Receive the Food Only Jesus Can Give Us

I need a new flashlight. And when I was looking at flashlight ads, I found one that you can turn on, and the beam can either go broad or narrow, concentrated down to a pin dot.

Sometimes the pin dot happens for me when I read Scripture. Today, it was this line from the Gospel of John: “But he said to them, “I have food to eat of which you do not know … My food is to do the will of him who sent me, and to accomplish his work” (John 4:32b, 34b).

And what I kept thinking was, How is that possible? How is it possible that somehow Jesus, God incarnate in human flesh, has the kind of flow happening through him that somehow energizes him and feeds him physically, emotionally, spiritually, in a way that causes him to not care whether he gets lunch or not?

 

A Powerful Promise

The disciples are clueless about the import of Jesus’ words. They actually echo the question of the woman at the well, who by this time is going into the village to tell everybody what Jesus has done. She said, “Where are we going to find a drink?” (John 4:11).

And it’s the disciples who come and say, “Rabbi, eat … Has anyone brought him food?” (John 4:31b, 33b). And in answering this question, Jesus says, “My food is to do the do the will of Him who sent me and to accomplish his work” (John 4:34b).

This foreshadows a promise he will share just two chapters later, “I am the bread of life; he who comes to me shall not hunger, and he who believes in me shall never thirst” (John 6:35). Now, have you ever read something so many times it just goes straight over your head, because you actually think you know what it means, but you know only a tiny bit of a verse that’s almost infinite in its depth?

I couldn’t square this verse with my own problem. You see, I’m often spiritually hungry and thirsty. But as I began to ponder, I realized that I’m often hungry and thirsty because I want things from God that he’s not actually ready to give me. I want access to the vending machine of “Ask, and you shall receive,” when more often than not, there is a deeper lesson: the formation of abject dependency that he is working in me. This work makes instantaneous answers to prayer at cross-purposes with his desire to conform me to the image of his Son.

You see, if I can just go and press the button, quote the Bible verse, and it happens, that only solidifies the mechanism whereby I can get something from God. In other words, it’ an expression of personal mastery, not subjective servanthood. But if I don’t really know how to pray, even when I offer it the best I’ve got, then I am in fact, utterly dependent upon God to choose, in his timing, to say yes or just flat-out, “No, I’m not going to do that.” And that keeps me in a position of learning how to seek his face, hear his voice, follow where he leads.

 

A Clenched Fist

It’s not that God is stingy. Far from it. I’ve seen extraordinary miracles, including God’s power to make the blind see, the deaf hear and the lame walk. But something about asking and receiving is never entirely automatic, because God wants to unite us to himself more than he wants to give us whatever we want. He will never be reduced to a mechanism that simply gives us what we need.

In other words, it is the conforming nature of that relationship that is always primary, and it runs at direct cross-purposes to my own self-centeredness. It comes against my desire to say, “I want what I want when I want it, so I need to know how to get it, so I can master prayer so I can get what I need.”

In those moments, my fist is clenched, trying to grasp what is really just the thin air of my own demanding desires. As Archbishop William Temple succinctly wrote, “Many ask for something from Christ. What he offers is himself.”

 

An Open Hand

How do I know I am grasping at that which is other than Jesus himself? In my life, the symptoms are evident. First of all, there is a certain wildness to faith that gets quickly domesticated. I start counting on the predictable just to get through the demands of life.

Second, I am not I am tempted not to nurture people, but to use them to get what I need done. And someone like me, who has been in ministry for a while, has the seasoned capability of using someone with the most extraordinarily biblical language. It’s like the tempter quoting Scripture to Jesus in the wilderness.

I need Jesus to stop me in my tracks, take me by the shoulders, turn me around and show me where he is: way behind me, because I’m running so fast. To keep saying yes to Jesus offers, instead of my striving to keep up, the invitation to go back, to walk at his pace, because it’s only then that I have breathing room.

A wag one said that every time one goes to the refrigerator, the bottle or the internet, one is actually looking for God. But I really do need God to take me, because I don’t want to let go that easily. Even though I believe, in the depths of my heart, in justification by grace alone, through faith alone, there is still a part of me that wants to prove my worth.

In other words, I must be willing to admit that that to which I clinch so profoundly is, in fact, a delusion. And to hold onto it is to invite only greater delusion because one lie, even if one believes it inside and tells it to no one, always begets more. I must be willing to come to God with an open hand. We’re never free except that we are made free. And the invitation again becomes, “Eat my flesh; drink my blood; sit, be still; learn what it is, again, to walk as a child.”

Brothers and sisters, family of God, “Come to me,” Jesus says, “all you who labor and are heavy laden” (Matt. 11:28). Let us learn again to receive the food only he can give us so we can walk with him and then, when invited, run the race that is set before us.

Which best expresses your walk of faith: a clenched fist or an open hand? Share this blog and your response on Twitter. Please include my username, @revgregbrewer.

(This post is an adaption of Bishop Brewer’s sermon on Oct. 23, 2018, at the Annual Clergy Conference, Canterbury Retreat Center, Oviedo, Florida.)

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.