Podcast Summaries

The Gospel is taken from John chapter 6, beginning to read at verse 1. It's on page 100 in the church Bibles. After this, Jesus went to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, also called the Sea of Tiberias. A large crowd kept following him because they saw the signs that he was doing for the sick. Jesus went up the mountain and sat down there with his disciples. Now the Passover, the festival of the Jews, was near. When he looked up and saw a large crowd coming towards him, Jesus said to Philip, where are we to buy bread for all these people to eat? He said this to test him, for he himself knew what he was going to do. Philip answered him, 200 denarii would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little. One of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter's brother, said to him, there's a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish, but what are they among so many people? Jesus said, make the people sit down. Now there was a great deal of grass in the place, so they sat down about 5,000 in all. Then Jesus took the loaves and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated. So also the fish, as much as they wanted. When they were satisfied, he told his disciples, gather up the fragments left over so that nothing may be lost. So they gathered them up and from the fragments of the five barley loaves left by those who had eaten, they filled 12 baskets. When the people saw the sign that he had done, they began to say, this is indeed the prophet who has come into the world. When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself. When they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him, rabbi, when did you come here? Jesus answered them, very truly I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the son of man will give you. For it is on him that God the father has set his seal. Then they said to him, what must we do to perform 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, what sign are you going to give us then so that we may see it and believe you? What work are you performing? Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, as it is written, he gave them bread from heaven to eat. Then Jesus said to them, very truly I tell you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but it is my father who gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world. They said to him, sir, give us this bread always. 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. This is the gospel of the Lord. Do please have a seat. Gillian, thank you so much for reading that familiar passage to us. Let me add my welcome to Jack's on this Sunday morning. Thank you so much for being here. It's really great to see you. Don't get too settled in your seats and in your sort of concentrating space too much, because I'm going to invite you to speak to the person next to you. That reading is perhaps so familiar to us because it is one of only two miracles of Jesus which is recorded in all four gospels. Here's a chance to say hello to the person next to you and see if you know the other miracle that is recorded in all four gospels. Say hello to the people next to you and see if you can work out what that other miracle is. Well, hopefully you've had time to have a quick natter. The feeding of the 5,000 appears in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The only other miracle in those four gospels is the resurrection, which you may or may not have guessed. Anyway, you'll be well equipped for your next pub quiz question when it comes to the Bible. This morning we're beginning a new sermon series looking at the I Am sayings of Jesus, looking at some of the miracles or the signs that he performed as we lead up to Easter. Specifically, we're drawing on John's account of Jesus' life. But before we get stuck into this particular series, you might be asking yourself, why have we got four accounts of Jesus' life? Why not just one, the sort of, if you like, the authorised biography? Why have we got these four accounts? I'm not sure about you, but one of my favourite TV programmes, which might offer us a little insight into this, is Sky TV's Portrait Artist of the Year. For me, it's complete duvet TV. It's sort of, you sit there feeling all cosy as you watch several amateur and professional painters trying to paint a portrait of a famous face. But also, not just their face, sort of their arms and their shoulders and sometimes kind of a full-length portrait. And what I've noticed the portrait artists do is that quite often they grid their canvas out so they can get a sense of proportion. And quite often, the squares start off quite large at the sides, particularly the bits that are going to be occupied by the shoulders or an arm or a bit of torso. But as they get closer towards the face, the grid squares get more and more detailed, smaller grid squares to allow them to capture all the nuances and all the inflections of who Jesus is. We don't want to miss a thing. So, we've got our four accounts of Jesus' life in the Bible. The word Bible itself just means book, which is an entirely appropriate word to describe it. It is, after all, one book with one author, the Lord God, and one message, how to be put right with God through Jesus. One book, one author, one message. But it's equally true that that book, we know, is sort of a library of books, each written by a different inspired human author, inspired by God and inspired to write God's message to their particular culture in their particular time in their particular way, in their particular genre or style that they really liked, but also writing for us today as well. So, opening the Bible is really a bit like going to Waterstones or to your favourite independent booksellers. You might go in there thinking, I'm not quite sure what to choose, but it might be, if you're like me, that you have kind of like specific authors to go for. Here's, I just picked a few of these off my shelf last night. Frederick Forsyth, The Day of the Jackal. I'm not sure whether you like a good political thriller. Sometimes I go for a particular well-known author. It might be that you're a person who goes for a well-known or a preferred genre of book when you're looking. Here's one of my preferred genres at Christian books.

