Preached on Sunday, August 11, 2024, the Twelfth after Pentecost, at Trinity Cathedral, Little Rock.

From John’s Gospel: “The Jews began to complain about [Jesus] because He said, ‘I am the bread that came down from heaven’…[But] Jesus answered [the Jews], ‘Do not complain among yourselves’” (John 6:41, 43).

This is our third Sunday in our five-week-long journey through the sixth chapter of John, Jesus’ so-called “bread discourse.” Last week, we got the punchline, and this week, we get it again, just for good measure: “I am the bread of life,” says Jesus. “Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty” (John 6:35). We learn of Who Jesus is: the bread of life, the end to all hunger and thirst.

And if all of that tells us Who Jesus is, this week, we hear about who we are in relation to this Jesus. “The Jews began to complain” (John 6:41), reads John’s Gospel. That’s us. That’s been us since our earliest days of covenant with God, from our wanderings in the wilderness to this very day. We’re the ones who complain, the ones who grumble, or as the King James’ version memorably puts it, the ones who murmur. We’re the dissatisfied ones, the restless and resentful ones, the ones who wish God would do something different, the ones who wish God would just be different, the ones who find the good God’s gifts to be not good enough. God gives us something––gives us Himself!––but it’s not quite how we would like it, nor is it quite how we would make sense of it. And so, we, like our ancestors before us, complain. It’s not entirely clear why we complain––we could come up with plenty of reasons why we do it, I’m sure––but none of the reasons really matter in the end. What matters is our predictability: when God provides, we murmur against Him.

[But] Jesus answered [the Jews, answered us,] ‘Do not complain among yourselves’” (John 6:43). Okay, then, we have our marching orders. But what does it actually look like in practice not to complain? That’s our question this morning: if we shouldn’t complain, what should we do instead?

What we should do is receive what God is doing. And that doing of ours is what we Christians very simply call “faith.” Faith is what this passage from John’s Gospel is getting at––and really, that’s what all of John 6 is getting at. Last week’s passage clued us in. The people asked Jesus, “What must we do to perform the works of God?” And Jesus answered them, “This is the work of God, that you believe (πιστεύητε) in Him Whom He has sent” (John 6:28–29). Our natural response to God’s provision is complaint––it always has been!––but we are commanded not to complain, and to believe in Him, to put our trust in Him, to have faith in Him.

Now, “faith” is a tricky word for Christians. It’s quite easy for us to make a mess of things when we talk about “faith,” because we tend to think that faith must primarily be some sort of activity of our own, “maybe a set of ideas to which we cling on tenaciously, maybe a psychological state we hope to induce, maybe a set of contrite feelings, maybe a great exercise of our wills. But in the end [we] can’t reduce faith to those things––ideas or feelings or acts of will.” So writes the late Anglican theologian, John Webster: “Faith is not first and foremost a matter of what I do or what I am; it is not at heart me striving to be something. In faith, we look beyond ourselves and our works and simply acknowledge and rest in something other than ourselves––the utter sufficiency and provision of God. Faith lets God be God, lets God do God’s work” [1].

Faith, in the end, is not about what we do, but about receiving what God does. “It’s a strange kind of doing,” writes Webster. “It’s [a] doing in which we don’t initiate, don’t try to bring something about…It’s a doing in which we receive and take into ourselves the gift of what God has already done” [2]. This is what we mean by faith.

But again, we must ask that question of ours: what does this actually look like? What does it look like for us not to complain and to have faith? The sixth chapter of John offers us an illustration of this strange kind of doing, and there are two parts to it, two steps.

The first part is making ourselves teachable. Jesus says, “It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught by God’” (John 6:45). Teachability is an act of humility. It requires us to stop talking in some sense––to be quiet and to listen. We might imagine that the opposite of complaining is to substitute our complaints with words of gratitude and appreciation, but that’s not really what John’s Gospel has in mind for us. Instead, Scripture urges us to not worry about saying much of anything at all, urging us to listen: to hear God and to be taught by Him. 

And here’s the second part: after we are taught by God, then, we are drawn closer to God. Jesus says, “Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me” (John 6:45). It’s only when we stop talking and listen that we can hear what God wants to say, and it’s only when we hear what God wants to say that we find ourselves drawn closer to God. We can’t think or feel or will our way closer to God. We can’t speak our way there, and we certainly can’t murmur our way there. It’s only by hearing God that we find ourselves drawn towards God and towards the life He has prepared for us.

For us not to complain is for us to be taught by God and, then, to be drawn closer to God––which is how Scripture describes having faith.  “Whoever comes to me will never be hungry,” says Jesus, “and whoever believes in me––whoever has faith in me––will never be thirsty” (John 6:35). In faith, all hunger and thirst, all desire and longing, comes to an end, not just for a day in the wilderness, but for all time. But crucially, notice just how passive all this is. We are not the subject of the activity, but the object. God is speaking, and we are hearing. God is teaching, and we are learning. God is drawing us in, and we find ourselves caught up in God’s current. “This is the work of God, that we have faith.”

Now, we need to be very honest at this point: faith can seem virtually impossible. Having faith seems virtually impossible because it doesn’t come naturally to us. Again, our natural response to God is reticence and resistance. Many Christians experience great inadequacy on this point, as if we just aren’t good enough. But we must remember that faith isn’t really something that comes from us: “faith is not our work,” writes the apostle Paul (Ephesians 2:8). No, not our work, but a gift “from above, coming down from the Father of lights” (James 1:17) And yet, weirdly enough, we must remember that, at the very same time, faith is our work. It is something that we do, but it’s a strange kind of doing. Faith is that doing in which we don’t do much at all: resting in Who God is and what God does.

We gather this morning to celebrate the Holy Communion, and in a very real way, the Holy Communion is one of the ways in which we practice all of this. The Church is the “school of the Holy Spirit,” to borrow John Calvin’s phrase, where the Good Teacher instructs us, where we practice the life of faith. What we learn here, what we practice here, what God does in us here, prepares us for when we are not here. Here, we practice encountering the provision of God, the Living Bread coming down from heaven. Here, we practice recognizing our response: the complaining, the grumbling, the murmuring against God’s gifts. And here, we practice attending to Jesus’ command to not complain by practicing the life of faith: that oddly passive activity whereby God teaches us and draws us closer. May it be so for us this day. As the Prayer Book puts it, may we “draw near with faith” this day, “and take this sacrament to our comfort.” And may we be blessed by such faith through all our days––and on the last day, find everlasting life. Amen.

[1] John Webster, “Take this Holy Sacrament,” in Confronted by Grace: Meditations of a Theologian, edited by Daniel Bush and Brannon Ellis (Bellingham: Lexham Press, 2015), 78.

[2] Webster, “Take this Holy Sacrament,” 78.