impatient. Inconsiderate. Willing to settle for garbage.
How do we ingest the bread that gives life?
1. We ingest the bread that gives life to the world through learning to pray.
When Jesus instructs his disciples to in Matthew 6, he acknowledges that it’s much easier to heap up empty phrases. For the disciples, as for us, empty phrases are what’s closest at hand.
The line “Give us today our daily bread” is anything but an empty phrase. It’s rich with Scriptural echoes, including the Israelites’ complaint during their wilderness wandering. Consider the layers of significance that surface when we hear Jesus’ instruction on prayer alongside Exodus 16. Perhaps Jesus’ instruction, “Pray this way” includes not only the words they are to pray, but the posture they are to adopt.
Pray this way, Jesus says:
Imagine you’re in the wilderness.
Imagine you’re angry.
Imagine you’re hungry.
Imagine you’re disoriented.”
(For some of us, it doesn’t take much of an imaginative leap to place ourselves there. This set of circumstances might even describe our current reality.)
When we have placed ourselves there, Jesus says we should address God and say, “Give us today our daily bread.” Do you hear how it sounds a bit more like a complaint than a request? Do you hear the urgency behind it?
Now imagine that, like the Israelites, your prayer is answered in a way that you never could have anticipated, and before it occurs to you to thank God for his provision, you ask the question they asked as they saw the longed-for sustenance lying on the ground, “What in the world is this?”
Such is the life of discipleship. Discipleship occurs when, having been led to the far reaches of the wilderness, we direct our complaints to God, from whom we receive an answer that leaves us more confused than before.
But take heart: Confusion is not a sign that you are outside of God’s will. Instead, that sense of disorientation might be the form God’s invitation takes. Taste and see.
How do we acquire a taste for the bread that satisfies? We learn to pray. We adopt the posture of Israel and Jesus when we pray ‘Give us this day our daily bread.’ That posture is defined by desperation, an acute awareness of our need, and expectancy that God will act. Before it’s a prayer Jesus prays in the company of his disciples, it’s a complaint issued in the wilderness, and we’d do well not to separate those two realities.
2. We ingest the bread that gives life to the world through reading Scripture.
Read Scripture until it becomes unfamiliar. Read the hard parts (which are almost all of them).
If the speech we’ve settled for in our daily lives and the loudest voices that we hear most frequently are those that have conditioned us to despair and to reach for easy answers, we’ll probably need to consult a script that works on us in the opposite direction—one that instills hope and drives us to exercise our imaginations. The Bible is living and active in precisely these ways. Reading Scripture attentively helps us, as the author of Hebrews puts it, “train by practice to distinguish good from evil.”
When we read Scripture, we allow it to work on us in all of its complexity. We let it confound and exasperate us.
If we approach Scripture in this way, we might render that well known Psalm, “I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you” slightly differently. We might hear it instead as, “I have ingested your word that I might not settle for whatever unhealthy option is closest at hand.”
3. We ingest the bread that gives life to the world through building one another up.
If the bread that Jesus offers is his body, and we are his body, we are to offer ourselves to one another.
As we saw above in Ephesians 4:14, Paul says that one of the dangers of trying to live on words that diminish us is that it puts us in danger of becoming so frail that we’ll be blown away. How can we counter this malnourishment? Paul suggests that we do so by speaking truth to each other.
“But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ” (Eph 4:15)
God’s word sustains us, and we mature as we speak those words to others. When we speak the truth in love, we can be a source of daily bread for the body of Christ. You and I can be an answer to the Lord’s Prayer.
What does this sound like? Perhaps it sounds like the words of Paul when he introduces his description of the Lord’s Supper in 1 Corinthians 11 by writing to the church, “For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you.”
4. Finally, we develop a taste for the bread that gives life to the world through receiving Christ’s body at the table.
God desires a relationship with you. The problem is that you and I have been conditioned to accept cheap substitutes. But the invitation is as open today as it was when the Psalmist first uttered it:
“Taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:8). At the table, God in Christ offers us a his sustaining word: a fresh, firsthand experience of his faithfulness, trustworthiness, and truth.