I Am: The Bread of Life

Okay, we're going to jump into our series and I'm so excited because this is the last service. So I don't have to be done quickly and preach at another service. And the reason that matters is because you get a double dose of the bonus content. Like if I was going to attend a service, this would probably be the one I would attend only because you get all the --first of all, I've already practiced a couple of times, so you get the polished version of it, but you also get all the men. I wish I had time for that. Um, okay. So we're moving into this new series called I am, and we're going to work through the seven statements of John in his gospel, the claims that Jesus makes about himself and what's happening there and why are these so significant and what is John trying to communicate? 

And so, Jesus makes a lots of claims about himself. Why are these seven? Why does John need these seven? And also, what can we learn? Not just, what does it mean for them, but what can we learn about it if we understand that conversation around that statement? And so I want to give us kind of a bigger picture. I believe that for many of us, when we read the Bible, we read the Bible in such a way that we treat it as if it was the people who were the first readers of the first people that it was written to, that they think and reason the world, the same way that we do, and nothing could be further from the truth. 21st century Americans and first century people in the Roman empire don't see the world the same way. And so, we've got to understand that and it doesn't make what we know today wrong. What it means is that we can add color and depth and meaning and beauty to what we're learning. If we'll take the time to get in there and figure some of this stuff out. Okay. So, I want to give us a bit of context for the gospel of John and also for the letter of Revelation, and then we'll go from there. So, I want to begin with a map. Let's start with a map. Look, we're showing pictures again. Isn't this fun. 

So, this is a map of the Roman empire in the first century. And what's interesting is that line -- that big yellow line in the middle is not there by mistake. This is kind of the dividing line between the Western part of the Roman empire and the Eastern part of the Roman empire. Now, if you go all the way down on the right hand corner, there's the word Arabia, do you see that? Okay, good. So right to the left of that is Petraea. And that section right there, that's where Jesus lived. That's where the Jesus story happens is right there. So, Jesus gets his followers. He's crucified. He raises from the dead and then he ascends back into heaven. And now what we're left with is these, these apostles, these disciples, they're having to figure out what to do with the rest of their life. 

Where are they going to go? How are they going to survive all of this? Okay. So what's interesting is the world empires that started on the Western side of this line started in a very specific way. Now there's some that started on the Eastern side of Syria, Persia, Babylon. Those all started over past Arabia, but on the Western side, the two majors are Greece and Rome. They both started on the Western side of this line. And what's fascinating is that when the leaders of these, which is Alexander the Great and, really Julius Caesar in the beginning, but it continues on with the Caesars of Rome as they conquer the West and move East. They start as a great military leader in the West, and when they returned from the East, they return as a God. There's something that happens in the Eastern paradigm that allows them to elevate themselves to the status of God. 

And the Eastern world really bought it. Now, that doesn't mean that they were a God and the Western side, like where Rome is in Italy and all the, like, they didn't really buy that. The Caesars were gods. They tolerated the claim because they didn't have a choice because Caesar is Caesar. And if I don't be nice to him, you know, that's not going to go well, but it doesn't mean they really bought it. But they bought it at right in the middle to the left, to the right side. The Eastern side of that yellow line, there's a region there called Asia. Do you see that? Okay, so Asia, if you were to draw a circle around that region, that whole region is called Asia minor in the Bible, modern day Turkey. This is why we go to Turkey for study tour, because that becomes the epicenter of Christianity, at least. 

Some people speculate as many as nine of the apostles moved from this little tiny section over here. They moved and made their center in Asia minor and that whole region. And they were, so they came in, like they parachute dropped in these church plants. They didn't, they didn't know anybody. They didn't have a community. There was no Bible there. They had no church to draw from. And within a hundred years, almost the entire region is Christian. This is before Constantine. This is before the legalization of Christianity it’s before all of that. These are people who live in a world where they will be butchered and tortured for their faith and they turn the entire region -- and the reason why that matters is because Asia minor is where East meets West. Asia minor becomes this melting pot of Western mindsets and Eastern mindsets. And what happens as a result of that is the worship of the gods. The pagan gods really start to escalate because they're trying to compete with this Western worldview that they're trying to fight. 

