Reverend Jonathan Waits
Satisfied (John 6:1-15, 22-59)
March 23, 2025
When was the last time you felt really and truly satisfied? What was it that gave you that feeling? Maybe it was finishing a really big project and having your contributions graciously recognized by others. It could have been working with another person, teaching them to do something, and then seeing them succeed wildly. Perhaps it was just a really good meal. There are lots of things that might satisfy us in this life. The thing about getting satisfied in this life, though, is that whatever desire it is that was satisfied has a tendency to return. You ate that great meal, but then you were hungry again. In fact, you were probably hungry again by the time the next mealtime rolled around. You finished that one project, but then there was another one behind it. And if there wasn’t, you went looking for one. That one student succeeded, but then there was another student who needed help. And when those desires returned, sometimes the same things satisfied them again, but sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes you needed more. It’s almost like underneath these more common, daily desires we have there are deeper longings that cry out for satisfaction. Yet try as we might, getting these addressed often seems to be just beyond our reach.
This morning we are in the fourth part of our Easter-bound teaching series, All Signs Point to Jesus. We’re doing this as a double-dip with our Sunday school Bible study series, which means it’s still a great time to get plugged into one of our Sunday school groups if you aren’t already a part of one. Over the course of this journey, we are taking a look at what the apostle John identifies as seven miraculous signs Jesus performed over the course of His ministry. These were not by any means all of the miracles Jesus did. Rather, John identifies this set as particularly important in terms of helping us understand who Jesus really is. The most powerful, emphatic, and final sign, of course, was when He came walking out of the tomb on the third day after His crucifixion. We’ll save that exciting story for a few more weeks yet.
So far, we have walked through three of the signs John identified for us. We have seen Jesus turn water into wine at the wedding of some family friends, we have seen Jesus heal a royal official’s son with a word at a great distance, and we have seen Him instantly restore the ability to walk to a man who had spent nearly 40 years paralyzed, hoping against hope for a help that never seemed to materialize. In each case, while the miracle Jesus performed understandably gets most of the attention, Jesus was inviting those with eyes to see and ears to hear into something more. We have seen that Jesus reveals Himself so that we can see who He really is, that Jesus wants us to see Him, not merely what He can do, and He wants to do more than merely make us well.
Thinking more on that last miracle from last week, Jesus invites us into something more than just being physically well. That’s not unimportant, of course, but, like we said, a person can be physically well and spiritually or psychologically a mess. What Jesus seems to be inviting us into in each of these signs is a world bigger than the one we normally imagine exists; a world that lies just beyond our vision, and which is often only accessed by our imagination. This doesn’t mean it’s not real, of course, but rather only that it is a world that exists beyond the limits of our senses. As we are going to see this morning—with the help of Jesus’ next sign in John’s Gospel—Jesus doesn’t just invite us into this larger world, He promises that in it we will find a deeper satisfaction to our desires than any we’ve ever known before.
This next sign is one of only two miracles that appear in all four of the Gospels. The other is Jesus’ death and resurrection. This one is the time when Jesus miraculously fed an enormous crowd of people. If you have your copy of the Scriptures with you this morning, find your way with me to John 6. We’ll start right at the beginning of the chapter.
John opens by saying, “After this…” As we talked about last time, those kinds of transition statements in the Gospels aren’t meant to imply that what follows occurs immediately after the events of the preceding chapter, but rather merely that they happened sometime later in Jesus’ ministry. From the context added to the story in Matthew, Mark, and Luke’s Gospels, what comes next happened after Jesus got word that His cousin, John the Baptist, had been beheaded by Herod the Tetrarch, the Roman ruler of the region of Galilee. Upon receiving this news, Jesus tried to get out of town to grieve. He crossed the Sea of Galilee in hopes of escaping the crowds that had become an ever-present feature of His ministry. But it didn’t work. Word of His miraculous healings had spread far and wide, and in a day without any kind of modern healthcare, someone like Jesus represented the best and only hope many folks had to ever experience any kind of a physical healing. So, they tracked Him down, told their friends so all of them could come too, and because Jesus was Jesus, He put His own needs to the side and ministered to the crowd—a crowd that included at least 5,000 men plus women and children.
