Bread of Life

When I was in grade school, we went on a field trip to a bread factory – can’t be 100% sure of the name of it but it might have been Sunbeam bread – We got a tour of the plant and saw the various processes involved in producing bread on a large scale – making the dough and baking it and getting it sliced and put into those plastic bags that the bread comes in. I remember the smell of baking bread as our schoolbus drove up to the plant and as we pulled out of the parking lot to go back to school. My grade school teachers told our class that “bread is the staff of life.”

Indeed, in most cultures, bread – some kind of bread - is a staple of life. We refer to prisoners being fed bread and water – enough to survive on. Folks like me whose overconsumption of bread over the years has made me a member of the wider church, so to speak, may hear their doctors imploring us, beseeching us to cut down on carbs, but for many, bread is still a staple, a necessity, part of one’s daily diet. Certainly it was a necessity to the large crowd that, in John 6, Jesus fed from a boy’s lunch of five barley loaves and two fish. We’re told that, for peasants of Jesus’ day, roughly half their intake of calories would have come from bread. And this would not be bread that they would purchase at the supermarket with their paycheck at the end of the week – not like the bread I saw produced on my grade school field trip, which ended its journey presliced and packaged in a plastic bag, sealed with a twist tie - but something they had to struggle hard for, to sweat and ache for day by day in order to live. This is the bread with which Jesus fed the crowd.

And crowds wanted to keep being fed. So they followed Jesus. John 6:24-35 tells us that Jesus was very aware of their motives, and tells them straight out that they’re only following him in order to get their next meal. This is Jesus’ lead-in to tell them not to be satisfied with the food that perishes, but for food that endures for eternal life. The crowd responds with a call for Jesus to give them manna, as Moses did in the wilderness in our Old Testament reading today. Jesus responds that God, not Moses, sent bread down from heaven – and that God is sending bread from heaven now, in the form of Jesus. What the crowds saw as something Moses did long years ago, Jesus said was happening right now in their midst. Jesus said, “I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never be hungry, and he who believes in me shall never be thirsty.”

The contrasts between Mark’s and John’s gospels are interesting. As we studied Mark’s gospel a few months back, it appeared that Jesus was always trying to conceal his identity. He’d do some miracle, and tell those who witnessed it, “don’t tell anyone.” In John’s gospel, Jesus is endlessly telling people who he is – with various “I am” statements such as “I am the good shepherd, I am the door for the sheep” or as in today’s Gospel, “I am the bread of life” – and the crowds don’t get it. They ask Jesus for a miracle of manna from heaven, even though he’d just gotten done feeding them with five loaves and two fish.

Jesus said that those who come to Him will never be hungry. And yet sometimes we are hungry, and not just in a physical sense. We’re hungry for so many other things – for connection to God and neighbor, for a sense that our work and our lives have meaning, for assurance that God loves us and cares for us. Yes, we get hungry.

Jesus says that he is the bread from heaven. As the manna from heaven sustained the children of Israel through 40 years of slogging through the wilderness, so Jesus sustains us through the wilderness stretches in our lives. And we all go through those stretches in which troubles pile on, in which bad things happen, not just in threes, but again and again and again and again, on and on, when the only light at the end of the tunnel seems to be the proverbial headlamp of an oncoming train. Or those stretches when, externally, things seem ok, yet life seems empty, hollow. If we will come to Jesus, we will receive the bread from heaven, receive the nourishment and strength to keep on keeping on.

And not only keep on keeping on for ourselves, but also to provide strength for our neighbor. The missionary D. T. Niles said that evangelism is one beggar telling another where to find bread. Like children – or adults – long deprived of the necessities of life, we may be tempted to hoard food, to be satisfied with enjoying Christ for ourselves. But we must not be greedy. Jesus Christ, the bread from heaven that feeds and sustains us, is also to feed and sustain our neighbor. We must be willing to tell others where and how to find this living bread. The crowds wanted to be fed physically, but Jesus wanted to feed them in all aspects of their lives, to be their bread of life, as he wants for us and our neighbor as well. And whether our neighbor is fed or not becomes a spiritual matter. A hungry neighbor is a spiritual challenge to us. The crowds wanted to fill their stomachs, but the good news of Jesus is to feed us – and our neighbor – body and soul; the whole gospel of Christ is good news for the whole person.

As we feed on Jesus, the bread of life, we ourselves are built up into the body of Christ, as described by Paul in our reading from his letter to the Ephesians. Paul says that we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ. Paul writes of the whole body, joined and knit together, each part working properly, promoting the body’s growth in building itself up in love. And so it is that some clergy, when celebrating communion, tell those coming forward for the bread and wine – “receive what you are, the body of Christ.”

Guide me, O thou great Jehovah / Pilgrim through this barren land.
I am weak, but thou art mighty / Hold me with thy powerful hand.
Bread of heaven, bread of heaven, feed me till I want no more.
Feed me till I want no more.

May we be sustained by Jesus, the bread of life, and in days ahead may we share this living bread with our hungry neighbors here in our beloved community of Bridesburg. Amen.