And it becomes, this incredibly gets pagan to the core in our world. It's like, believe in God, or don't believe in God, right? That's kind of the battle we face.  For them, it was believing the one God of the Bible, or believe in the Roman Pantheon. And because Christians chose to believe in one God instead of the whole pantheon they were put to death for being an atheist for rejecting the gods. Now towards the end of the first century -- and I'm going to say late eighties to mid nineties A.D., John is Ephesus. If you go to the yellow line again and go just to the right of it, where Asia is right on the coastline of Asia, there is two black dots. One is Ephesus. And one is Mietas. Ephesus is John's base of operation. Ephesus is where John is living and building relationships.  Now he has other churches that he's pastoring as well, but Ephesus is kind of his place of residence. The people that live in Ephesus, he knows them. He loves them. He's pastoring them. He prays with them. He hurts with them. He does life with these people. And the reason why that matters is that right towards the end of the eighties, there is a Caesar that rises named Domitian. And where a lot of the other Caesars. They liked emperor worship. Domitian demanded it. And Ephesus becomes what's called Nechorus. Ephesus becomes the center in the entire Roman empire, the center of Domitian worship. And John is writing his gospel there. My letter to them would be really short. Move! John writes his gospel there and the letter of Revelation, by the way. And he doesn't say move. He says endure. Domitian was so evil that when he died, the Roman empire passed a law that struck his memory from history. He was evil to the pagan Romans. So evil, damnatio memoriae, I believe is the Latin term. It's close to that -- damnation of memory. And so anywhere in the entire Roman empire, anywhere, his name was, they chiseled it out. Any statue of him, they knocked the head off and put a different head on it. Like anything that represented Domitian was destroyed. He was that evil. And in the center of where they call him a God, John is pastoring a group of Jesus followers, and they need to have a conversation. And it's into that world that John writes his gospel. So you better believe that he is not going to waste real estate. This isn't just a let's hang out this summer, call me some time. This letter is not a yearbook note. This letter is John looking on the horizon of things, seeing what's happening and saying, guys, buckle up. All those fears that you have about that -- how bad it could be, guess what, it's going to be worse. But, to him, that overcomes -- John's not asking them to evacuate. He's asking them to endure. And maybe there's a message for us in that today. I want to begin – one of the things that John is doing is, his gospel is a rebuttal against the pagan gods of Asia minor. And so he's wrestling with things like, how do I make this the message, the story of who Jesus is, right? He needs to help these people understand it. We've wrestled with the same thing here. Let me give you a perfect example of how this works. Any Seattle Seahawks fans in the room? One, I'm surprised we had that many -- I'm surprised we had that many that admitted it. Let's be honest. If I go up to a Seattle Seahawks fan and I say to them, listen, whatever you do, don't throw the football. They know exactly what I'm talking about, because there's a context for that statement for them, right? For those of you that are like, what does that even mean? Right. Cause only Broncos all the time. You know what I'm saying? So let me tell you this story. During the NFC championship game, they're on the one yard line and they have the best running back in the NFL that year, like legit dominant running back, Marshawn Lynch, one yard line, the one. Russell Wilson drops back throws into the end zone and gets, gets picked off and they lose the game. Whoops. Oh, there was a lot of blame to be had all the way around on that one, right? For a Seattle Seahawks fan, that is the worst moment in Seahawks history. And for the record, there have been some bad ones over the years. Like the running joke in Washington was, you know, Spokane doesn't have a professional football team because if they did Seattle would want one too. Like there's been a lot of years, not so great. The context matters to these statements.