“After this, Jesus crossed the Sea of Galilee (or Tiberias). A huge crowd was following him because they saw the signs that he was performing by healing the sick. Jesus went up a mountain and sat down there with his disciples.” One of the biggest logistical challenges when it comes to hosting large meetings is figuring out how to feed everybody. I was recently at a one day conference that featured about 2,000 attendees in a building built for about 2,000 occupants. It was tight. The hosts did a really good job of making snacks and water available for everyone, but when it came time to get lunch, everybody was picking up from one of two locations. It took a long time to get our Chick-Fil-A sandwich, waffle chips, and cookie. And of course it was Chick-Fil-A because somewhere there’s a rule that says church conferences can only use Chick-Fil-A for their mealtimes.
In any event, after everyone had been there listening to Jesus teach and being healed by Him for three days, hunger was starting to set in. Some folks may have prepared well and brought their own food, but not for three days. This was going to soon become a problem that needed solving. Also, it was just about time for a major Jewish festival. To not provide anything would have made Jesus and His disciples look like bad hosts—something nobody wanted in that day. “Now the Passover, a Jewish festival, was near. So when Jesus looked up and noticed a huge crowd coming toward him, he asked Philip, ‘Where can we buy bread so that these people can eat?’ He asked this to test him, for he himself knew what he was going to do.”
So, a mission of mercy got turned into an object lesson. Jesus could walk and chew gum at the same time. Philip, on the other hand, was clueless. Doing some quick calculations in his head, he figured that it was going to take more resources than they had available or would ever have available to feed this enormous crowd. “Philip answered him, ‘Two hundred denarii worth of bread wouldn’t be enough for each of them to have a little.’” A denarius was a day’s wage. Put in modern terms, and assuming on a minimum wage of $15 per hour, this would equate to $24,000. That would buy…well…24,000 of the $1.00 loaves of bread from Walmart…and it would have only been barely enough to give everybody there a bite or two.
At this point, Andrew came up with a young boy who was willing to share his lunch. This almost feels like a joke—and a bad one at that. Philip just established that it was going to take vastly more food than any of them could possibly get their hands on to feed everybody, and “one of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, said to him, ‘There’s a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish…’” At least he has the good sense to note, “but what are they for so many.”
Having established now that the disciples weren’t going to pass the test, Jesus steps in and does His thing. Verse 10 now: “Jesus said, ‘Have the people sit down.’” Matthew and Mark both note that the disciples had them sit in fairly organized groups so they could get a good count on how many were actually there. “There was plenty of grass in that place; so they sat down. The men numbered about five thousand. Then Jesus took the loaves, and after giving thanks he distributed them to those who were seated—so also with the fish, as much as they wanted.” The people were hungry, and Jesus satisfied them. The disciples were curious. Jesus satisfied them too. There is satisfaction in God’s kingdom.
But satisfaction of natural desires is far from the limit of what we can find in God’s supernatural kingdom. Jesus offers us something more. He certainly did for the people gathered on that mountain pasture. “When they were full, he told his disciples, ‘Collect the leftovers so that nothing is wasted.’ So they collected them and filled twelve baskets with the pieces from the five barley loaves that were left over by those who had eaten.” Jesus didn’t just provide for them at the bare minimum necessary to meet their needs. He went above and beyond. Way above and beyond. The leftovers from the five barley loaves filled twelve baskets. Jesus didn’t just take what they had and made it bigger. He made it more.
After performing this incredible miracle, Jesus hit the road for reasons we’ll talk about more in just a second. When He did, though, like last time, the people followed. He ultimately went back to His home base in Capernaum. The people found Him there and were ready for more. Jump down to v. 22 with me: “The next day, the crowd that had stayed on the other side of the sea saw there had been only one boat. They also saw that Jesus had not boarded the boat with his disciples, but that his disciples had gone off alone. Some boats from Tiberias came near the place where they had eaten the bread after the Lord had given thanks. When the crowd saw that neither Jesus nor his disciples were there, they got into the boats and went to Capernaum looking for Jesus. When they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him, ‘Rabbi, when did you get here?’”