Biography, this is a book by a chap called Brother Andrew, called God Smuggler, about a man who smuggled Bibles into Eastern Europe and then later on into the Muslim world. So you might go for an author, you might go for a preferred genre. It might be that you look at the front cover. This one, I love travel writing, particularly travel writing on France. This La Belle Saison is all about a lady living in France, and that's the one that I'm reading at the moment and really enjoying. It might be that you prefer to go for the back cover blurb. This back cover blurb is full of credits and people saying nice things about this book. And this is another one of my preferred genres, which would be theology. And this is a book by one of Tido's colleagues at the back called Jamie on reading Revelation. All of those books, I wonder whether you've got your preferred genre or author or particular style or period that you like reading about. If we judge a book by its cover, then John's Gospel that we're about to pitch into might be reassuring for us. The author on the front cover is John, one of Jesus's disciples, one of the 12 people that followed him around as an eyewitness to Jesus's life, somebody who really knew what was going on. If we're into biography as a genre, and particularly biography told through well-curated events, exciting signs and events through history, rich conversational detail, fully fleshed out characters, then John's biography of Jesus is going to be an excellent read for us. If we're the type of people that choose a book by going in and reading chapter 1 of a book and seeing whether we like the style, then we'll know quite quickly that John's got quite a lively metaphorical style, that there's lots of exciting events. He's a very people person and a very imagery person. If we were to read the back cover of John's Gospel, then we would find out why he wrote the book. The back cover blurb for John comes at the end of the Gospel, towards the end of the Gospel in John chapter 20. I'm just going to read that out for us before we dive into John chapter 6. Here's what John says about his book and his purpose in writing. Now Jesus did many other signs or miracles in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, that's to say God's promised king of the world, the son of God, and that through believing in him, you may have life in his name. So what we're about to read in John chapter 6 is also replayed as an event in Matthew chapter 14, Mark chapter 6 and Luke chapter 9, and we'll refer to those a little bit as we go through. But it's a miracle that is written down so that you and I might believe and that by believing, we might have life in Jesus. So that's the two points that we're going to look at this morning. Can I believe that this miracle happened? And if I can believe that it happened, then actually what does it look like to believe and to receive life in Jesus' name? I'm going to pray for us and then we'll look at John chapter 6 together. Lord, we thank you that John wrote these things down so that we might believe and so that we might receive life in your name. And so we pray this morning that you would help us both to believe and to receive. Amen. Well, let's open up our Bibles. Page 100. There'll be a Bible somewhere around in front of you. And as we often do, we're going to look through it pretty much verse by verse. Slightly more time in the first half of our reading and then slightly quicker in the second half. So first of all, page 100. Can I believe that these events in John's Gospel are a supernatural miracle? Well, please put on your best lawyer hat and come with me into verse 1 and we'll have a look at the evidence that John presents us with. John locates this miracle on the other side of the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel, just below what today we know as the Golan Heights, near the Syrian border. The three other Gospel writers tell us that it was a deserted place, that there were only a few small villages anywhere nearby. A village in Jesus' day may have been as few as a few, or sorry, as small as a few families. The world was much less densely populated and so villages really were, even by our understanding of villages, if we were to go with the term hamlet and then downsize hamlet, that's probably not too far off what we're talking about. So we're talking about a remote place. In verse 2, John tells us that a large crowd was following Jesus, about 5,000, he says. If you compare that to the size of the villages around, we're already getting the idea that this is an enormous town, if not city-sized crowd that are following Jesus. And they're following him because of the amazing healings that he's been doing in their local area. The fact that the other Gospel writers tell us that there were at least 5,000 people there is explained by the fact that it was the men particularly who were counted. That was standard procedure, whether that's right or wrong. That was standard procedure in those days and so we know that there were 5,000 men present, but not including women and children who inevitably would have been there as well. So an absolutely huge crowd. And you might say, well, is 5,000 a rough guess? Well, the Romans and the Jews were sticklers for accuracy. They liked a good accurate headcount as much as we do today. And so Mark's Gospel tells us in his account that Jesus asked the disciples to have the people sit down in groups of 50s and 100. That would have been a practice that would have been familiar, at least to the people, because it's what Moses did with the people of God in the Old Testament. When they gathered together as an entire people, they would have been asked to have sat down by Moses in the Old Testament in groups of 50 and 100. Obviously, that's helpful from an organizational point of view, but it does make counting the average number of people there, or the approximate number of people there, quite a lot simpler. Verse 3, you'll notice that Jesus sits down, the traditional posture of a Jewish teacher, and his disciples sit down to listen to what he's about to teach them. When they see an enormous crowd approaching them, Jesus tests Philip. Philip is the glass half-empty disciple. And so in verse 7, Philip immediately points out the predicament. Jesus' six months' wages would not buy enough bread for each of these people to have a little. It's a good point. I mean, quite apart from the cost, the other Gospels tell us that it's evening. Our little hamlets around the edge, even if they did have a shop, are not likely to have any of the day's bread left over by evening. In fact, the villages are so small that it's unlikely that even together they would have had enough food in the entire villages brought together to have fed 5,000 people. The disciple Andrew is a glass half-full person. He's always quite looking out for kind of the way to make things work if at all possible. So he's there with his solution in verse 9. Jesus, there is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish. But even positively-minded, practically-minded, pragmatic Andrew has to then go on to admit, but what are they amongst so many people? The standard size of a loaf in Jesus' day would have been a little bit smaller than this very nice white boule from Waitrose. Here's the sort of like the size of it. It would have been a little bit smaller, probably, in terms of diameter and probably a little bit flatter. But basically, it was enough bread for one person for one day. We're not talking about an enormous focaccia tray bake and we're not talking about a sort of a bloomer loaf of gigantic proportions in this boy's basket.