And when John writes his letter, he's writing, not taking the time to write all that context out because his assumption is that the people that he's writing to will know what he's talking about. For example, we came from the Paloose, this region of Washington and Idaho, that is a very agricultural area. Metaphors that Jesus uses about farming and wheat and all those kinds of things made a lot of sense on the Paloose. They did because the people generally got what was going on, right? They understand the law of seed time and harvest of sowing and reaping. They understand they get all that. Now most of the people in our church, not everybody, but most of the people in our church have never grown anything ever. They're like, where did vegetables come from the store, nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with that. It's just a cultural difference. And so understanding that once we get into those cultures, like the culture of the area, shapes the message. The culture of the specific body of people that you're writing to, or talking to, that shapes the message. And then the message itself doesn't make it right or wrong. It just means how do we shape it to make it make sense to people that are listening to it. And that's the task that John is trying to take on in John chapter six, actually in this entire gospel. Here's what's going on in John 6, Jesus has just fed 5,000 people with a little boy’s sack lunch, five loaves and two fish. Now, before I go any further, the fact that five loaves of bread was in one boy's lunch -- that's a problem. That's a mom who doesn't understand the effect of carbs on diabetes, right? Like that's a little boy that needs to meet Atkins. But, Jesus, that's funny. Jesus feeds 5,000 people with five loaves and two fish. Why five? And there's a whole conversation on that. Why, why do we need to know that? And why do we need to know that there's 12 basketfuls left over? Well, for the same reason that we need to know that Jesus also went to the area of the seven pagan nations, which we call the Decapolis and he fed 4,000 people there was seven loaves and a few fish cause apparently the Holy spirit forgot the number. And then he had seven basketballs leftover --seven pagan nations, seven loaves of bread, seven basketfuls left over – maybe we ought to pay attention to that. Jesus's statement is I am the bread of life for the people of Israel. Then he goes on to say I’m the bread of life for the pagan nations, too. Come on! Now he's the bread of life for both sides of the street. Maybe that's a lesson. 

What happens then is Jesus dismisses his disciples. And he says, I want you to get in a boat and go on the other side. So they get in a boat. He's not with them. And they go across the Lake and the storm comes up  -- surprise! Because every time they get on the Lake, a storm comes up. It seems like they’d quit getting on the Lake. Jesus is not with them and he doesn't have a boat. So what he does is he walks out to them on the water. You know, like you do, when you don't have a boat, you just walk on the water. He calms the storm. And then the next story in John is there in Ganesereth and we go, Oh, that's interesting. No, no, no. Let me, let me draw you a map. This is sea of Galilee. This is my high tech map. I'm gonna draw it on my Palm pilot. Jesus feeds 5,000 people here on this, right off the shore. They get in a boat and they head this way and they encountered the storm somewhere over here. And then the next story they are in Ganesereth, which is here.We don't know how, like how, what happened. Well, here's why John doesn't take the time to explain that because he doesn't care. Geographically. None of the people who are reading this from him are gonna know where Ganesereth is, it’s not like they could jump on Google and look at a map. They don't -- John's point isn't the location. John's point is the story and the evolving understanding of what it means that Jesus fed them. Are you with me? That's what's going on there. And so then Jesus starts to have a conversation. So we have this feeding of the bread, then the calming of the storm and then, now, we have this conversation with the Pharisees starting in verse 25. Here's what it says. When they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him, Rabbi, where'd you come from? How'd you get over here. Jesus answered them. 