The people had gone in search of Jesus, looking for more. That’s not a bad thing at all. What they wanted more of, though, wasn’t His teachings or an even richer experience of God’s kingdom. They wanted more miracles. They wanted another free meal. Jesus knew this, and called them on it. “Jesus answered, ‘Truly I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw the signs, but because you ate the loaves and were filled. Don’t work for the food that perishes but for the food that lasts for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you, because God the Father has set his seal of approval on him.’”
At this point, Jesus started off down a rhetorical path the people with Him didn’t understand how to follow. They were stuck on one thing: getting more miracles and another free meal. Jesus, however, was speaking metaphorically. This results in a pretty humorous conversation to follow, but one that led to increasing frustration on the part of His original audience who just couldn’t grasp what He was trying to help them see.
Jesus said something there about working for food that would result in not being hungry anymore—food that lasts for eternal life. Better yet, they wanted to know how to multiply food like He did on their own. So, the people asked for this. “‘What can we do to perform the works of God?’ they asked.” As the apostle Paul would later spell out in his letter to the Roman church, there are no “works of God” we can do that will set us on a collision course with His kingdom. “Jesus replied, ‘This is the work of God—that you believe in the one he has sent.’ ‘What sign, then, are you going to do so we may see and believe you?’ they asked. ‘What are you going to perform?’” They asked this in spite of the fact that they had all just been a part of His miraculously multiplying bread and fish for a crowd of thousands. It almost makes you think they weren’t really interested in Him at all, but only what He could do. Perhaps they could have done with a conversation with that royal official from Capernaum whose son Jesus had healed.
Trying to wrap their minds around what Jesus was saying, they referenced the last person who was involved in a mass feeding effort—Moses. But Jesus insisted they had it wrong. Moses hadn’t done anything for the people. God had. All Moses had done was to announce what God was doing. He was offering them something way more than Moses did. “For the bread of God is the one who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” This once again sounded like something better than Jesus had given them before; something better than they had ever had before. So they asked for it. And Jesus told them how to get it. “I am the bread of life,’ Jesus told them. ‘No one who comes to me will ever be hungry, and no one who believes in me will ever be thirsty again. But as I told you, you’ve seen me, and yet you do not believe. Everyone the Father gives me will come to me, and the one who comes to me I will never cast out. For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me. This is the will of him who sent me: that I should lose none of those he has given me but should raise them up on the last day. For this is the will of my Father: that everyone who sees the Son and believes in him will have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.’”
The people started to gripe about this because Jesus was making Himself a pretty big deal in saying all of this, and they all knew where He was from. As far as they were concerned, He was just one of them who was putting on airs—something that wasn’t tolerated so well in that day. Jesus basically told them to can it and kept rolling. Verse 47 now. “Truly I tell you, anyone who believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven so that anyone may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats this bread he will live forever. The bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
Well, the people didn’t understand this at all, and ultimately a whole bunch of even His own disciples bailed on Him because this sounded so weird to them. I mean, eating someone’s flesh isn’t exactly a good topic for polite conversation. This kind of stuff is why later critics of Jesus’ followers would accuse them of cannibalism. That’s silly, of course, and is the result of someone who is able to grasp metaphor about as well as the crowd gathered and listening to Jesus in this Capernaum synagogue, but it’s at least understandable why they would make this charge when Jesus said things like this.
As is clear when you take this whole section in context, though, “eating Jesus’ flesh” is being used as a metaphor for believing in Him. We are to take Him and His commands entirely into our lives so that they become a part of us. Except, instead of processing all of this spiritual food out as waste, it comes back out of us as blessing for us as well as those around us. And with the whole hunger metaphor, Jesus is talking about our desires—something entirely natural to us as humans.
