What do you want?

The first words Jesus says in John’s gospel are a question: ‘what do you want?’  It is a question posed to two of John the Baptist’s disciples when Jesus sees them hanging around behind him, but it is a question which will run through the whole gospel, a constant recurring theme.   As Jesus journeys through Galilee and onto Jerusalem, he is challenging all the people he meets to reveal what it is that they truly want, what it is that they really desire.  And for John the evangelist this question is crucial – one that Jesus asks not only of the people around him on earth, but of all human beings, all of us who encounter Jesus in the scriptures and through the Spirit.  For John is clear that we too are asked, ‘what do you want? - what is it that your heart truly desires?  

Today’s gospel passage, indeed the whole of chapter six, is one of those times where the people around Jesus are finding their wishes and dreams are being placed under the spotlight.   At the start of the chapter Jesus fed the five thousand and walked on water, showing the power of God, of himself, over and in creation.  In a world where so many were hungry and tired, where Roman oppression was often so blatant, where the claims of the Emperor to maintain peace and civilisation rang so hollow, for Jesus to provide food and security was a cause for rejoicing.  It was evidence of divine power at work in the world.  So the people marvel at the miracles, as if all they had wanted had now happened, that all their dreams had come true.  They rush to Jesus, keen we are told earlier to make him King.   The one who can make plenty out of just a few loaves and fishes, surely he can give them what they need, and that is what they want. 

But if the crowd are content to be fed just for a day, Jesus is not willing to leave them to bask in the memory of this great event.  He is opening up a conversation that begins from their desire, from their hopes and longings and aspirations, and challenging them to be brave, to desire more and better, not to rest content simply with what they have become accustomed to needing.  For Jesus is reminding them of what their tradition already tells them, that what God calls us to is not simply the satisfying of our physical needs, nor even perhaps the earthly success that can be so alluring.  And he is challenging them to shift their perspective, to see themselves as people invited to share in the true life lived in and with God.   The people are asked if what they want is not only to be sustained with bread and water but something more than that.  Are they ready and willing to share in the true bread that is Jesus’s body, and through this to be drawn into the relationship between Father and Son, the relationship of divine life? To many of Jesus’s hearers, this seems outlandish, much too far away from a literal, exclusive way of thinking about God that still exerts a hold over them.  Some scoff, keen to put Jesus down, to deny he might somehow be special.  Jesus’s response is not so much an explanation as a reflection, a suggestion that even in the great story of God providing manna to eat in the wilderness, there was still something missing.  Perhaps if we are honest with ourselves, we find our hearts still restless, even when we think we have all the answers.

For to know what we want, we need to know what is possible, what future there might be for us as humans and God’s children.  So often, what we want is what we think we might be able to have, our horizons limited by the familiar.  Yes, for some that horizon might include Olympic gold, high office, or headlining the Glastonbury festival, but for many others it might just be the possibility of getting through the day, in a world of inequality and exploitation.  But whatever our human dreams might be, Jesus is always challenges us with the question of whether this is really what we desire, what true life might be.  And always Jesus is offering to those who will hear, those who will taste and see, a fulness of life that exceeds the surface realities of this world.  For he offers us life ‘abundantly’, in true relationship with him and one another. 

And if we ask what that relationship might look like, Jesus offers us here perhaps the most powerful image of all, even in its simplicity.  That is the image of bread, bread which the crowd have just been filled with, bread that is the staple necessity of their diets, bread that cannot be made and eaten on our own, but needs farmers and grain, yeast and ovens and bakers.  But bread, as the people of Israel know, is also God’s gracious gift, sent down as manna from heaven to feed refugees in the wilderness, or as the loaf brought by an angel to Elijah when he needed the strength for the journey to Horeb.   Bread is the energy and carbohydrate our bodies need, but it is also, always, a sign of the goodness of creation, of God’s generous love, and of our own dependence on God and on each other. And as the bread of life Jesus is for us the saving, sustaining, Son and God.

Bread, in Jesus’s hands and in Jesus’s words, becomes a sign of grace, of God’s generosity that makes possible new and richer hope, new and deeper community.   And what that generosity means is revealed here in our passage when Jesus talks of giving his flesh for the life of the world, of the self-giving love that is the true divine glory.  That is the glory not only of miraculous feasting, but it is also, and most fully, the glory that is the pain of the cross, that challenges all our certainties and reorientates all our desires.  For, as the whole gospel underlines, if we come to Jesus looking only for the kind of food and power and security that we have become used to here on earth, then we will be disappointed.  Only when we allow God’s grace to transform our perspectives can we be drawn into the relationship with the Triune God that will truly satisfy our hearts. 

For throughout the gospel, indeed throughout our lives, Jesus will keep asking us what it is that we want, what it is we really desire, for ourselves and for our communities.  And all the while he will offer us truth and life and new relationship, made possible through divine love, restoring and renewing all creation.  As our focus turns in a moment towards the altar, where bread and wine become for us the body and blood of Christ, we encounter the effectual signs of that grace given to us freely.  For here we find hope and assurance that our hearts may find the true peace and joy that is ours in Christ.