“I am the bread of life…” John 6.35 NKJV
We’ve been looking this week at unlikely candidates; those whom we would choose last for kickball, for instance. We’ve been in and around John 6 quite a lot, and when I saw that I realized what God might be up to this week.
To the unregenerate part of us, the ultimate unlikely candidate is Jesus.
He is the plot twist the most educated among us never saw coming. For others, He is the last possibility they want to consider because they are so invested in everything He came to demolish. For still others, however, He is the overabundant fulfillment of everything we could ever hope for.
There’s so much going on in John 6 that I have to discipline myself in today’s Firewatch to a single attribute of a single facet, and that’s the bread.
John 6 is where it is recorded that Jesus fed the five thousand with five barley loaves and two small fish. He commands the disciples to “gather up the fragments that remain, so that nothing is lost” (v12).
I have to cover also a brief interlude wherein the people attempt to take Jesus by force and make Him king (hello, shades of king Saul), Jesus hides Himself by departing “again to the mountain by Himself alone” in v15 (a fragment worthy of far more meditation than I can give it here), and the disciples inexplicably leave Him behind, rowing for the other side of the Sea of Galilee in the dark. A storm comes up, the disciples row hard for miles, and oh, by the way, Jesus shows up walking on water, says, “It is I; do not be afraid,” and then, as if He were the true destination all along, they immediately arrive where they were headed.
But back to the bread.
The people whom Jesus fed on the other side of the Sea of Galilee track Him down in Capernaum asking about bread, of all things. Jesus busts them by speaking the truth; that they seek Him not because He does the work of the Father but because He had filled them with bread, however miraculous. He urges them to labor for everlasting bread, the bread He confesses He is in v35. He even tells them, when they ask, that the work the Father has for them is real simple: to “believe in Him whom [the Father] sent” (v29).
The crucial verses for this discussion are from v35 to v40, where, three different ways, Jesus makes it clear that there is a supernatural, abiding, eternal truth underpinning His command to the disciples way back in v12 to “gather up the fragments that remain, so that nothing is lost.”
He teaches them that everyone whom the Father has given Him will indeed come to Him and not be rejected by Him, “that of all He has given Me I should lose nothing,” and that “everyone who sees the Son and believes in Him may have everlasting life; and I will raise him up at the last day.”
Jesus was and is the ultimate unlikely candidate because it requires radical, simple, childlike faith to access the truth: that He is precisely who He says He is. We can either believe Him or refuse Him. It does seem impossible that one Man could have saved creation by His blood, but that’s how powerful perfection is. Who would have thought that God Himself would step into all He had made and be the sacrifice He had required? None of us imagined that God would show up the way He did. It has always been thus. And not a fragment shall be unaccounted for.
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