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.

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.