'I am that bread of life. 49. Your fathers did eat manna in the
wilderness, and are dead. 50. This is the bread which cometh down from
heaven, that a man may eat thereof, and not die.'—JOHN vi. 48-50.
'This is of a truth that Prophet,' said the Jews, when Christ had fed
the five thousand on the five barley loaves and the two small fishes.
That was the kind of Teacher for them; they were quite unaffected by
the wisdom of His words and the beauty of His deeds, but a miracle that
found food precisely met their wants, and so there was excited an
impure enthusiasm, very unwelcome to Jesus. Therefore He withdrew
Himself from it, and when the people followed Him, all full of
expectation, to get some more loaves and see some more miracles, He met
them with a douche of cold water that cooled their enthusiasm and flung
them back into a critical, questioning mood. They pointed to the
miracle of the manna, and hinted that, if He expected them to accept
Him, He must do as Moses had done, or something like it. Probably there
was a Jewish tradition in existence then to the effect that the Messiah
was to repeat the miracle of the manna. But, at all events, Christ lays
hold of the reference that they put into His hands, and He said in
effect, 'Manna? Yes; I give, and am, the true Manna.'
So this is the third of the instances in this Gospel in which our Lord
pointed to Old Testament incidents and institutions as symbolising
Himself. In the first of them, when He likened Himself to the ladder
that Jacob saw, He claimed to be the Medium of communication between
heaven and earth. In the second of them, when He likened Himself to the
brazen serpent lifted in the camp, He claimed to be the Healer of a
sin-stricken and poisoned world. And now, with an allusion both to the
miracle and to the Jewish demand for the repetition of the manna sign,
He claims to be the true Food for a starving world. So there are three
things in my text: Christ's claim, His requirements, and His promise;
the bread, the eating, the issues.