Jesus said to them, "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)

When we were down seeing my Mum a couple of weeks back we brought a living room chair back with us. It’s a recliner. Which is a bit fatal for me because I can fall asleep at the drop of a hat. Especially after dinner. A good meal, sit back, pull the handle and that’s me gone. There’s something satisfying about a good meal that just sends me off to a contented sleep after eating.

That’s why I think we have to be careful about what Jesus is saying here. “Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” He describes himself as “the bread of life” and makes a clear link between that and the manna that the Israelites had eaten in the desert. The thing to bear in mind about the manna is that each batch of it only lasted for a day. The Israelites had to go and gather new food with each new day.

One thing that Jesus is saying here is that faith in him is not like that. It is constant and it goes on for day after day all the days of your life. Whenever you need the love and support of God in Christ it’s there - as fresh as the fall of manna each new day. Whenever you come to God in prayer in Christ you find that same nurturing love and in the dark times of life - when it can seem that all the other things in life that have brought you happiness, joy and laughter, just don’t seem to gladden your heart, the love of God in Jesus Christ is there for you, as fresh as the manna in the first flush of dawn.

“Whoever comes to me will never be hungry” says Jesus. I’ve been reading a book by a chap called Alistair McGrath. He had been an atheist in his youth but, while he was at university, converted to Christianity because “it just made sense”. There is something satisfying about the Christian faith - something complete and whole. Sure, you don’t necessarily have all the answers to all the mysteries of life in clear-cut black and white, but there’s something about the Christian faith that speaks to all aspects to life - to the good times and the bad, to the bright side and to the dark side of being human, to the way you go about living your life and the way you make decisions. 

“Whoever comes to me will never be hungry.” Faith in Christ is satisfying - in the sense I’ve just mentioned, but also in terms of completing our relationship with God. If we have faith in Christ then we are put right with God and we have the promise of eternal life with him. There’s not another pile of stuff you have to say or do or believe to be made whole in the eyes of God. Sure, we have rituals in church. Sure, there’s Christian ethics and Christian theology. These are great and I’m going to come back to them, but faith in Christ is enough for our salvation. It’s satisfying.

In that sense what Jesus says is true. If we come to him we will never be hungry. But we have to be careful. It’s easy, when Jesus uses this metaphor of being the bread of life, when he says that those who come to him will never be hungry, it’s easy to think of faith in Christ as being like a satisfying meal. And what do we do when we’ve had a really satisfying meal? Sit back, recline the chair, kick off the slippers and go to sleep. That’s the last thing Jesus is getting at here. The last thing Jesus ever offers to Christians is a supine, dozy faith.

There are things for which we should still be hungry. What Jesus is offering folk in this passage is a new relationship with God; a relationship in which all the things that keep us apart from God - the stuff we say and think and do that aren’t worthy of us, let alone God - are washed away and we can begin each new day with a clean fresh start, just as the Israelites found, each new day, a fresh fall of manna. This is a relationship of love, and the thing about loving relationships is that, generally, you want that love to grow deeper. We should be hungry for the love of God. We should be hungry to be closer to God. That’s just not possible from his side. From our side we can spend time praying and reading the Bible; trying to understand God a bit better each day. We can spend time thinking about God and what it means for you and me and for humanity that he came into this world in the life of a human being; that that human being offered healing and comfort to those in need and lived among the poor.

We should be hungry for the kind of life God offers us in Christ. You can live in this world chasing after all the shiny things on offer - the things that appeal to our desires, our greed, our lust - but ultimately they do not add up to a life lived well. And when you come to your last breath isn’t that what you want to look back on? And if it could be a life lived loving your neighbour as you love yourself, wouldn’t that be brilliant. If it could be a life where you’ve made those around you feel that they are important and precious in the eyes of God, wouldn’t that be brilliant? If you could feel you’d made a difference - even in the tiniest of ways - to make the world a better place, wouldn’t that be brilliant.

We should be hungry for the world to come. Not just the eternal life that awaits us when we’re gone from the world, but this world remade and restored to be the world that God intends it to be - a world without war and without want; a world without hunger and without need; a world without poverty and without pain. A world where we live in harmony with one another by living the way God means us to live - loving one another as we love ourselves. We should be hungry for justice in an unjust world. We should be hungry for truth in a world which preaches “greed is good”. We should be hungry for peace in a world that reaches way to easily for the bomb and the armalite.

We should be hungry for these things and maybe, paradoxically perhaps, it’s that hunger which makes us complete. It’s that hunger for an ever closer relationship with God that addresses our need for meaning in a big and forbiddingly cold universe. It’s that hunger to be the kind of people we are meant to be that addresses our need to grow as spiritual beings. It’s that hunger for a better world than this one that addresses our sense that things should not be as they are; our need for that better world.

“Whoever comes to me will never be hungry”. That ought to, as well, grant us peace. Maybe not a ‘kick in the recliner and nod off’ peace, but an assurance that whatever we do in this life, however small or weak or feeble we may think we are, we can place the things we say and do in the hands of God and let him do the rest

Lord, we are hungry. Hungry for your love. Hungry for peace and truth and justice. Hungry for the world as you want it to be - as it will be. Hungry  to be the children you want us to be. Feed us with the bread of life that is your son

Preached at Gretna Old parish church