Truly, truly I say to you, you're seeking me. Not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Okay? So what Jesus is saying is these people were all there when Jesus fed 5,000 people with a sack lunch, okay. That matters in a second, do not work for the food that perishes, but for food that endures to eternal life. Food, that's eternal food. Why does that phrase matter to John? Which the son of man will give you. For on him, God, the father has set a seal, which is a whole other sermon, but it's really cool. So the seal, then I said to him, what must we do to be doing the works of God? Jesus answered them. This is the work of God that you believe in him, who he has sent. So they said to him, then what sign do you do that we may see and believe you? They just saw a sign! What's the problem. He's like, Hey, I don't need – like, remember yesterday? What work do you perform? Our fathers ate manna in the wilderness. Okay. We're back to this bread thing. Again, our fathers ate manna in the wilderness. As it is written, he gave them bread from heaven to eat. Who's the he? Jesus then said to them, 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. My father gives you the true bread from heaven. Why does John need to make that point to his people? For the bread of God, is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world. And they said to him, sir, give us this bread always. Jesus said to them, I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me shall not hunger. And whoever believes in me shall never thirst. But I say to you that you have seen me and yet do not believe all the father gives me will come to me. And whoever comes to me, I will never cast . For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me. And this is the will of him who sent me that I should lose nothing of all that he's given me, but raise it up on the last day. When will it be raised up? Why did the people that John's writing this gospel to need to know this story? For this is the will of my father that everyone who looks on the son and believes in him should have eternal life. And I will raise him up on the last day.

Well, this is interesting because John writes his gospel late in the first century. And up until that point, there were these three other gospels that kind of emerged as the ones that were really telling the story correctly. That was Matthew, Mark, and Luke and John at the end of the first century, he reads these things like, man, those are great. But if they just, if they would just tell this story or tell that story this way, then all of a sudden my people that I'm serving, the people that I love and know that would mean so much to them. And so John takes it on himself to write a different account and it fills in the gaps. He says this in his gospel, that it's different. So we have the three that are called the synoptic gospels. And then we have John, which is like, the John is like the three toed sloth of the gospels. It's painfully slow -- like a third of his gospel deals with one day. We'll talk about why that's so important. Mark, as a gospel, totally different. Mark is like the action movie. It's like the Adam West Batman television series of the gospels. Mark is like, and he was born and then he did some things and then he died and then he rose and now he's gone.  That's the whole gospel of Mark. It's like you remember the, when Batman would punch somebody in the old television series and be like “POW!”, that's Mark, not John. John is like, it was 10 in the morning, and then it was 10:01, and time kept marching. Like that's John, slow. Why is he telling us this story? Why do we need to know Jesus is the bread of life?

I want to introduce you to a goddess named Demeter. You can also call her Demeter if you want to, wherever you choose to put your emphasis is okay. Demeter is a Greek goddess. Her Roman name is Ceres, which we get our word cereal from, which means that every time that you eat cereal, you are acknowledging the source of grain. So any time that you would eat grain in the ancient world of any kind, although bread being the most dominant thing that you would make out of grain, of course it makes sense. Any time that you would eat grain, you are acknowledging Demeter or Ceres. Now I want to show you another picture. In order to be a part -- if you want to serve Demeter, first of all, you had the female, there were no priests in the service of Demeter -- doesn't mean men didn't worship her. It just means in the service of the temple, there were only priestesses. In order to become a priest -- like part of the reason why that matters is because the worship of Demeter wasn't corrupted the way a lot of the male gods were because there weren't any men involved in it. Um, if you really want to mess up worship, add men to it. The moral of that story is that women are better than men, but especially men who are Seahawks fans. I'm just saying like maybe, uh, no, uh, there was only priestesses and, in order to become a priestess, you had to go through something called Tarabolium let me show you what that looked like.  This is a Tarabolium. So what would happen is the gal who was going through the initiation process, she would put on a completely white brand new, beautiful unstained, white robe, and then she would go and stand in this bottom part and up on top that they would sacrifice a bull on a floor that had a bunch of holes in it. As they sacrifice the bull to the goddess, Demeter, the blood would run down onto the floor, through the holes and down onto her white robe, which we go, “gross”. They called it being washed in the blood to which we go, they stole our Christian phrase…no, actually we stole theirs.  This is a practice and a phrase that was around for hundreds of years before Jesus followers. The most popular story about Demeter was that she fed a large group of people with a small amount of bread. So why does John want to talk about Demeter now? Why? Because he's just told the story of Jesus feeding a large group of people, a small amount of bread. So he's brilliant. It's like you had to have help writing it. So he introduces us to Demeter. Now Demeter was known -- she was called the bread of life. The way that you celebrated her was to eat her flesh, which was bread. Now keep that in mind because we're going to come back to it just a second . Here’s a quote, by a historian by the name of Euripides. “Two stand foremost among humans: Goddess Demeter—call her Earth if you like—who nourishes mortals with solid food; the other one came later, Semele’s son, who discovered the liquor of the grape, and brought it to mortals, giving the poor fellows surcease of sorrow.”

