As I have already said, in the whole wonderful conversation of which I
have selected a portion for my text, there is a double reference to the
miracle of the loaves and of the manna. What our Lord means to assert
for Himself is that which is common to both of these—viz. that He
supplies the great primal wants of humanity, the hunger of the heart.
There may be another reference also, which I just notice without
dwelling upon it. Barley loaves were the coarsest and least valuable
form of bread. They were not only of little worth, but altogether
inadequate to feeding the five thousand. The palates, unaccustomed to
the stinging savours of the garlic and the leeks of Egypt, loathed the
light bread. And so Jesus Christ comes into the world in lowly form,
like the barley loaf or the light bread from which men whose tastes
have been vitiated by the piquant savours of more earthly nourishment
turn away as insipid. And yet He in His lowliness, He in His
savourlessness, is that which meets the deepest wants of humanity, and
is every man's fare because He will be any man's satisfaction.
But I wish to bring before your notice the wonderful way in which our
Lord, in this great dissertation concerning Himself as the Bread of
Life, gradually unfolds the depths of His meaning and of His offer. He
began with saying that He, the Son of Man, will give to men the bread
that 'endures to everlasting life.' And then when that saying is but
dimly understood, and yet awakes some strange new desires and appetites
in the hearers, and they come to Him and ask, 'Lord, evermore give us
this bread,' He answers them with opening another finger of His hand,
as it were, and showing them a little more of the treasure that lies in
His palm. For He says, 'I _am_ that Bread of Life.' That is an advance
on the previous saying. He gives bread, and any man that was conscious
of possessing some great truth or some great blessing which, believed
and accepted, would refresh and nourish humanity, might have said the
same thing. But now we pass into the _penumbra_ of a greater mystery:
'I am that Bread of Life.' You cannot separate what Christ gives from
what Christ is. You can take the truths that another man proclaims,
altogether irrespective of him and his personality. That only disturbs,
and the sooner it is got rid of, the firmer and the purer our
possession of the message for which he is only the medium. You can take
Plato's teaching and do as you like with Plato. But you cannot take
Christ's teaching and do as you like with Christ. His personality is
the centre of His gift to the world. 'I am that Bread of Life.' That He
should give it is much; that He should _be_ it is far more.
And notice how, when He has thus drawn us a little further into the
magic circle of the light, He not only asserts the inseparableness of
His gift from His Person, but also asserts, with a reference, no doubt,
to the manna, 'I am the Bread that came down from heaven.' The
listeners immediately laid hold of that one point, and neglected for
the moment all the rest, and they fixed with a true instinct—although
it was for the purpose of contradicting it—on this central point, 'that
came down from heaven.' They said one to the other, 'How can this man
say that He came down from heaven? Is not this Jesus the Son of Joseph,
whose father and mother we know?' So, brethren, as the manna that
descended from above in the dew of the night was to the bread that was
baked in a baker's oven, so is the Christ to the manhood that has its
origin in the natural processes of birth. The Incarnation of the Son of
God, becoming Son of Man for us and for our salvation, is involved in
this great claim. You do not get to the heart of Christ's message
unless you have accepted this as the truth concerning Him, that 'in the
beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was
God,' and that at a definite point in the long process of the ages,
'the Word became flesh, and dwelt amongst us.' He will never be 'the
Bread of Life' unless He is 'the Bread that came down from heaven.' For
humanity needs that the blue heavens that bend remote above should come
down; and we cannot be lifted 'out of the horrible pit and the miry
clay' unless a Hand from above be reached down into the depths of our
degradation, and lift us from our lowness. Heaven must come to earth,
if earth is to rise to heaven. The ladder must be let down from above,
if ever from the lower levels men are to ascend thither where at the
summit the face of God can be seen.
But that is not all. Our Lord, if I may recur to a former figure, went
on to open another finger of His hand, and to show still more of the
gift. For He not only said, 'the Son of Man gives the bread,' and 'I am
the Bread that came down from heaven,' but He went on to say, in a
subsequent stage of the conversation, 'the Bread that I will give is My
flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.' Now, notice that
'_will_ give.' Then, though the Word was made flesh, and the manna came
down from heaven, the especial gift of His flesh for the life of the
world was, at the time of His speaking, a future thing. And what He
meant is still more clearly brought out, when we read other words which
are the very climax of this conversation, when He declares that the
condition of our having life in ourselves is our 'eating the flesh and
drinking the blood of the Son of Man.' The figure is made repulsive on
purpose, in order that it may provoke us to penetrate to its meaning.
It was even more repulsive to the Jew, with his religious horror of
touching or tasting anything in which the blood was. And yet our Lord
not only speaks of Himself as the Bread, but of His flesh and blood as
being the Food of the world. The separation of the two clearly
indicates a violent death, and I, for my part, have no manner of doubt
that, in these great words in which our Lord lays bare the deepest
foundations of His claim to be the Food of humanity, there is couched,
in the veiled language which was necessary at the then stage of His
mission, a distinct reference to His death, as being the Sacrifice on
which a hunger-stricken world may feed and be satisfied.
So here we have, in three steps, the great central truth of the Gospel
set forth in symbolical aspect: the Son that gives, the Son that is,
the Bread of the world, and the death whereby His flesh and blood are
separated and become the nourishment of all sin-stricken souls. I do
not say one word to enforce these claims, but I beseech you deal fairly
with these Gospel narratives, and do not go on picking out of them bits
of Christ's actions or words, which commend themselves to you, and
ignoring all the rest. There is no more reason to believe that Jesus
Christ ever said, 'As ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so
to them likewise,' or any other part of that Sermon on the Mount which
some people take as their Christianity, than there is to believe that
He said, 'The bread which I give is My flesh, which I will give for the
life of the world.' Believe it or not, it is not dealing with the
Scripture records as you deal with other historical records if, for
subjective reasons, you brush aside all that department of our Lord's
teaching. And if you do accept it, what becomes of His 'sweet
reasonableness'? What becomes of His meekness and lowliness of heart? I
was going to say what becomes of His sanity, that He should stand up, a
youngish man from Nazareth, in the synagogue of Capernaum, and should
say, 'I, heaven-descended, and slain by men, am the Bread of Life to
the whole world'?
I was going to make another observation, which I must just pass with
the slightest notice, and that is that, taking this point of view and
giving full weight to these three stages of our Lord's progressive
revelation of Himself, we have the answer to the question, What is the
connection between these discourses and the ordinance of the Lord's
Supper? Our modern sacramentarian friends will have it that Jesus
Christ is speaking of the Communion in this chapter. I take it, and I
venture to think it the reasonable explanation, that He is not speaking
about the Communion, but that this discourse and that rite are dealing
with the same truths—the one in articulate words, the other in
equivalent symbols. And so we have not to read into the text any
allusion to the rite, but to see in the text and in the rite the
proclamation of the same thing—viz. that the flesh and the blood of the
Sacrifice for sins is the food on which a sinful and cleansed world may
feed.