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In the mid-to-late 80’s I was first starting in the real world of real jobs as an assistant manager of a Golden Corral Steakhouse. In was in their employ for roughly five years during which the company and their product line underwent very significant change as the company tried to adapt to a culture that was demanding an all-you-can-eat variety of foods. They started as mom-and-pop franchise stores serving fresh-cut steaks with a baked potato or fresh-cut fries and an optional pre-made salad and desert and became massive buffet stops found only at major intersections on interstates. Golden Corral was a steakhouse serving fresh real food. But then, the next thing we knew the company added a salad bar which became a buffet bar with beaucoup of entrees and a full-blown desert bar with self-serve ice cream.
The cost of the food on the buffet bar was astronomical and it nearly doubled the number of people we needed to work in the kitchen…and then there was the waste. People would fill their plates up with way more than they could and should eat and then go back for more only for it to be thrown away. Then there was the throwing away of uneaten food on the buffet bar at the end of the day. (We had a local pig farmer whose last name happened to also be Benson pay us next to nothing for what we threw away on weekend nights. But hey, anything to recoup some of the cost of what we were throwing away.) Food cost, labour cost, and waste made it impossible for the moms and pops to continue to afford their franchises. To survive you needed to do a very high volume of business…and that’s why today, Golden Corrals are few and far between located at major intersections on interstates offering an unbelievable smorgasbord of mostly industrially produced food.
What caused all this? Culture changed. People were no longer simply satisfied with a meal of real food (real beef, real chicken, real vegetables). We wanted to be able to eat our fill of a variety of stuff that tasted good and didn’t cost an arm and a leg. This meant serving industrialized or mass-produced processed foods that are full of corn and soy fillers and corn syrup and another sugar called fructose which nobody seems to want to admit is an evil little critter and should not be a food additive. Any beef producer will tell you what happens when you add a lot of corn to the cattle’s diet. We all got fat.
I did some Internet research and found a site put out by the World Obesity Federation. In 2017 33.5% of Canadian adults were overweight and on top of that 27% of us were obese. Do the math, and that adds up to 61% of Canadian adults are dealing with physical and mental health problems related to our body fat. In the States (if you want to know how Americans are doing) in 2018 31.2% of American adults were overweight and 42.7% were obese. Do that math. That’s a whopping 74% of Americans are dealing with physical and mental health issues related to too much body fat. That was 2017-2018. Today, every one of us can attest that COVID has exasperated the problem. They should call this bug the COVID 10-20 for the 10 to 20 pounds nearly everybody has put on.
Let’s do something interesting. Let’s compare “have’s” to “have not’s”. Malawi is a nation we Presbyterians should be concerned about. It’s a poor nation in Africa with whom The Presbyterian Church in Canada has had a longstanding relationship. In 2016 16.6% of adults in Malawi were overweight and 7.6% were obese. That’s only 24.1% of Malawians dealing with physical health issues related to weight. I refrain from saying it affects their emotional health because body image problems aren’t as prevalent in the Third World. That makes me wonder if there might be a direct link between wealth and weight.
Anyway, why are we eating so much, and particularly so much of this food that’s bad for us? If this were a TV talk show and Jesus was our guest and we asked him that question, based on what he says here in John his answer would be, “You’re not satisfied. You spend your lives in pursuit of all this stuff that you think will make you happy, but you are not. Your lives are not fulfilling and so you are bellying up to the buffet bar for a false feast trying to convince yourselves your happy, but you’re just not satisfied.”
I don’t think a one of us could argue with him on that. This cultural thing that we have where we devote ourselves to getting the biggest piece of this pie we can get, this pie that we think we are entitled to; well, it ain’t working. Down South we had a phrase for that stuporific after affect you feel after a big family meal at Mawmaw’s house. We called that feeling being “fat, dumb, and happy”. As a society here in North America, by the way we do life, this unrestrained pursuit of striving to get more of the stuff we think will satisfy us, we have indeed grown fat. We have indeed grown dumb. The ability to think critically about important issues has left us. We are fat. We are dumb. Yet, we are unsatisfied. Disillusioned and angry might describe us better.
