John 6:24-35
The people in this morning’s passage seeking Jesus were the peasant class of Galilee. Perhaps their life was best described thousands of years later by Annie in “It’s The Hard Knock Life”.
It's the hard-knock life for us
It's the hard-knock life for us
'Stead of treated
We get tricked
'Stead of kisses
We get kicked
It's the hard-knock life
Perhaps it would be a similar life to West Virginia coal miners or day laborer farmworkers. Getting more than a few days’ worth of food was beyond conceiving and so one can appreciate the passion with wish they sought Jesus; the man who could literally multiply bread.
Pearl S. Buck wrote, “A hungry man can’t see right or wrong. He just sees food.”
They were understandably impressed by Jesus, so much so they tried to make Him a king, (Wouldn’t you rather have Him as king!) so, they combed the countryside chasing after Him.
But Jesus, the man with such incredible compassion that Mark uses a word to describe His emotions upon seeing needy crowds, splangdizomai, which means to have your guts torn apart; because it literally caused Him pain to see people suffer would not respond gently.
His love for them was even greater than His compassion.
When they finally find Him, He chastises them. He tells them that they seek Him out for the wrong reasons. It’s like that parable. If you give a child a fish, you feed her for a day. If you teach her how to fish, you feed her for life. Only in this case Jesus was teaching them not how to find food for the body. As important as feeding a hungry stomach is feeding a hungry soul is even more so. As Catholic priest Joseph Donders said, “They wanted that which would give them the means to continue life as they had been living it for years, a handicapped life. A life that we all know too well.”
Arthur John Gossip, a New Testament scholar and one-time professor at the University of Glasgow had this penetrating insight:
People are hugely interested in the byproducts of Christianity, but hardly at all in Christianity itself. If [Jesus] ... will give us loaves and fishes, better houses, shorter hours, bigger wages, gadgets to lessen work and add to our leisure these are real things well worth the having, and we will follow him for them. But who wants his spiritual gifts? What would we do with them? What difference would they make?
Clearly Jesus thought they made a world of difference, so He implored them “Do not work for the food that perishes but for the food that endures for eternal life.” Jesus showed the crowd that He loved them too much to allow them to be satisfied with filling their stomachs for a few hours.
…more important than the bread He multiplied was the compassion He had for the lost,
…more important than the water He turned into wine was His teachings about love
…more important than healing people’s infirmities was the gift of forgiveness He offered.
Trusting in the spiritual which we cannot see or touch is hard. We want to see it; we want to taste it; we want to experience it; before we’re going to trust it. And when we finally do, it’s like that pearl of great price, the man sells everything he has in order to obtain it.
But the tricky thing in life is to not mistake a lesser pearl for the real thing. Carl Jung saw this clearly in his many years as a therapist:
During the past thirty years, people from all the civilized countries of the earth have consulted me. ... Among all my patients in the second half of life that is to say, over thirty five there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. (Modern Man in Search of a Soul)
This is what Jesus was trying to teach that crowd. To see beyond their immediate needs and to hunger not only for bread but food that endures. A religious outlook on life in the end is one that it’s not so much about believing certain things it is about a sense of purpose and a sense of beauty that goes beyond each one of our immediate needs of shelter and food.
I was 10 years old when I first remember learning something of what it is to give of yourself and to risk everything for this pearl of great price. Only in my case it wasn’t a pearl it was a tree, a really big tree.
My father was driving my brothers and I from Los Angeles to Kings Canyon National Park, to see a sequoia. I believed this tree existed but simply couldn’t see the point in driving ten hours to see it.
After a while my dad and brothers, tired of my whining, offered me some cough syrup to put me out of their misery!
But finally! When I stood at the base of that sequoia tree I no longer simply believed in its existence. I stood in gleeful amazement with my knees shaking and heart pounding as my eyes soaked in its monstrous, mammoth, monumental, and mountainous awesomeness. I think if Jesus had seen this tree, He wouldn’t have talked about a pearl of great price but rather a tree of ancient majesty.
As we gazed in wonder, we noticed a plaque by the tree telling about the importance of fire. I had always thought that fire was bad for trees, and it is, but sequoia’s actually need fire to germinate.
As we looked around there was another plaque telling the story of fire fighter, Charlie Castro of the Mono Paiute and Miwuk tribes. There was a picture of Charlie with a rope between two of these mammoth trees.
In 1967 a raging fire had taken hold of this incredible tree; they called Charlie in from another fire in Montana and he arrived by helicopter.
Charlie Castro … gaz[ed] down into the heart of the tree, a[nd saw a] hollowed-out cavity alive with raging red flame… [a few minutes later] Castro stood at the base of the burning sequoia, preparing to hoist himself up to the flames. Helicopters had been deployed to extinguish the fire in the California Tree – but to no avail. Local media reported that even after 13 separate drops, amounting to tons of water, the flames continued to roar in the tree’s canopy and core. Around 9am, it was time to start the climb. Castro knew better than to begin from a sequoia’s base, though. Their trunks were too broad, their bark too spongy, and their lower sections were generally bare of any branches. So Castro turned to a nearby fir tree instead. Equipped with little more than some drinking water, a radio and his climbing equipment, Castro started to ball some rope into what he calls a “monkey fist”: a knot with enough weight to sling over the fir tree’s branches. That allowed him to lift himself into the fir tree, gaining a height of about 170ft – just tall enough for Castro to send another rope into the lofty branches of the [burning] sequoia. [It took Charlie several hours to make this climb the tree but finally,]
With cables and rope, he pulled fire hoses directly into the tree’s canopy, directing the nozzles where others couldn’t reach. When firefighters on the ground turned the water on full blast, Castro could feel the ropes tighten under the strain. He warned the onlookers below to step back. As water surged into the flame-filled cavity, one of the knots on the trunk looked ready to burst. “I hollered at them, ‘Get out!’” Castro recalls. A jet of water and flame and debris suddenly exploded from the trunk. “It pushed that great knot out of the trunk of the tree, blew it on down to the ground.” Castro was soaking wet by the time he set foot on solid land around 9.30 that night, more than 12 hours later. But the flames had been defeated. The chief ranger on site handed Castro a beer. Castro quickly downed it and proceeded to drink another. Right then and there, he took a vow: “I’m not going to ever climb this tree again.” The tree miraculously survived. So did the grove. And the name Castro would become inextricably linked with their legacy... (The Guardian, September 2023)
The ranger told us most of this story and near the end of the tale, a somewhat short, average looking man was walking by, and the Ranger pointed him out and said that’s Charlie Castro. The tale that we had just heard was powerful but then meeting the man himself left an indelible mark right here.
Oh, it’s a hard knock life for so many people in this world and the heroes are the ones who risk their own lives to bring beauty and hope to others.
Jesus knew that stories and tales and even bread and water are no substitute to meeting the people of God whose bravery and courage and grit help you to see what truly is valuable in life. On that day I learned about the ancient beauty of an amazing tree but even more what a person can do when they find that pearl of great price and risk their life to protect it.
Charlie is a hero; he climbed into a fire and saved a tree. Jesus is our Lord, for he climbed a cross and saved us all.
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