It's not that complicated

 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

Thus, the beginning of John's Gospel, known overall as being the impenetrable, mystical one. The Gospel where it doesn't start with the birth of Jesus, or the ministry of John, or the family tree of Christ. All easy things to get your head around. No, it starts with the concept of Logos, the Word, the Word becoming flesh and dwelling among us. 

That sort of mystical stuff is really at the core of what the Christian faith is all about, the nature of God becoming flesh and dwelling in the midst of his people, but this sort of doctrinal content can be accused of being at least semi confusing and baffling, especially to the outside. But there is a separate type of content that is exclusively baffling to people on the inside of the church, namely things like we have in our epistle reading from Sunday. And Christians are notorious for this: having a good grasp of esoteric and arcane aspects of the nature of God, but are very bad at having a firm grasp on things that are so easy that we teach them to children. 

Of course, this isn't exclusive to Christians, but you would be amazed at how easily the average Lutheran at least can wrap their heads around the concept of a six day creation or the real presence. And my standard go-to line is always this: if you can believe that a 2000 year old man is literally there made of bread and wine on the altar at this suburban church, if you believe that "Is means is," then why are you having a hard time with a lot of what the Pauline epistles say about how to behave?

I mean, I know why. We are a Sola people: Faith alone, Grace alone, Christ alone, that kind of thing. And we like to avoid anything related to works righteousness. And the best way to avoid works righteousness is not to do any works, right Lutherans? Can't feel righteous in your works if you didn't do any, you know? Okay, I know I'm being a little facetious, but not much, to be honest. Lutherans resist the preaching of works out of an abundance of caution about self righteousness, but we have to remember who Paul's letters were written to: The Christians in any given area. The church in Ephesus, the church in Thessalonica, the Church in Rome, that kind of thing. These are people, who, like you, are already Christians, already baptized, already washed clean by the Holy Spirit, called by the grace of God, and given life and salvation. But you're not done at that point: There's still a lot of living to do, you know. You believe, you have been baptized, you have faith in Christ, now what? And the answer is what you find in the Pauline letters.

Paul, who wrote the book of Romans, isn't confused about salvation. He's not perplexed about what works and grace are, you know. He wrote that doctrine down, codified it, and made sure that we would know that it is by grace we have been saved, not by works, lest any man should boast. So if that's true, and you trust Paul with that, then why don't you trust him when he tells you not to let any corrupting talk come out of your mouths? 

I know why, of course. A lot of ink has been spilled from not so well meaning philosophers who have gone to a lot of effort to try to convince you that the essence of not just Christian but all morality is for you to do nothing differently from what you would have been doing normally. The goal of the theologian now is not to tell you what God wants you to do, but rather to tell you that God wants you to do what you're doing. 

It just ends up being this: you want to hear from friends, family, acquaintances, even God himself that you should stay the course, and that you're doing super. And you want to have a pastor, a church, a theology that echoes that loud and clear, so that when you church-shop, you're looking for a church that will tell you that what you're already doing is what God wants you to do, no matter what it is.

But that drives you headlong into the salvation problem. For if God desires all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth, then what are you being saved from? If John 3:16 tells you that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life, what's he saving you from? Jesus can't cheerlead you on with every decision and also save you from your sins. And deep down, you know that you're not supposed to be doing the things you're doing. When Paul tells you what to do, he's shining a light using the law on your current behavior, and demonstrating to you two things:

1 - what good behaviour actually would be, and 

2 - what you need to be forgiven of. 

The combination of those two things means that you have a guide on how to live, that you don't water down the word from Paul, but that when you examine yourself, you will find that the voice that wants you to stay the course, that you're doing super, gets drowned out by the voice that proclaims the grace of God.

Faith and bread.

 Jesus talks to those who are following him around, and tells them that they are following him because they have eating their fill of the bread. This is true. For people will do a lot for those who are supplying them. 

