Bread of Heaven (John 6)

     “Jesus said to them, ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.’” From the Gospel for today, the Gospel of John, chapter 6, verse 35.

     In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

     We are all familiar with bread, of course, homely, comforting, ordinary, nourishing bread, a part of meals and snacks, in kitchens and shops and restaurants, on lunch and dinner tables and on and on. Bread is everywhere, and is so common we hardly think about it. When I was a boy, my grandmother, and my mother made bread, and they were good at it, a skill which I never mastered. I remember asking my grandmother once how she measured the ingredients. “Oh,” she said, “a little bit of this, and a little bit of that.” These days I use a bread-making machine, which works wonderfully, but only when I measure things exactly according to the recipes. But however we make it, we call bread “the staff of life” and so it has been for thousands of years.

     Into this environment of ordinariness, of daily bread that everyone knows and uses, comes Jesus with his extraordinary claim: “I am the bread of life!” What are his hearers, and we, to make of a claim like this? It is at least surprising, it is certainly confusing, and to some people, it is really outrageous. And, according to today’s reading, people react to the statement rather strongly. “Is not this Jesus…whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” Perhaps you’ve noticed that in today’s reading, Jesus doesn’t actually say that he comes down from heaven; he says it in verse 38, which the compilers of our lectionary skipped over when they put together  this reading out of verse 35, and then went straight to verses 41 to 51. In any case, Jesus’s hearers react strongly to his very unusual statements, as we would if we heard anybody making such remarks. In fact, I remember an encounter with a young man I knew years ago. One evening in a café, he said, “I’ve just realized that I’m God!” I was at a loss for words, of course. It soon became clear that he was trying to describe a powerful experience, the kind of experience we call “mystical,” in which God is a perceived, known reality, more than a word or an idea. Jesus is speaking out of that kind of experience, and he describes his experience using bread as a symbol or image of it, connecting his hearers and us to something divine by using bread, something earthly and ordinary.

     “Do not complain among yourselves,” says Jesus. “No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father.” In other words, by complaining among ourselves, by giving ourselves reasons not to pay attention to the message coming to us from outside our own inward-looking circle, by passing around our opinions and ideas, we are never going to hear anything unfamiliar, and we are never going to hear the message from Jesus that will free us from our self-perpetuating complaints. “Drawn by the Father” means that we release ourselves from the inward-looking circle, and allow ourselves to be “taught by God,” as Jesus says, quoting Isaiah. The Father is always drawing us toward Jesus. That is why God became incarnate in Jesus: to draw us to himself.

     “I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die.” We know about the manna in the desert, which God provided for the Hebrews during their travels in Sinai, on their way to the Promised Land. Manna is apparently a real, natural substance, made by insects, which exists even today in the deserts, and it is understandable that people would experience it as coming from God, as indeed the whole of Creation comes from God. We can think of it as a kind of bread, truly a “staff of life” to the Hebrews travelling through the desert. But it was not “the bread that comes down from heaven” that Jesus is talking about.

     The people listening to Jesus would know about the manna, and they would also know about the bread used in the Temple, the Bread of the Presence, called the ‘showbread’ in the old translation. It was a perpetual offering, on a golden altar dedicated to it, and always in the presence of God. It was changed once a week, and the bread being changed out was consumed by the priests. It was the only offering not burned in the Temple, but it was eaten by the priests once a week. We can think of it as a kind of communion, in which the priests took into themselves the holiness of the bread, made holy by its nearness to God in the Temple. Jesus knows about this, and identifies himself with the bread and the Temple priesthood, as we know from the Letter to the Hebrews. Our liturgy of the bread and wine clearly recalls this Temple liturgy. Jesus applies its meaning to himself, and makes it available to us, in making himself present to us, as God made himself present to the priests in the Temple.

     In the prayer the Our Father, we pray for “our daily bread.” This has an ordinary daily meaning of course, in which we ask God for what we need from day to day, bread and everything else. But there is a mysterious word in the original Greek version of the prayer, which no one has ever convincingly proved actually means “daily.” The word is ‘epiousios’ and is a very rare word, which, when we break it down, means something like ‘super-essential’ or ‘super-substantial.’ So when we pray for our daily bread, we are not praying merely for ordinary daily needs, but also for super-essential bread, the Bread of Heaven, the Bread of Life.

     Our Eucharist is a celebration of the Bread of Life, the Bread of Heaven. In it we make present the manna in the desert, the Bread of the Presence in the Temple, and Our Lord himself, the living bread that came down from heaven. May we always, as it says in the Prayer Book, “feed on him in our hearts, by faith, with thanksgiving.”

     In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.