We have desires that need to be satisfied. Most of these desires—at least when they have not become disordered in some way by sin—are for entirely natural things like food and water and air. And yet, in the heart of each one of us beats a desire for more than that. We desire substance for our lives. We desire purpose. We desire meaning. We desire significance. We want so badly that it feels like a need for our lives to matter. We desire glory. What Jesus was offering the people here, and what Jesus still offers us today, is the chance to see these deeper, more lasting desires fulfilled. He offers us the chance to have that spiritual hunger that gnaws persistently at our hearts and minds, making it such that not even the most satisfying meal or completed project or vicarious wish fulfillment ever really leaves us content, fulfilled in a way that will leave us never looking for satisfaction anywhere else ever again. Jesus can satisfy our deepest desires.
Can you imagine that? Can you imagine not being constantly plagued by a desire for more? Can you imagine not feeling that any longer, but the reason isn’t simply that you’ve given up and embraced the malaise or despair that characterizes the lives of so many in the world around us, but that you’re just content? In Jesus, you can experience that. Jesus can satisfy our deepest desires. Jesus’ offer of abundant food in this sign was just a pointer to this richer, deeper, fuller kingdom reality that all of these desires we have can and will find their ultimate fulfillment in Christ. Jesus can satisfy our deepest longings.
But the people here with Jesus just couldn’t wrap their minds around this. They didn’t understand when He was explaining it to them back in Capernaum. They definitely didn’t understand it in the moment after He had finished miraculously multiplying the food for them. In fact, John tells us that they missed the point so profoundly they were planning to just make Jesus their earthly king. After all, a king is supposed to provide for his people and Jesus had just provided for them the way no other earthly king had ever done. Putting Him in charge only made sense. Look at this in v. 14: “When the people saw the sign he had done, they said, ‘This truly is the Prophet who is to come into the world.’ Therefore, when Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself.”
Jesus can satisfy our deepest desires, but when these people refused to look past their most immediate desire’s getting met, they did something that made perfect sense in the moment, but in the context of God’s eternal kingdom was a grand exercise in missing the point. Jesus wasn’t just offering them bread. He was offering them eternal life and the satisfaction of all of the things that kept driving them forward day after day. That’s what He offers us too. Jesus can satisfy our deepest desires.
Now, does this mean you won’t have any more desires in this life? Of course not. That’s silly. Again: all of these desires that drive so much of our lives and the decisions we make on a daily basis are natural at their heart. They can get disordered—sometimes deeply disordered—by sin, but they are natural. They are for things God put in this world which are able to satisfy them. What Jesus offers us goes beyond these. It goes down to our core where those desires lay for things that go beyond what anything in this world has proven to have the ability to lastingly satisfy. Jesus can satisfy our deepest desires.
These desires themselves actually point us toward our need for what Jesus is offering. The great Christian thinker and writer, C.S. Lewis who some of you will know as the author of The Chronicles of Narnia once observed this in his classic of Christian thought that every follower of Jesus should read at some point, Mere Christianity. Listen to this:“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or to be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage.”
Through the provision of bread in John’s fourth sign here, Jesus was doing just what Lewis said. He was offering them the partial satisfaction of an earthly desire but in a way that was designed to point them forward toward a heavenly one. He was meeting a need they had—for food—but in a way that pointed them forward to the eternal satisfaction of a far greater and deeper hunger. He was offering them the chance to have their spiritual hunger satisfied permanently. Jesus can satisfy our deepest desires.
You and I want things. Lots of things. And sometimes we get what we want. But not always. Like The Rolling Stones sang, we can’t always get what we want. But unlike their resolution to that tension, our best efforts aren’t going to get us to what we need. Jesus can and Jesus will. Jesus can satisfy our deepest desires. He can give our lives purpose and meaning and substance and direction. We can share in His glory. We can do more than merely exist, scratching our natural itches as they come up. We can live for an eternal kingdom where the things we do to His glory now will be celebrated long beyond the boundaries of this life. We can follow Jesus in doing things that will matter not just a generation from now, but forever. We can participate in projects that after 10,000 years of heaven we will only be just beginning to fully enjoy. Your desire for more is from God. And when you go to Him in Christ, you will find its ultimate fulfillment. Jesus can satisfy our deepest desires. Put your trust in Him and find the satisfaction He brings.