Moses, Buddha, Mohammed—each pointed to a way, a way of living, an ethical system.  A way of life.  Jesus does not come for that.  Jesus doesn’t give us a way of life: Jesus gives us the way to life.  More, Jesus himself is the way of life, himself the way to life.  Jesus did not come to give us a system. He came, and he comes, to give us himself.

This is what so confuses and disturbs the people listening to Jesus.  He is not claiming to be some remarkably enlightened man.  He claims that he is the one who has come down from heaven.  Moses didn’t come down from heaven.  Buddha didn’t.  Mohammed didn’t.  When we’re encountering Jesus, we are encountering someone beyond our experience, beyond our limitations.  For many, to encounter Jesus is to encounter someone beyond their belief.

The Incarnation.  Ordinarily, if we’re going to talk about this, we do so around Advent, at the end of the calendar year, which is the beginning of our worship year.  Incarnation is not a word you are going to hear outside these walls.  Incarnation is that word we use to name God becoming a human, when the Word became flesh in Jesus, born of a virgin, in a shed.  We cannot restore ourselves, only God can.  Who God restores through Jesus Christ is us: human beings.  The divine nature does the redeeming, and what is redeemed through Jesus Christ is flesh, and ours, by faith in the Redeemer; this is why, at the Resurrection, the Judgment, it is our bodies that will be raised, glorified, because these bodies of ours are redeemed, restored in Christ.  Now, we are embattled, torn, and tired.  Then, we shall be bright and whole.

          Admittedly, this is a great mystery—something revealed to us that we could not know, believe, or rely upon apart from revelation.  We do not understand how it can be, but the how is not really the point for us.  God knows the how, and it is beyond us.  The point for us is the why.  This is what the Gospels mean to tell us: why does God become man?

Part of the reason may be found in what I read to you from Isaiah last Sunday, where God points out that His chosen people “draw near with their mouths and honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me” (Is 29:13).  If the heart has wandered far, it is because there is no relationship to anchor the heart.  Moses and Mohammed can tell their students to obey God, and Buddha, starry-eyed, can tell his fellow travelers to be God, but it is only Jesus through whom and in whom we can know God.  Jesus comes to change our relationship with God.

It’s challenging to have a relationship with one whom we have not seen.  (Are there pen-pals, anymore?)  “[H]e who is from God is the only one who has seen the Father” (6:46).  Moses asked God to let Moses see Him, and God responded, “you cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live” (Ex 33:20).  We hear Jesus often speak of the Father, and we pray to our Father, who art in heaven, so we may not think much of the word, but in Israel’s relationship with God up to that point, speaking of God as Father was not common.  Jesus speaks of God as his Father, claims to have seen the Father, which no mortal can do and live, according to God Himself, and Jesus claims to have come down from heaven, although these people know his father and mother.  What does it all mean?

Jesus comes to change our relationship with God.  That is a beautiful thing: many people do not have a relationship with God.  He is a nearly empty drawer in the filing cabinet of their minds.  He is a woefully faded, blurry image in their hearts.  In Jesus Christ, God becomes visible to us, tangible, touchable.  This could be a reason why Jesus speaks about giving people bread and water, about being water and being bread.  Jesus told the woman at the well that “those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty.  The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life” (4:14 NRSV).  Today, we heard him say that he is “the bread of life” (6:48), “the living bread” (6:51).

What are water and bread for?  Bread and water sounds like prison rations, like extra punishment.  We are in prison, and we are free.  The prison we are in is this world that has locked itself in sin.  “Oh, sin!  You church people!”  The world has locked itself in evil, terrible things that we do to one another.  You, personally, might not have murdered anyone (though if you fought in a war you may have some qualms about that); you, personally, might not have committed adultery, although I’ll wager you know two or three people who have; you, personally, might not have bowed down to any statues or images, or prayed to them, yet have you never let anger, or sorrow, or grief, or fear, the pursuit of pleasure, or of wealth, or of experiences occupy the place in your heart that God has reserved there for Himself alone?  Have you never sought to fill some emptiness inside with something less than God?  To have to live in this world, as we must, is to have to confront sin, including our own.

And we are free.  Have you ever visited a prison?  I haven’t, so I can only try to imagine what it’s like to enter such a place, to walk in it, smell it, go through its doors, be in its rooms.  I can only try to imagine what it must feel like to walk out and leave it behind.  In the prison of this world, we walk out and leave it behind knowing there are people in there still, some of whom we love dearly, all of whom ought to have some claim upon our heart, since we claim to know, love, and follow Jesus.

