John 6:25-59 page 1

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Night by night we are clearing each room of the manse before we move next month. As much as possible is either being recycled or going to charity shops. However we have so many black sacks accumulating that we may have to distribute them surreptitiously up and down the street next Tuesday night!

One recipient of our unwanted possessions has been the Rochester Depot of Blythswood Care, the charity for whom we fill in shoeboxes every Christmas. On Friday I took a carload there, and the man who received everything from me told me lots of interesting and disturbing things about aspects of world poverty that they encounter. One shocking incident stood in my mind.

One of the recent projects of so-called international aid and development by the UK Government was this: they paid the international accountancy firm Pricewaterhousecoopers £3 million to privatise the water industry in South Africa. In one township water meters were fitted. The people were so poor they could no longer afford the water. Within months thirty had died of cholera. It's a scandal with devastating human consequences. Doubtless the people couldn't afford the water from their taps and got water elsewhere, from a contaminated source.

In our reading Jesus said,

I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.
[verse 35]

This is not what Jesus does in the spiritual life. Nobody is left with the religious equivalent of cholera; instead, meeting Jesus Christ and becoming one of his disciples leads to true spiritual health.

Which means it's vital we get our attitude to Jesus and faith right. And that, it seems to me, is what this passage is about. It comes soon after the only miracle that features in all four Gospels apart from the Resurrection - the feeding of the five thousand. That miracle has ended with Jesus escaping from the crowd, because they saw what he had done and wanted to make him king by force. Already their reactions to him are wrong.

It continues here when they find him on the other side of the lake [verse 25]. Six times they question Jesus and every time they are barking up the wrong tree. And so I want to make six brief points about getting the spiritual life right.

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Copyright © David D Faulkner, 2006 except where other sources are attributed or noted as inspiration.