This is true not just in matters religious, but in all matters. You will tend to give loyalty to things and people who provide for your needs. But we're short sighted, by and large, and so we tend to follow around after things that meet our immediate needs. Our needs to unwrap the book for Christmas, not to read it. Our needs to bring home a puppy but not want to walk it. Our needs to have new relationships, money, attention, all that for a moment. And once that moment is gone, we tend to look for what is new, what is exciting, and we pursue novelty, new attention, new blessings. 

The people of the ancient world were no different, because they were people. And as people, they tended to do what people do. Jesus showed up to a world where even bread was difficult and time consuming. There was a reason that His miracle of feeding so many was such a big deal, because back then, you couldn't just go to the store and get a McDouble, even the idea of getting such a thing would have been laughable to a first century middle easterner. Remember in the parable of the prodigal son, how the complaint from the older brother was that the fattened calf had been killed, but that he never got even a young goat to celebrate with his friends? We're at the point now where the average person in Canada would consider eating goat to be beneath them "Goat? No thanks!" And in the Gospels, that was a treat, a treat that the older, obedient son never even got to have. Meat was way off the table for the most part, only for a really special occasion. And bread was the standard of the day. Flour, oil, water, baked in to cakes, as the scriptures say, but that takes time and effort. You don't get to go to the store on the way home and spend 1/6 of one hour's pay on a loaf of bread. If you want bread, you have to make it.

Day in, day out, the same routine, same flour, same oil, same water, same bread. And because it took hours to do, a generous portion of someone's day was going to be spent just keeping the family fed. Slow. Over coals. Every day. When Jesus gets on the scene, and multiplies the loaves and the fish, it's a giant miracle for the people who are following him. Surviving takes work, and lots of it. Just like the BeeGees remind you, over and over again, Stayin' alive. Stayin' alive. 

So when Jesus shows up and makes bread seemingly out of nothing, when the fish multiply without being caught, and the bread is pulled out of thin air, people take notice. Imagine if a quarter of your day was freed up, and the chore that defined your daily routine which, if you didn't do your family would starve, was just taken care of. Imagine that. You can bet that this is something worth paying attention to. But Jesus' work is not to be John Galt and to make an infinite energy loop here. He hasn't come to earth to be a source of food without labor. He's on earth to do bigger work than that, and this is just what the Bible calls a sign.

But signs aren't things. Yes, I took literary criticism in University, and once again, I'm about to make use of that expensive degree. The idea behind a lot of literary criticism and search for literary meaning is to understand that an awful lot of what we think is pre-determined is actually fairly open to interpretation. Not only is the meaning of the story as a whole subject to interpretation, but the language itself is open to interpretation as well. Words aren't anything concrete, they just point to concrete things. But the words themselves are nothing at all, only useful insofar as they point to things. As signs do. In the same way, the miracles of Christ, the signs that they see, work in the same way. They're only useful insofar as they point to what they point towards. 

The people who came to listen to the preaching of Jesus sat down and were filled with bread. Real bread. And their real tummies were filled, all fine so far. But if you stop at the sign, you'll never get where you're supposed to go, you know. If you assume that the sign is the thing, you'll never move past the sign. And the multiplying of the loaves and the fish was there to be a sign to point to the bread of life. But people got focused on the sign, wanted the sign only, and not what the sign pointed to. And you can see what happens, where Jesus does a sign, then tells people what the sign points to, and then they get angry and walk away: "This is a hard teaching, who can understand it?" But your job as the Christian is to understand what are the signs, and what the signs are pointing to. When Jesus talks about himself as the bread of life, he does so as something that will satisfy eternally. That is, the source of eternal life. 

Bread is transient. You labor for it, bake it, it's necessary for life, but you burn it and then need more. That's the cycle. And people of the time understood their relationship to God in the same way. You sin, you need grace, you sacrifice, you go back and repeat. Over and over again. And it never satisfies. Jesus used the hunger in the stomach to talk about the hunger in the heart. You hunger and thirst for righteousness, for life, and that hunger and thirst can be satisfied. Don't follow me because of the bread in the wilderness. Follow me because of the bread of life.