SOMETHING BEYOND THE MIRACLE
Take for example the Miracle of the Feeding of the Five Thousand (John 6).
At its first level of significance, it was performed by Christ out of his compassion for the people’s physical hunger. But that was not, its only, and not even, its main purpose. The people naturally got hungry the next day as well. But the record itself tells us that when they came to Jesus clamoring for a repeat of this physical miracle he refused to repeat it.
Why? If he did have these miraculous powers, why did he not go on using them day after day until physical hunger was banished from the earth? And why does he not still do it today? Because, so he said, they have failed to see, or else were deliberately ignoring the higher purpose, the significance of this miraculous sign. (John 6:26) They failed to see the truth beyond the miracle.
The miracle was meant to alert them not only to the fact that Jesus was their Creator in human form, but that he had come down from heaven to offer himself to them as the Bread of life to satisfy their spiritual hunger. The stomach being itself material can be satisfied with material things. But the human spirit, deriving as it does from God who is spirit can never be fully satisfied with material things nor with merely aesthetic, emotional or intellectual pleasures. It needs fellowship with a Person, and that Person none other than its Creator. Without him the human spirit is doomed to perpetual hunger which ten thousand physical miracles would never quench.
At this level we can test the truth of this miracle story ourselves.
It offers us a diagnosis of human need. It says we are spiritually hungry, whether or not we consciously know what (or rather whom) we are hungry for. It is the hollow, void in the soul that nags us. Some seek mystical enlightenment and discipline to satisfy this longing, yet remain empty. Multitudes have been taught and trained to suppress their spiritual hunger. Some have succeeded and will honestly claim that they feel no pangs of spiritual hunger. But that can be an alarming symptom. We are told that when people are physically starving without any food, whatever, it is at first very painful. But after awhile the pain goes away and does not return until death is imminent and inevitable. It can be similarly so with spiritual starvation and its final stage, the second death.
But to those who recognize their spiritual hunger, Christ offers himself as the Living Bread.
Do they long for that spiritual dimension of life that is eternal fellowship with God, that begins here on earth and extends beyond the grave into God’s heaven? Christ guarantees that he can give that. (John 6:28-58)
Do they long to have their spirit freed from the shadow cast on it by the guilt and bondage of sin? Christ through his death can give that as well.(John 8:31-36)
How then can we know that he is true, that he is, as he claims to be our Creator in human form?
In the same way as we know a loaf of bread can genuinely satisfy our human hunger: By coming to it, trusting it, eating it.
So to those who recognize the truth of his diagnoses of their spiritual hunger, Christ says, ‘I am the bread of life. He who comes to me shall not hunger; and he who believes on me shall never thirst.’
Those who come and believe discover that he is true.
