Hungry Yet?

For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. As the living Father hath sent me, and I live by the Father: so he that eateth me, even he shall live by me. (St. John 6:55, 57)

          Conventional wisdom says summer is a hard time for churches, while Christmas is a feast. More and more, though, I’m coming to believe that Christmas is actually a time of famine for churches.

          Certainly Advent should be a delicious time when the Lord feeds His hungry people. But in fact Advent is a depressed time when the Lord’s people try to fill their starving souls with anything except the only One who can fill them.

          This Advent, we’re going to go against the grain of society and actually focus on the Lord Jesus Christ. We’re going to learn who he is from his own words about himself, and you and I – Lord willing – are going to take him to heart.

          Today, as we read from St. John 6 and Jesus’ description of himself as the Bread of Life, ask yourself three critical questions: Am I hungry? What do I want to eat? And what does it mean to “eat the Bread of Life?”

          The fact is, you have a massive empty place in your soul, and you’ll do anything you can to fill it – whether with friends, family, food, drink, gifts, parties and the like. So you must give your attention to learning more about the One who feeds, and fills, souls.

          The first question you need to ask yourself this Advent is, “Am I hungry?” As it turns out, you’re probably starving.

          St. John 6 describes one of the miracles of Christ: the feeding of the 5,000 with a few loaves of barley bread and some fishes. The miracle demonstrated the divinity of Jesus and his superiority to Moses, but the next morning, we read of the crowd hunting after Jesus for all the wrong reasons. They wanted dinner and a miracle, not a personal relationship with the Bread of Life.

          Perhaps the saddest aspect of this account is that like their ancestors in the wilderness, these Jews ate miraculous bread from the Lord – yet that physical bread failed to whet their appetite for true spiritual nourishment. It was as deflating as a so-called “Christian” soup kitchen today where the Gospel isn’t preached: what’s the point? This miraculous physical food should have caused them to crave the Lord God Himself, but these folks couldn’t hear their souls growling with hunger for the rumbling of their bellies.

          Sometimes you and I can’t either.

          Either we’re gloating over our possessions or worrying about our lack of possessions, but regardless, you and I often fail to realize our great spiritual need this time of year. We tend to mock those crowds who attended to their physical hunger but ignored their souls; the truth is you and I aren’t any better.

          Recently I ran a 10-mile race (yes, there are officials who can prove it to you skeptics!), and remarkably my appetite was suppressed for several days after the race. I wasn’t alarmed by my lack of hunger, because long runs tend to suppress the human appetite. Yet when humans for no evident reason claim not to be hungry, you and I are alarmed.

          Why, then, do you and I not care that we and those around us have no sense of spiritual hunger at all?

          Advent and Christmas should be a time of the year when you and I ignore our stomachs and see our desperate need for a Savior to cleanse us from our defilement and to make us whole. Dec. 25 should be a day of revelry and feasting on Christ. With our absorption with this world – with gifts and with food and with trees – sometimes we hardly sense our souls’ emptiness.

          Ask yourself secondly, “What do I want to eat?”

          The crowd that day wanted more bread and fishes – they had no interest in Jesus whatsoever. When Jesus challenged their thinking and caused them to deal with their spiritual need, they spurned him and fell back on the religious traditions of their fathers.

          “We don’t need you, Jesus,” they murmured. “What can this man do for us? He claims to be from heaven, but we know his mama and daddy. He says he’ll feed us with the ‘Bread of Life,’ but no one can compare to Moses and to the manna he fed our fathers. And this man says he’ll give us his flesh to eat. Who ever heard of such?”

          In fact, had they taken to heart the words of the prophets, they would have begged Jesus for this heavenly food and fed on him eagerly.

          Your soul is hungry regardless of whether or not you acknowledge that hunger. The issue really is how you’ll fill the gnawing pit inside you. This time of year, you and I take good things such as get-togethers and decorations and tasty foods and make them into little saviors. We go too far with them, and we run ourselves into heaps of debt trying to mollify our spiritual hunger with iPods and clothes.

          Like the crowd that day in John 6, you and I honestly don’t think Jesus is sufficient to satisfy our souls. We think we need more stuff in order to be content and to have purpose and place in life.

          But listen to what Christ says repeatedly about himself in this text: only he has seen the Father, because he is divine. Only he is from heaven. Only he gives the true nourishment from heaven, his flesh (sacrificed on Good Friday), which gives life eternal. Only he fills the soul with lasting fullness and life. And only he grants resurrection life.

          When I did recover my sense of hunger and my appetite a few days after the race, I was smart enough not to reach for cookies or for potato chips. I actually ate some turkey and vegetables – food that truly satisfies and nourishes the body.

          If your soul is calling out to be fed, don’t look to the Christmas songs or to entertainment or to the trappings of the season. Look to the Bread of Heaven, who promises that you never again will hunger with him in your soul.

          If you have asked yourself the previous two questions (“Am I hungry? If so, what do I want to eat?”), you must ask yourself the third and most-important question: “What does it mean to feed on Christ?”

          Jesus says his flesh is food indeed and his blood is drink indeed, but in what way can you feed on this One who is the Bread of Life?

          Clearly, Jesus means more here than simply consuming the elements in the sacrament of Holy Communion, although the Lord’s Supper might well be in view to some extent. What Jesus is saying, rather, is that you and I must personally appropriate the work of Jesus to ourselves: you and I must believe on him as our Redeemer. In order for the Bread of Life to dwell inside your soul, you must welcome him by faith as your Savior – as the one who at Calvary paid the price for your sin against God.

          But feeding on Jesus is a daily practice as well. It requires preaching the Gospel to yourself every day as you allow the Spirit to search you and to bring to light your secret and public sins. Feeding on Jesus requires communing with him daily in the means of grace that he has provided: reading his Word; praying to and through him; receiving Communion in church; and meditating on his work for you. In short, feeding on the Bread of Heaven involves mindful walking with Christ every moment of every day.

          Jesus, true to his word, always nourishes your soul. Yet his nourishing and sustaining presence is most notable when your evil conscience is attacking you in the quiet of the night, saying, “You’re not good enough to follow Jesus.” He sustains you when your father is diagnosed with cancer and you don’t know how you’re going to make it. He sustains persecuted believers in China as they are beaten for meeting in house churches. Jesus sustains you when you are at the low point of a depressive episode and life looks bleak.

          Jesus is always there to fill your soul with his very self. To feed on him, and to enjoy his fullness, is to run to him constantly as he is offered to you in his Gospel.

          Spiritual hunger is a curious thing: it presents itself to you in the midst of abundance.

          The starved soul begins to growl when the stomach is full, when the house is plastered with decorations and when the floor is flooded with opened presents and shredded wrapping paper. It’s when you’ve gorged yourself at the world’s table and come away famished that you sense your inner hunger.

          Can you hear your soul grumbling? Good! You are on your way to your best, most-satisfying Christmas ever.