Bread of Life (John 6)

     “This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever.” From the Gospel according to John, chapter 6, verse 58.

     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 so 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. And come to think of it, in this time of transition, parish-making is something like bread making: a little bit of this and a little bit of that, and no one has figured out exactly what the recipe should be. But the ordinariness of the process shouldn’t discourage us, since it is that very ordinariness that Our Lord uses to bring the divine presence to us.

     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. Jesus’s hearers react strongly to his very unusual statements, as we would if we heard anybody making such remarks. As the Gospel says, “When many of his disciples heard it, they said, ‘This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?’” Jesus, of course, is using bread as a symbol or image of divine life, connecting his hearers and us to something divine by using bread, something earthly and ordinary.

     “But Jesus, being aware that his disciples were complaining about it, said to them, ‘Does this offend you? Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before?’” In other words, by complaining among themselves, by giving themselves reasons not to pay attention to the message coming to them from outside their own inward-looking circle, by passing around their own opinions and ideas, the disciples are never going to hear anything unfamiliar, and are never going to hear the message from Jesus that will free them from their self-perpetuating complaints. They will not be able to see the “Son of Man ascending” if they don’t turn away from their own preoccupations, and allow Jesus to teach them.

     “This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever.” 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 of the Presence, and the Temple priesthood, as we know from the Letter to the Hebrews. Our liturgy of 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. We conclude, as Simon Peter does when he says to Jesus, that “You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe that you are the Holy One of God.” If we, like the disciples, can let go of our worrying, we will experience what Simon Peter does, when he says that Jesus is the Holy One of God. Then we will “see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before.” Then the Bread of Life will be real to us, and we will know, as Jesus says, that “the words I have spoken to you are spirit and life.”

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