What he's saying is Dionysus took pity on men and gave him wine so that when they feel bad, they can drink. Which means even in the ancient world, when people felt bad, they drank too much. Didn't help them. And it doesn't help now. But that was why they believe. Why, now Dionysus this is blood was believed to be wine. He was called the vine. What else is Jesus going to call himself? I am the vine. By the way, in the seven great “I am”, John bookends “I am the bread of life“ and “I am the vine.” There are only two gods in which you eat in order to take the presence of the God into yourself so that you could become closer to the God. One is Demeter. You eat her flesh. And the other, Dionysus, is where you would eat raw meat so that you could drink the blood. What does Jesus say in the gospel of John? Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you have no part of me and the Jews have this wrestling match with what to do, right? And what's going on. What's brilliant is for John, is that the Jewish people who were reading his gospel are like, wait, did you see what he just did there? That was brilliant. But the pagans are going, no, no, no, no. You don't understand at all what he's doing. He's doing this whole other thing. And John's like, right? It's brilliant. Let me show you this. This is a quote from a gal who is, um, a pagan, like a religious pagan. This is what she says. She says, I'm the bread of life. This phrase is put in the mouth of Jesus in the gospel according to John. Again and again he declares himself to be “the true bread from heaven,” “the bread of God which ... gives life to the world,” “the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever.” “The bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world,” he solemnly announces.

Yet the “bread of life” did not come down from heaven; it came from the hands of women and was one of the most important kinds of food in antiquity, sustaining people in good as well as in hard times. Interestingly, the word for wheat, sitos, became synonymous with “food.”

The bread, in a way, was also the flesh of the Goddess: the very name of Demeter came to be identified with it, as well as with the grain. She also had the titles Sito (“of the wheat”) and Megalartos or Megalomazos (“with big loaves”). The Megalartia was the festival celebrated in her honor on the sacred island of Delos in the Aegean Sea. Even a month was named Megalartios after her.
This is, Demeter is really important in the ancient world, right? Why does John take on Demeter? Here's why, because Demeter is the goddess of provision. And what John's doing is looking out onto the horizon and seeing what's happening around them. And he's saying, you guys need to remember there is nothing that can provide for you outside of Jesus Christ. John is preparing his people to stay the course through a very difficult time, and it will be incredibly difficult. These people will have to look at their children and when their children say, dad, are we going to die today? If they're honest, they would have to say, son, I don't, I don't know.  These are people that are watching their friends and family members be butchered, be torn apart by animals in the arena, be mocked, be made fun of, strung up crucified, tortured in every way imaginable for their faith. And John says, you're not getting out of it guys -- endure. And I know it's bad and it's going to get worse. But to him who overcomes, it's why that promise of the eternal life is so important because for them, they needed to be reminded that it's not just this life that we live for. There's a story that we tell about how this universe actually functions and what happens long after we're gone from this world matters just as much. Now the question is, why would John, write this to you and me. Like, at one level, he wrote it for these people's -- real people, real place, real time. And it's obvious what they, why would he write it to us? Maybe here's something to think about. We are living in the most ridiculous, crazy times. I ever remember. There's probably been crazier times in the world. I wasn't alive then. We have watched, in our world, tremendous pain over the last three months, we've seen people's retirements gone, jobs lost, businesses closed, things that people have given their entire lives to just go away. We've seen people become incredibly ill and even lose their lives from a virus that we do not understand. Hundreds of thousands of people dying. And on the heels of that, we watch all of this tension bust out in the streets as if they'd been caged up for two months. And we look at it and go in the world is happening. I think one of the lessons that John teaches us is that times like this, they expose our faith.  They reveal to us, the things that we've really tried to put our security and where is our provision, really? And when we get shook over things that we can't control, maybe there's some work to do on that Jesus, and Jesus alone, is the bread of life.