Well, I’m nattering on about satisfaction because satisfaction, or happiness or fulfillment (whatever you want to call it) plays a major role in what’s going on in our reading from John. Satisfaction or the lack thereof is why this crowd of people came seeking Jesus. In the storyline, the day before the day our reading is set on, the crowd came seeking Jesus because they wanted to see him do miracles…and he gave them one. At the end of the day when they were all hungry Jesus fed this crowd of likely 15,000 if you add women and children to the men. He fed them using a little boy’s lunch that consisted of two fish and five loaves of bread. They…were…satisfied.
Jesus had his Twelve Disciples get the crowd to repose on the ground in groups of fifty. He took the boys lunch, gave thanks, and then started to divide it up for his disciples to distribute. Everyone had enough and there were twelve big baskets of left-overs. The people were so gobsmacked they wanted to make him king. (We seem to think that there’s a relationship between politics and satisfaction.) In that moment, as they reposed and shared that meal they tasted of something more than just bread and fish. They tasted life in the Kingdom of God, eternal life, and for a moment they knew what it was to be satisfied. It’s not like they feasted, filed their gullets and kicked back all fat, dumb, and happy. It’s that they had had enough, abundantly enough.
In the wake of that meal, the next day, when our reading picks up, these people came to Jesus again seeking satisfaction. When they found Jesus, he immediately pointed this out saying, “You are not seeking me because you saw signs, but because you ate the bread and were satisfied.” In other words, “You are not looking for me because I fed all of you with two fish and five loaves. Rather, you felt satisfied.” They were not seeking Jesus because they understood that these signs revealed him to be the Messiah, indeed the Son of God. They were seeking him because for a brief moment they were satisfied. Life was the way it was supposed to be and they wanted more.
So Jesus continued to teach them. “Don’t labour for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures into eternal life that the Son of Man will give you.” Jesus hits home here not only with this crowd but also with us. I cannot think of a statement that would be more counter-cultural to our way of life than what Jesus has just said here. He tells us not to waste our lives on pursuing all that stuff that we think will make us happy. It is all perishable. Rather, labouring for him and the eternal life he has to give is the path to satisfaction.
Jesus says labour after the food that endures unto eternal life. Eternal life does not mean going to heaven when we die as we are accustomed to think of it. Jesus defines eternal at John 17:3 where he says precisely this: “And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” Eternal life is knowing God through Jesus. There is no true satisfaction in life apart from the relationship we have with God in Jesus by the abiding presence of the Holy Spirit with us.
Jesus says that eternal life is found by believing in him meaning there is only one work we should labour at and that is to believe in him. We are to practice our faithfulness to God in a place called “in him” – in Jesus. I know that sounds weird so let me explain. The preposition “in” is important here. The Greek preposition there is used primarily to describe location or place; i.e., in the store. It’s like saying we are playing baseball in the park. To believe “in” Jesus literally means to be located “in Jesus” meaning situated in the new humanity God has brought about in him. Just like we have lived our lives located in the old humanity which the Apostle Paul would call ‘in Adam”. So now, we are ‘in Christ” and sharing in his relationship of Son-ship with the Father in the Holy Spirit. We are in him by being united to him by the Holy Spirit who has come to dwell in us.
It is the work of the Holy Spirit to make us more and more dissatisfied with the way things are in this world; the injustice, greed, false securities, abuses, lack of compassion, self-seeking, divisiveness, etc. The Holy Spirit also prompts us to take a look at ourselves to see our giftedness and our shortcomings and assures us that we are loved. The Holy Spirit makes us hunger for true community and prods us to compassionate action. The Holy Spirit makes us hunger to know Jesus and share in his relationship with God whom he called Father.
This location, this place called “in Jesus” where in we experience eternal life and live out our faithfulness is a real place right here in our lives – it is Christian fellowship. Practising our faith “in Jesus” is a community effort to love each other and the community around us in the way that Jesus has loved us. It is to work together in this world to seek justice for everyone, to love extending kindness to all, and to walk humbly with our God who is always with us.
This world promises satisfaction but has none to give. In this world that’s driven by materialistic and consumeristic individualism we find ourselves stuffed with stuff and like any meal at which we’ve eaten and imbibed too much we are left feeling miserable. The planet on which we live that hosts humanity’s fickle feast is certainly wondering when its conflict prone guests are finally going to leave and is quite upset that we haven’t learned to clean up after ourselves. But yet, there’s the Feast that Jesus has to offer in himself, the one where everyone simply reposes and has enough and there are leftovers. The feast where God is present and reposing with us. I know which feast I would rather be a server at. Join me?
