Jesus says in verses 26 and 27 of today’s text, “I tell you the truth, you are looking for me, not because you saw miraculous signs, but because you ate your loaves and had your fill.  Do not labor for food that perishes, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.  On him God the Father has placed his seal of approval.”

 The people that Jesus was talking to just saw or took part in the miracle of Jesus feeding the 5000 the day before.  Now they’re on the other side of the Sea of Galilee, and they ask Jesus, “When did you get here?”  They didn’t see him get in the boat with his disciples and it would have been too far to walk around the Sea in just one night.  But Jesus ignores their question and gets right to the heart of the matter.  He knows that the only reason that they are there is because they had their bellies filled the day before with bread and now they want some more.  But Jesus tells them not to work for food that spoils, or that will just make them hungry again, but rather for food that gives eternal life.

As many of you know I just returned from visiting with my family in Michigan.  Whenever I go back to see my mother, who still lives in the house where I grew up, it doesn’t take long before she asks the same question she’s been asking every time I go home.  She asks, “When are you going to get the rest of your stuff out of here?”  For the last few years, she has been on a mission to purge the house of anything that belongs to me and my brother.  She is making progress as my bedroom has already been turned into a guest room/nursery for the grandkids.  My brother’s room is now a computer room/playroom for the grandkids.  But her Waterloo in this battle so to speak, is the basement.  So last week, my brother Craig and I decided to go down and see if we couldn’t help out  a little bit.

When I was down there, I came across my some old model rockets.  I remember when I was younger the excitement of going to a hobby store and buying a rocket with my allowance that would launch hundreds of feet into the air and then trying to catch them as they floated to the ground.  Today, their parachutes are ripped and fins are broken off.  Downstairs I found my old remote control cars.  I remember how I saved up the money from cutting grass all summer so that I could buy one.  Today its’ sitting in pieces on my old work bench.  My first bicycle with gears, a Schwinn World, that my father paid over a hundred dollars for, was down there.  I used to ride it up and down our street that’s as flat as pancake, thinking I was riding in the Alps during the Tour de France.  Now, its’ down in the basement its’ gears don’t shift anymore and the tires are all dry rotted.

Down in that basement there’s over 30 years of stuff like that down there.  Things that at one time were so important and that I just had to have.  But after I launched a few rockets, I had to race a remote control car, then race my bike, then a new and faster bike, and then I started driving, and then, and then…well you get the picture.  Maybe you have some things in a parent’s home or in your own, that are similar.  Things that were so important at one time, things that you or someone else had to work so hard to get.  And while they may have given you some great times and memories and you’ll always love them, today they are just food that perishes.

Jesus tells the crowd not to labor for bread that perishes, but to work for bread that gives eternal life.  He tells the crowd that our concern and focus in life should not be on model rockets or bicycles nor anything else that is here today and gone tomorrow, but on eternal life.

 But when Christians here the word “work” we sometimes get a sinking feeling in our stomach.  Work is sometimes a dirty word in the Christian vocabulary, and its’ not because we are lazy.  Years ago during the  reformation, protestant Christians were in a large part fighting against works righteousness, that is the idea we can earn part or all of our salvation.  The Lutheran reformers pointed to Scripture and said that there is nothing we can do to earn our salvation (AC. IV), nor can we come to Christ by our own power.  Salvation and Conversion are gifts of the Holy Spirit.  But here in our text we have Christ telling us to work for the food that endures eternal life!  But notice the question that the crowd asks Jesus before he gives this reply.  They say, “What must we do to be doing the works of God?” 

Did you catch that?  They said “works”, plural, as in more then one.  They were Jews, ever aware of the Law that God had given them, and the hundreds more, in what was collectively known as the Mishna, set up around them by men to make sure that no one would even come close to breaking God’s laws.  So they asked which ones out of the hundreds out there, must we do to have this bread that gives eternal life.  And Jesus turns their question right back around on them and says, “The WORK of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent you”.  No Ten Commandments, no Mishna, just a simple, “To believe in the one he has sent.” The one thing you must do, is to believe in Christ.  And you have to do it, for the Holy Spirit cannot believe for you. But it is only with His help through the Word and Sacraments that we are able to come to know Christ is the bread that gives eternal life, whom the Father sent.

But the crowd wants proof that they are saved by faith and not by the Law. So they want a want a great miracle than what Moses, the Law gives, gave them saing “When our forefathers were with Moses they ate manna from Heaven for 40 years, how are you going to top that?”  Jesus says, “It is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven”.  The reply Jesus gives corrects them in three ways.

  First, it was God, not Moses who provided for the nation of Israel in the Desert.  How easy it is for us to forget this, something in which Satan must delight in.  Yes I cut grass for a summer to buy a remote control car, but it was God who made the grass grow, the oil to run the lawn mower, and even my own muscle and bones to push it.  We all work for what we have, but the ability to work itself is a gift from the Lord above, not something we have earned.