I finally broke down and bought a new car this week. The Jeep has been a faithful member of our family for nineteen years and one-hundred and eighty-nine thousand miles. It’s moved me across the country three times, it’s gotten me through feet of snow and countless snowstorms. But recently it’s been a bit less reliable. Every few months or so something flares up requiring a trip to the shop and several hundred dollars. It was supposed to go in to the shop on Wednesday, because it no longer has a working turn signal, but Monday when it refused to start, yet again, in the parking lot of my physical therapist, that was it. But in all honesty, even sitting in the parking lot of the PT with a car that wouldn’t start; as I was on the phone with my best friend, venting my frustration before calling the tow truck yet again, I tried to rationalize if replacing the Jeep was really the right decision. “It’s been towed three times this year. Wait, no, only twice, this will be the third time.” “Wasn’t it towed at least once the winter before last also.” “Yes.” “OK, so we’re still looking at like an every six month pattern here.” Kelli texted me the first day I had the car, “did your car start this morning?” “It did!” To which she responded, “Your standards are too low.”
The truth is, and several of you have politely mentioned this to me, I’ve needed a new car for a while. There have been too many repairs, too many times needing to be rescued from the Meijer parking lot, too many bruised shoulders from the lift gate crashing down when I tried to put my bike in the back. I knew I needed a new car, but it was a hard decision to make. A new car felt frivolous, like a waste of money and resources. I’m frugal, to a fault some may say, and I didn’t want to spend the money on a new car when I had a perfectly serviceable old one. Car buying is also stressful. I didn’t want to go through the hassle of researching what I should get, figuring out a fair price, negotiating with a car salesman, all that stuff. So even though I really did need a new car, especially since the whole turn signal thing really meant the Jeep wasn’t even street legal anymore, I didn’t want one. So I put it off.
Needs and wants are complicated feelings. It’s oh so easy to mix the two up, or to let the wrong one triumph over the other. Which we know, but the more familiar side of that is probably mistaking a want for a need. Think about kids begging for a toy, “but I NEED it.” There are plenty of things we think we need, that really we just want. But harder, at least for me, to catch, and just as insidious, is the temptation to mix up a want for an actual legitimate need. I needed, if not a new car, at least to stop driving the old one. But I didn’t want to, and I worked really hard to convince myself that a new car was just a want, that with enough determination and effort I could get the old one to work, not a need.
I think we do this a lot with God. We talk a good game about needing God but at the end of the day I think we would rather just want God. Because if we need God then we are dependant and dependence is not a great feeling. Needing God is great when God is doing things we are comfortable with, when God is making us feel good about worship, or helping our neighbors, or doing the right things. When we can go to God with simple concerns, and however they turn out, it’s ok. Or that if we just work hard enough, believe strong enough, pray deep enough, are good enough, we could earn God’s love. But if we can earn it, that’s not a need, that’s a want. If we deserve it, that’s not a need, that’s a want. Or if it works when it’s convenient, again, that’s not a need, that’s a want. Our need for God is blind desperation. It is the hemorrhaging woman reaching out to touch Jesus’ cloak. It is Jairus the leader of the synagogue rushing through the crowd to beg for Jesus’ mercy. It is the stay of execution, the first breath of someone who was drowning, the light coming down the tunnel of a cave two miles under a mountain. We can ignore it, we can miss it, we can mistake it for a want, but it doesn’t change the truth of our reality. In Jesus, God has “set God’s seal” on us, and we can no more go without this love than we could go without air, because God is in fact the air we breathe.