The writer of Hebrews chapter 12 -- and this is not so much connected to John, but in chapter 12, he writes something really interesting in chapter 11, there's this list of people that they call the hall of faith. These people who had faith and endured and had faith and endured and had faith and endured, and they overcame these incredible circumstances. And some of them were blessed and they didn't get what was promised to them when they died, because what was promised was fulfilled through Jesus. And because of that, you and I should be ecstatic that we live in the time that we live in. But then there was these other people that got tortured and sawn in two and drowned and exiled, and the world was not worthy of them -- this tremendous group of people. And then in chapter 12 and verse one,it begins this way, therefore, since we're surrounded by so great, a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured from sinners, such hostility against himself so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted. For these people that John is serving and loving and ministering to, these stories, these biblical stories of these great heroes of the faith -- this was their foundation upon which they could stand so that they didn't give up and quit. And while that can be for us too, maybe for you and I, we need to go back and take a look at those people that were reading this gospel for the first time and go, thank you. Thank you for not quitting.  Thank you for showing me that we can go through hard things and while we hate it, okay, we're going to make it because Jesus is the bread of life. And regardless of whether it leads to my life or my death, it is irrelevant because God is the God of it all. So Lord Jesus have your way, whatever that means. And wherever it takes us. 

I've lots of implications for this, but we're going to focus on three, call that comic relief. Number 1, in difficult times, how quickly we turn to the world's definition of provision shows what we really believe about Jesus. I'd love to have an extended conversation here about the role of government in our life. But I think too many of us are expecting the government to give us what only God can provide and we're let down when it doesn't work. I love our government officials. I pray for them every day, especially now. They're making hard decisions in hard space. I wouldn't want to be in that job, but you can't go to the world for things that only God can give us. Our military doesn't provide security for us. Only God does that. By the way, the Bible says that some trust in chariots and horses, we trust in the name of the Lord our God.  It’s all we’ve got.

Number 2: John's promise to the followers of Jesus was not that they would escape persecution, but rather that faithfulness is the final test. Will we endure to the end? God is the God of eternal life. And to him that overcomes, to him will be given a crown of life. And yeah, it'll be hard, but will be worth it.

Implication number three, unlike pagan or worldly religions, our God doesn't demand perfection. Apart from his presence. Jesus walks with us, lives in us and empowers us to stay the course even if it means death. The thing about Demeter is Demeter doesn’t provide if we don't appease her. And so the constant wrestling match is us trying to make Demeter happy -- by the way, all the pagan gods -- try to make them happy so that they do what we need them to do. And if they don't provide, if they don't give us what we need it’s because we obviously did something to upset them. I would suggest, we don't have a God that demands to be appeased. We have a God that is so thrilled with you, and it is his good pleasure to give you everything that you need. Exceedingly, abundantly, according to his grace.

I'm loving the idea of taking communion on the heels of talking about the bread of life. This moment, where Jesus says, this is my body, this is my flesh. And we take in the body of Christ to say, God, regardless of what comes, we want to tell it myself. And I'm going to tell all of you by doing it in front of you, that I believe that God is the source of all things. Let’s take a minute and sit with that. As we get ready to take communion this morning.

On the night Jesus was betrayed. He took bread and he broke it and he said, this is my body which has given for you. So whenever you eat this bread, do it in remembrance of me. Let's remember him.  And then after the dinner he took a cup, and said this cup, this is the blood of the covenant which is shed for you. So, whenever you drink this cup, do it in remembrance of me. Let's pray.