So even if they had five of those loaves, they clearly weren't going to be enough for 5,000 people. Nevertheless, Jesus gets the people to sit down. He looks up to heaven and gives thanks, verse 11. And the bread and fish are then given to the people, enough for everyone to have as much as they wanted, which given the size of appetites—Appetites haven't largely changed over history—and the fact that people hadn't been perhaps fed as well as you or I might normally be fed, I'm assuming that to have as much as they wanted with twelve baskets of leftovers, they must have had really quite a feast. I wonder, with your criminal barrister headset on, what you're thinking of the evidence as presented so far. I wonder whether you want to prod a little bit more. Could those 5,000 witnesses have been lying to John as he wrote his Gospel account? Well, that's highly unlikely because John actually was one of those witnesses. If they'd been lying, he would have had the evidence of his own eyes to have backed up his account. And equally, the eyewitnesses themselves were convinced enough to reach the conclusion in verse 15 that they want to make Jesus king by force. They clearly thought they had seen a miracle. So could Jesus perhaps have performed some kind of conjuring trick and supposedly magicked the bread from some hidden store of bread that he had just hidden somewhere in the barren, desolate place around him with grass, certainly, but if you've been to that area of the world, relatively little other vegetation? Could he have somehow, without his followers of knowing, smuggled 5,000 loaves that he could pull out of a metaphorical hat at the last moment with nobody knowing where they had come from? Well, unlikely, but perhaps the sight of a small boy sharing his packed lunch just guilted the crowd into breaking open their packed lunches too. Well, in that case, it's unlikely that we would get 5,000 people prepared to witness the fact or to testify to the fact that they'd witnessed a miracle if they knew that basically it was just a case of stingy Bob and Brenda who didn't want to share their sandwiches being guilted by a little boy into breaking out the ham sarnies so that they could pass them around and share them together. As we keep aggregating the evidence, it seems less and less likely that there is any other explanation, particularly given the fact that most of these 5,000 people, well, many of them, particularly the disciples, would end up being persecuted or even killed for claiming to see what they had seen. People will die for something they believe to be true, but they won't die for a lie. Perhaps, therefore, they'd been hallucinating. I'm not medically qualified, but as far as I understand, it's not possible for 5,000 people to share a group hallucination. As we steer our way through the evidence, it seems to be that the only viable conclusion is that Jesus actually turned five loaves of bread and two fish into enough food for a feast for 5,000-plus people with plenty of leftovers to be collected afterwards. And the reason that we've gone into the evidence quite so closely there is because the evidence for this miracle and the way that we've gone about it is equally applicable to the resurrection and can be helpful in how we understand the resurrection is indeed a miracle as well. So when we get to Easter, perhaps be thinking about this way we started off. So no wonder that John concludes when he's looking through the life of Jesus, this would be a good miracle to put into my gospel account. So just let's pause for a moment and think where we've got to so far. We've been looking at the question, can I believe that this is a supernatural miracle and therefore a reliable sign pointing me towards the conclusion that Jesus is in fact the Son of God? And so far we've had plenty of evidence for the mind. But if I reach that conclusion that it is a reliable miracle, then actually, what does it mean to believe? And that's the second half of our reading. I'm just going to pause there. You've been phenomenal at listening to this point, but just have a chat to the person who you spoke to at the start and say, how convincing do you find that so far? Just have a quick chat just to give you a break from my voice. Great stuff. Well, we're about two thirds of the way through. Let's come into land. Verses 22 to 24, the crowd realise that Jesus has gone away and that he's no longer with them and that the disciples left by a boat earlier on. So they set off to look for Jesus. Not especially because their lives were committed to following him, it has to be said. They believed that he'd done something amazing, but verse 26 points out why they are following Jesus. In a world where physical food and drink were hard won and worked for, Jesus points out to them in verse 26 that they're following because they had a good meal. That's no small thing in the world of this time. We need to make sure that we're not kind of over-egging things. We've seen something amazing, but basically, Jesus, we're following you because you gave us a great meal. So they keep on following. Jesus uses at that particular opportunity to point out to them the inevitable fact that physical food keeps us alive physically. Therefore, verse 27, is a sensible, logical follow-on. Do not work for food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life. Physical bread rots. It goes mouldy. It decays. It is physical. That's not just true today. It was true of the manna bread that God gave to his people in the Old Testament when they were with Moses. The bread of the Old Testament, for those of you singing the Welsh national anthem yesterday, or at least at the rugby, bread of heaven. Manna decayed as well. And elsewhere in the Gospels, you might remember that Jesus is quoted as saying, one doesn't live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. Physical food keeps us alive physically. Brain food keeps us alive mentally. Spiritual food is what keeps us alive spiritually. What gives us and sustains true life at the deepest internal point of me? Well, that's something that bread, even the beer that used to market itself on reaching the parts that other beers don't reach, doesn't get to the spiritual part of us. Only spiritual food and drink keeps us going spiritually. And so Jesus goes on to say something really very helpful in verse 27. For it is on the Son of Man, it's on Jesus, that God the Father has set his seal. And that word seal is all about the Holy Spirit. It's the type of seal that you put on a legal document. In modern terms, what we might call stamp duty, the stamp or the seal that you put on a legal document to give it your agreement, to give it your approval,

to seal it up to keep it safe. That's what was going on in Jesus' baptism. You might remember that at Jesus' baptism in John chapter 1 at the beginning of John's Gospel, other Gospel writers record a dove coming down, the Holy Spirit of God hovering over Jesus as a dove. John says in his Gospel, he on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptises, not with water, but with the Holy Spirit. And it's the Holy Spirit that later in the Bible, in the book of Ephesians chapter 1, is described as the seal of God. The Holy Spirit who comes into the people of God who commit their lives to following Jesus and believing in him, the Holy Spirit who's put on that person's life, into that person's life, as a seal, the seal of approval of God, God saying, I approve and agree with you because you have accepted Jesus' death and resurrection for yourself. And so Jesus says that the bread that he gives isn't just physical bread. It isn't even mental or brain food, kind of intriguing and stimulating teaching. There are plenty of people in Stoke Bishop this morning who aren't here, who if we questioned them would say Jesus was a good teacher. This isn't just physical food, it isn't just brain food. What Jesus says he gives us is spiritual food to give us spiritual life on the inside. Verse 33, for the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven, i.e. Jesus, and gives life to the world. So no wonder the people say, sir, give us this bread always. They're saying, in part, they're saying, actually, it would be lovely not to have to work for food day by day, but they are also saying, Jesus, we want to come alive spiritually. Jesus answers them in verse 35, I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry. Whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. As I look around our world, I'm seeing in many ways in Western society an increasingly well-physically-fed world. Sadly, not true for the whole of our planet. But in our Western societies, particularly an increasingly well-physically-fed world. Even though we've got our understandable doubts about artificial intelligence, I'm looking around and seeing, particularly in our Western world, an increasingly well-educated world. We are well-fed physically and we are well-fed mentally. I'm seeing possibly an increasingly poorly-fed world spiritually. I'm seeing younger generations particularly who are almost starving of spiritual nourishment and who are reaching out to Jesus saying, feed me. I wonder if that resonates with you. It's not just our younger generations, this is a human pandemic, if you like, a shortage of spiritual nourishment and a recognition that all is not well with our health on the spiritual inside. And we want to be both healed and fed. Jesus says to the people that coming alive in that way, being healed deep inside and being fed at the deepest possible place of our being is not something that we can do. It's not something we can work at and it's not something that we can provide for ourselves. It is a gift from heaven. It's what it means to be born again, to come alive inside, to be born by God's Spirit and to know what it means to be fully and completely nourished. We are born again by inviting Jesus to live in us and to feed us with the words of eternal life. And so verse 29 is a great place to land. This is the work of God that you believe in him God has sent. It might be this morning that you've been sat here for a number of years and you've thought church services over the years have fed my brain, but I would like my soul to come alive. It might be that you're sat here thinking, actually, this week has been an absolute flurry of activity and although I would say my faith in Jesus is alive, this week I've got a little bit distracted and I need to remind myself that being alive is something that comes from deep inside, not just a flurry of activity. It might be that for the first time this morning, you're thinking, I really would like to come alive and I just know that I am not alive inside in that way. I'm going to pray for all of us, no matter what our situation is, and if you'd like to make this a prayer for yourself at the end, then just say amen. Let's pray together. Lord Jesus, we thank you that the evidence for you is compelling on a mental level. We thank you for all the physical signs that you did, but we thank you that you did all of that because you long for us to come alive spiritually inside. We recognise the fact that we are broken people and perhaps we don't feel we deserve to have you come to us and offer us the deep life that you do. Please forgive us for all of the ways in which we fall short of you and your glory and please would you come into us. Would you help us to believe? Would you set the seal of your Holy Spirit on our lives? Would you forgive us for all that is past and would you help us to live with the hope of heaven in our hearts for your glory? Amen.