But, all this about Jesus being divine, being . . . God.  Really?  How is that rational?  Those people talking among themselves in angry tones knew Jesus, knew his father and his mother.  Okay, he says some good things, things we agree with, about a good way to treat each other—if only we would!  Let’s just focus on trying to be good to one another, and not concern ourselves with all the God stuff.  Do you really need God to live a good life?

Beloved, do you know who the most enlightened people were who ever were?  Do you know what they did to one another, not once but twice?  One hundred years ago, this very day, the most enlightened people who ever were were murdering each other wholesale—using all the best scientific and technological advances to come up with ever more thorough and efficient ways to annihilate each other in horrible ways.  And then we did it again twenty years later, culminating in not one but two atomic bombs that wiped entire cities off the face of the earth.  J. Robert Oppenheimer didn’t quote the Bible upon seeing the test detonation in New Mexico, but he did say, rightly, “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

To whom can we turn, beloved?  We turn to one another, and that is something, but we are turning either to prisoners in the prison or to visitors in the prison.  Turn to the Creator, who comes to us as Redeemer, who tells us of the Sustainer, who gives water freely and bread without price, that most basic stuff of life, without which we could not live: living water, living bread.  Turn.  Come.  This is what Jesus is saying, what Jesus has been saying from the beginning of his earthly ministry.  I am hopeful that, for those of you who have been journeying with me in our Bible study, this message of Turn and Come will be sounding very familiar to you; we’ve been hearing it from Genesis on.

And Jesus tells them, “no one can come to me unless the Father draws him [or her] to me” (6:44).  He elaborates upon this in the next verse, saying that “anyone who [1] hears the Father and [2] learns from Him [3] comes” to Jesus (6:45).  Hearing does not imply learning.  Our teachers and our students, getting ready for the start of school, can affirm that.  Hearing is not the same as learning.  And the one who learns comes to Jesus, the living bread, the living water from heaven, from the Father.

Okay, so if we accept what Jesus teaches, if we eat the bread of his teaching, drink the water of his instruction, we will live, is that it?   Because, I mean, that sounds like something we can do.  We can hear.  We can learn.  We can come and do what Jesus tells us to do.  We can live an ethical life, according to this system.  No.  Beloved, no.  Jesus did not come to give us a system or a way of life.  Jesus comes to give us himself.  Jesus comes to change our relationship to God.  The bread he will give is his flesh (6:51).  If Jesus had confused and frustrated people before, how much more now!  It makes no sense!

When Eve and Adam each decide to disobey God, knowing disobedience meant death, God expelled them from Eden “to till the ground from which he was taken” (Gen 3:23 RSV).  Beloved, the ground from which Adam was taken was the earth upon which we live and work, to this day, but the ground of Adam’s being, his existence, the ground of the meaning and purpose in his life, is God: God is Adam’s ground.  It may just be that God sends the unhappy couple out on a journey of cultivating their relationship with Him, whom they rejected, to whom they preferred death.  If someone you loved said “I prefer death to you,” you, also, might conclude that some work was needed on that relationship.

God drives them out, lest Adam “put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever” (Gen 3:22 RSV).  Now, God did not forbid their eating from that tree while they were in the garden, while they were in a healthy, growing, flourishing, fruitful, loving relationship with God, their Father.  In a sense, we were driven out to cultivate our relationship with God.  We did such a poor job of it, despite all the help God gave us along the way, we so preferred sin to obedience, preferred death to God, that, if it were possible, we ended up in an even worse condition than Adam and Eve.

Yet it was God’s will, in mercy and grace, because of His great love and compassion for His creatures, to offer them the fruit of the tree of life.  When we receive Jesus Christ, we eat that fruit.  When we come to the tree upon which that fruit hangs, we come to life.  Jesus says, “If anyone eats this bread, he will live forever.  The bread that I will give him is my flesh, which I give so that the world may live” (6:51).  Isn’t it strange?  All this death so many, too many pursue, thinking it is life, and the life so many, too many reject, preferring their poisonous pursuits.  By his wounds we are healed.  By his blood we are cleansed.  I sometimes think our cross is a little too tidy, a little too clean.

And to Jesus Christ, who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests of his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever.