Loading...Jesus said “ I am the Bread of life.”
When you think about bread, what comes to your mind first. I think about the bread my Mother used to make. It was so good. It was called “friendship bread”.
She kept a starter for the bread in her refrigerator and every four or five days using a part of the starter she would make bread. It was called friendship bread because you could give away some of the starter to a friend who could then use it establish their own starter and to make bread.
I loved it when I visited her on bread making day. I would always get a warm loaf or two to take home. The ends of the loaves never made it home as I could not resist of the aroma of that warm bread and would eat them on the way.
It is common to have bread at almost every meal: toast for breakfast, sandwich for lunch and some kind of bread with dinner, some kind of dinner roll, garlic bread, bread sticks. I remember as a child we would always have sliced bread on the table with butter.
When I am thinking about restaurants and where we want to go eat when we don’t feel like cooking at home, I usually think about the bread the restaurant serves before our meal. What do you think of when I say Red Lobster? Right. Cheese biscuits. The Outback? Those small loaves of dark bread served on a wooden cutting board, How about Texas Road House, Yes, those soft warm buns. So sweet and moist you don’t even need butter.
Bread is all around us and is an important part of our daily life.
Maybe that is why bread is such a powerful symbol for what God is giving us in Christ, the bread of life. Without food we die. Without Christ we cannot have abundant life. A life that lasts for eternity.
When we think of all the emotions that go along with food most of them are good. That warm feeling we have from a full tummy. The warmth and gratitude we feel when sharing a meal with people we love. The memories we cherish from meals at holidays. Bread means comfort, warmth, good feelings and memories. Bread means abundant life. Good life
When Jesus says “I am the bread of life, whoever eats of this bread will live forever,” he is not just talking after living we die life. He is talking about our present life. When he says “whoever believes has eternal life”, the verb “has” is in the present tense. That means eating the bread of life, participating in Jesus through belief in him, gives us an abundant life that begins now and lasts for eternity. God provides us with food, through Jesus, for our journey through this life.
The passage we read today from 1st Kings speaks of food for the journey. Elijah is tired from his fighting with and having defeated the prophets of Baal. You'd think he would be on top of the world after such a convincing victory, but he is finished and now he is running for his life from the Queen Jezebel who is trying to kill him. He has no more strength for the journey. He was ready to die and said to God “please take me now.” He laid down and went to sleep. I imagine he hoped that God would take him while he slept. But instead God sent an angel with bread and water, not once but twice. Providing him with enough sustenance to sustain him for a journey lasting forty days and nights.
Another story of God providing for God’s people is the miracle story of Jesus feeding more than five thousand people with only five loaves of bread and two fish. We don’t know the rest of that story as well as the first part. The next day, the crowd of five thousand people, who had just been fed the previous day and had gone to bed that night with their tummies full, wake to find that the disciples and Jesus are gone and they go out to find him. Well, that sounds good, we should all want to be with Jesus, to get to know him and learn from him. But when the crowd finds Jesus, Jesus does not respond as we would expect him to. Instead of praising them for finding him and wanting to be with him, he scolds them because they are not really seeking Christ and what he was really offering them but rather they are looking for more material things, things that are perishable. Jesus wants them to seek what is eternal.
He said “Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you.” “What you seek is too small,” “It disappears. It’s good to have full bellies when you go to bed, but you should labor for the food that sustains you forever.” He gave them a little nourishment and sustenance, but it was temporary and they were already hungry again. Jesus said: “There is bread you can eat that surpasses what I fed you. There is food you can eat that surpasses even the manna that fell from the sky.”
There he was referring to yet another story of God providing food for a journey. The manna that God sent to the Israelites as they journeyed through the desert. It would fall from the sky six out of seven days every week and they would eat it. But again that food was only temporary; the next day this bread from heaven would have worms in it and be moldy and rotten.
Neither those who gathered on the hillside nor the Israelites in the desert got the message? Their stomachs were full, their body’s hunger satisfied for the moment, but they didn’t see the miracle, that this was God providing for them?
It is as if the Israelites and the 5,000 were crying out with the words that Jesus used when teaching us to pray, Our Father in heaven . . . . Give us this day our daily bread. And God heard them and sent them food. Bread for the day. But Jesus in our Gospel passage this morning is talking about something more? Something more than food for the day. Jesus is talking about bread for life. He is the bread of life. And when we feed on him we will live forever.
This is not news to us, is it? It reminds me of the upper room, and Jesus’ last meal with his disciples. We celebrate the Eucharist every week together and Elizabeth holds up the bread and says:
“On the night he was handed over to suffering and death, our Lord Jesus Christ took bread; and when he had given thanks to you, he broke it, and gave it to his disciples, and said, Take, eat: This is my Body, which is given for you. Do this for the remembrance of me.”
And then right before we come to the altar rail to receive this bread, she says:
“The Gifts of God for the People of God. Take them in remembrance that Christ died for you, and feed on him in your hearts by faith, with thanksgiving.”
Feed on him. Take him into your body. Make Jesus a part of you. You can't get much closer to something than when you eat of it. Its atoms combine with our atoms and becomes us and we become it.
At the very beginning of the story of humankind, we were in a beautiful garden where God was present and dwelt with us. God provided all the food and water that we needed. There was only one rule. That we didn’t eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. But of course that is exactly what we did and our eyes were opened forever and we became like God and with the ability to see both good and evil.
But, you know, there was another tree in the Garden — The Tree of Life.
And God said, ‘See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever.’
We could have lived forever. In that garden. With God.
But we ate from the wrong tree and were banished from God’s presence so that we would not eat from the tree of life.
Jesus now isn’t talking about trees and fruit, but rather bread and how we through Jesus now get a second change of living God’s dream, that we would live with God forever.
There is one more story from the Bible I want to remember this morning. At the end of the Gospel of John, the resurrected Jesus appears to his disciples for the last time. They are on a beach in the early morning. Jesus cooks breakfast for them, bread and fish. When they finish eating Jesus turns to Simon Peter. Three times Jesus asks Peter, “Do you love me.” and three times Peter answers, “Yes, Lord. Yes, You know that I love you.” And each time Jesus gives Peter a command. Feed my lambs. Tend my sheep. Feed my sheep. And then Jesus then gives a final command: Follow me.
Jesus’ command to feed his lambs and his sheep, follows the question about love. It is out of Christs’ love for us, and in return our love for him that we are then to feed others.
One day when my son was very small maybe about 3, he had a piece of cake. He carefully ate all of the icing leaving the cake intact. He pushed his plate toward me and said “Mommy, I don’t want the bread.”
I fear this is the way many people go through life. Eating only the sweet part. The part that may bring them temporary pleasure but that is not so good for you, that doesn’t provide nourishment for their journey through life.
Jesus said “I am the Bread of Life. Feed on me.” Feed on the immense love that Jesus has for us. It is not love for just this day, but forever. We can feel it in the depths of our souls. In that part of us that seeks eternal and everlasting life and in that part of us that seeks Jesus’s peace that passes all understanding. In response, then we are to turn, and nourished by the love we have received from Jesus, we are to feed others.
Without food we die a physical death. Without love we die a spiritual death. Jesus is love. Take, eat and go forth in peace and in love.
We are called to be an eating and feeding people. That is what the church is all about. AMEN.