Confusing want and need is not a modern problem, the crowd had it too. Our Gospel this morning picks up the morning after Jesus fed five-thousand on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. The crowd woke up and, like any of us would be in the morning, was hungry again. And remember, the reason Jesus fed them was because they were in the middle of nowhere with no access to food. The crowd woke up in the exact same predicament they had been in before, only this time Jesus wasn’t there. So they went after him. When they found Jesus, they had this super interesting conversation around the word “work.” Let’s slow down and walk through this, because I at least found it really powerful. So the crowd came to Jesus and asked, “Rabbi, when did you come here.” But Jesus, being Jesus, didn’t answer that question. Jesus instead jumped right to the heart of the matter, “you are looking for me not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.” “Signs” is the word used in John’s Gospel to describe the miracles Jesus performed, because in John’s Gospel, these miracles were as much about what they revealed about who Jesus was as they were about the acts themselves. And normally, when Jesus performed a sign, those who witnessed the sign learned something new about the nature of God, and they believed. But this crowd, per Jesus, didn’t learn about God’s abundance, they just got their needs met. They were thinking transactionally, thinking small picture. But what Jesus was offering was bigger than that, it wasn’t transactional, it couldn’t be earned, it was only something that could be given, as Jesus explained, “Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures…which the Son of Man will give to you.”
Now, let’s be clear, food is a need. We need to eat or else we will die. Jesus is not offering some kind of bizarre diet plan where if you pray enough you can go without food. Nor is Jesus promising that if you believe enough you won’t be hungry. Hunger is a huge problem in our nation and in our world. ELCA World Hunger exists for a reason, we help stock and staff the food pantry at First Methodist for a reason, people need food. So this isn’t about actual, physical food any longer, this is about a different need. The need for faith, the need for belonging, the need to be a part of something beyond ourselves, the need for God. And that is a need that no amount of breakfast could fill, that no amount of money could buy. It is a need that could only be given by God. The “work” of this need is the work of receiving, of being willing to receive. Which, at least in my own experience, is hard work, maybe even harder work. I would much rather be the one earning, the one giving, then the one receiving. Yet the food Jesus was offering, he told the crowd, was food they had to receive.
To which the crowd pushed back. OK then, “What must we do to perform the works of God?” Again, transactional thinking. Ok, if you’re not going to just give us the bread like last time, let us earn it. What do you need us to do? Jesus responded, reinforcing his earlier statement, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” Yet again Jesus did not tell the crowd what they were to do, but what God had already done. The work of God is that you believe. Because believing, remember is not intellectual accent to an idea, belief is about seeing. It is about entering into relationship even as you cannot understand. Even belief itself is a gift. Just like we do not choose to fall in love, belief is God’s work; it is a gift we receive. I think it’s from Mark actually, but it’s one of my favorite verses of scripture, “Lord I believe, help my unbelief.”
But the crowd, oh they were persistent, challenged one last time, “What sign are you going to give us then, that we may see it and believe you? What work are you performing?” And again, Jesus reiterated, “the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven.” It’s not a thing, this gift. It’s not something you can hold in your hand, or intellectually understand, or earn or do. It’s a gift, it’s given freely, you have it already, it’s yours. But again, the crowd, so literal, “Sir, give us this bread always.” To which Jesus responded, the first of what are called the I AM statements, these revelations of the nature of God and God’s love, “I AM the Bread of Life.”
What I love, and hate, about this passage is that I don’t understand it. Clearly Jesus wasn’t talking about food, because we do need food. And he wasn’t giving a statement of faith, because he said the work of God is that we believe, not that our work is that we believe. I don’t really know what Jesus is talking about here, and like the crowd I find myself leaving hungry, leaving unsatisfied.
Which, as much as I hate to admit it, is maybe the greatest gift. To leave hungry, to leave unfulfilled, to leave wanting more. Because that hunger assures me that there is more, that God has more, that I can have more. When I look around at the world, at the hunger, at the pain, at the fear, this hunger that is not physical but is spiritual presses me onward, pulls me inward, and pushes me outward, and that hunger feels like gift. It feels like grace. It feels like love. Hard grace, sure, not the cheap grace of peace, peace, when there is no peace, but the deep knowledge that there is food that will fill this need, that it is God, and that it is there. Just beyond my reaching, but also close enough to grasp. At this table we get just a taste of this bread. Not enough to leave us satisfied, but enough to keep us coming back, again and again, for the food which endures. Amen.
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