Bread from Heaven

Maybe you’ve had this experience – you attended a high school reunion or otherwise had occasion to get together with some folks you grew up with and went to school with, but that you haven’t seen for a while. One of these friends – somebody with whom you used to hang out casually, but had since lost touch - has been very successful in the years since last saw him or her. This person drives up to the reunion in a Rolls Royce or some other fancy car that cost a mint, insists on showing you pictures of his palace of a home, talks about his life of meetings with business leaders and leading politicians, tell of his kids who all started their own businesses at age 14. And as you’re sitting there listening, you’re thinking, “who the heck does he think he is. Hey, I knew him when he was growing up, back when he put his pants on one leg at a time…. He’s nothing special” or as the saying goes, “he ain’t all that.” Or as a different saying goes, “familiarity breeds contempt.”

In today’s reading from John’s Gospel (John 6:35-51), those who listened to Jesus had a similar reaction. Jesus tells them, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” Jesus’ listeners, who remember him when he was growing up, said, “bread that came from heaven…yeah, right….he’s the son of Joseph…we know exactly where he came from …he’s nothing special.”

We’re continuing our series of Gospel readings in John’s gospel about “Jesus as the Bread of Life.” In these readings, Jesus feeds the crowd of five thousand, and then uses that miracle to try to explain to the crowds who he is, and to offer himself to them fully, to satisfy them at their point of deepest need. In these readings, the word “bread” takes on multiple layers of meaning, and considering the word “bread” at all these levels gives us a deeper appreciation and gratitude of the mission of Jesus. However, like Jesus’ listeners, if we think we’re on familiar ground, if we think we “know,” if we think nothing special is going on here, we may end up missing out on an encounter with the divine.

The four Gospels each begin in distinctive ways. Mark’s Gospel just begins, “The beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” Matthew and Luke have the Christmas narratives, each with different details. As usual, John’s Gospel is really different. Remember that John’s Gospel begins with an almost cosmic explanation of Jesus, those familiar words we often read on Christmas Eve: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…All things came into being through Him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it….He was in the world, and the world came into being through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God….and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.” Remember that Deuteronomy 8:30 says that “man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” This is one of the ways in which Jesus spoke of himself as the bread from heaven; Jesus was the life-giving force of God, the Word of God described in John’s Gospel that called all things into being, now become flesh and speaking to the crowds. This is typical of John’s Gospel, with Nicodemus, Jesus used the metaphor of birth to speak of being born from above or born again; with the woman at the well, Jesus spoke of living water that would never run out; in today’s Gospel, Jesus begins with bread that we eat, but speaks beyond that to himself as the Living bread, that life-giving Word of God that will always sustain us.

We get a picture of how God sustains us in our Old Testament reading today (I Kings 19:4-8). Elijah had just won a great victory over the false prophets of Baal. As often happens, no good deed went unpunished; his life was threatened, and he went into the wilderness and called on God to let him die. Instead, an angel of the Lord set food and water before him and told Elijah “get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.” Scripture tells us that “in the strength of that food Elijah went 40 days and 40 nights to Horeb the mountain of God.”

As Christians, we are fed by Jesus, the living bread from heaven. We all have those moments in our lives when we’re like Elijah, when we feel discouraged, when we feel like we’ve prayed all we can and we’ve done all we can, and now we’re just plain done, when we’re overwhelmed with exhaustion and wonder why God doesn’t just call us home. Our faith in Jesus can sustain us, like bread that never runs out. In the strength of that living bread, we can find the resources to make a way out of no way.

Our Gospel contains some words of Jesus that are perhaps unnerving – “No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me….Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me.” In many evangelical and fundamentalist traditions, preachers speak of the need for believers to “come to Jesus” and “make a decision for Christ” a decision to “accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior.” As the old hymn goes, “I have decided to follow Jesus, no turning back, no turning back.” All true enough. But this passage from John seems to come at this from the opposite direction – No one can come to Jesus unless first drawn by the Father. We can “decide for Christ” only because God the Father has first decided for us. For Jesus and the early disciples, this explained why some people responded to Jesus’ message while others didn’t. But this can both discomfort and comfort us. On one hand, do we trust that God is still drawing people, that people are still hearing and learning from the Father? Our churches try to reach out to the community, try to share the good news, but so few respond. It can be discouraging, and it takes a great deal of trust to believe that God is still working God’s purpose out, that seeds we wish to plant perhaps just need more time before they sprout. But on the other, what great comfort that God made preparations for our salvation even before any of us here had any thought of the need to be saved. And what great relief for us as Christians – what great relief for me personally as a pastor – that the salvation of our neighbors doesn’t depend on our personal eloquence, certainly not my personal eloquence – that we don’t have to try to reason or argue people into the Kingdom of Heaven, only to be willing to tell others what God has done for us. God will do the rest.

So we’ve spoken of bread as…bread, and we’ve spoken of Jesus as the Word, the creative power of God that existed from the beginning and was made flesh – in this sense, the bread from heaven. At the end of the reading, verse 51, we begin to reach the 3rd level of meaning of “bread” – Jesus says that the bread that he gives for the life of the world is his flesh. Of course, his listeners are still on a literal level – “How can he give us his flesh to eat – is he going to hack a hunk off his arm and toss it to us or something. Who can stand to listen to this?” But now Jesus’ words are moving into the words we speak during communion, which we spoke last week, when I say “Take and eat, this is the body of Christ which is broken for you and for me. Take and drink, this cup is the new covenant in Christ’s blood, poured out for you and for me.” Let us take a moment to meditate on these words, to chew on them a bit, as it were. As we share bread and cup among ourselves, we believe that Christ is truly present in our midst. Various Christian communities differ in their interpretations of how Christ is present, whether the elements physically become Christ’s body and blood, or whether the presence is in spirit only. In the sharing of the elements, we covenant together to life as followers of Christ. And as we take the body and blood of Christ into ourselves, Christ lives in us and through us. Little by little, our lives are no longer our own, as Christ lives in us, and our lives will never be the same again.

May we know the presence of Christ, the bread from heaven, in our lives, and as Christ lives in us, may his sustaining presence reach our neighbors, hungering for the sustaining love of God. Amen.