Oak Chapel United Methodist Church

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"Verily, verily I say unto you, Moses gave you not the bread from heaven; but my father giveth you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is he that cometh down from heaven, and giveth life to the world. Then said they to him, Lord, ever give us this bread. And Jesus said to them, I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst." Such audacious words! We should be mightily offended by, or fall down on our knees before, one who claims to be bread from heaven.

We read the story of the Feeding of the Five Thousand, which appears at the beginning of the sixth chapter of John's Gospel, two weeks ago. It is followed, you remember, by an account of Jesus' walking on the water, which is traditional but then the entire remainder of the Chapter 6 -- and it's a long chapter -- is taken up with a tedious discussion (first between Jesus and some of those who had followed him to Capernaum, and then with some Jewish leaders who had apparently witnessed the miraculous feeding, and finally with the disciples) -- a tedious discussion about the meaning of the loaves and the fishes. It is in this context (explaining the Feeding of the Five Thousand) that Jesus says, "I am the bread of life." He has always been uncomfortable about his miracles, afraid people might focus only on the magic and miss the message. Now, as explains the loaves and the fishes, he seems more determined than ever that they should get it right.

Possibilities abound, actually. Certainly the cynics among the five thousand went home that day sure the disciples had hidden extra loaves and fishes up their sleeves, and then had produced them on some cue from Jesus, thus bedazzling the common folk. Every generation has doubters like that. They can't even see miracles, much less understand them. Others went home stupefied, knowing they had seen something nifty, but oblivious to its implications. We know people like that, too. Religion is entertainment for them, good theater, replete with special effects. The more devout in the crowd saw the miracle, attributed it to God, but understood it to be a one-time event, like the parting of the Red Sea, something for the record books. We still have people for whom religion is a box in the attic, a hodge-podge of old, and mostly irrelevant, curios. But Jesus (in this long discussion) takes the Feeding of the Five Thousand far beyond any ordinary understanding. He expands its meaning -- indeed, he explodes it. Not only did it happen, he says, not only was the bread from God, but that feeding will continue forever. For, "I am the bread of life."

I said two weeks ago that the early Christians saw the Feeding of the Five Thousand and looked ahead to holy communion. And, no doubt, communion is in this story. Some of the Jews in the crowd, however, saw Jesus feed the five thousand, and looked back to Moses' feeding of the Hebrew children with manna from heaven. And manna is in this story, too. Two miracle breads, both gifts from God: manna from heaven in the Old Covenant, the bread and wine of communion in the New. But Jesus upbraids the Jews when they mention Moses -- reminds them that it wasn't Moses but God who gave the manna, and then rubs salt in the wound by implying that the manna wasn't such great stuff. It was perishable, he says, and (moreover) everybody who ate it is now dead. Same for the bread I gave the people yesterday. It tided them over 'til dinner, I suppose -- but by now they're hungry again. Ordinary bread, the bread of the world, only gets us by. However (and here the tiny bud of a miracle bursts into glorious flower) if we eat not just the bread but also the giver of the bread, we can be nourished forever. I myself am the true bread from heaven. "My flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed." We can, in fact, become (as our communion prayer so boldly says) "partakers of the divine nature."

There is something pitiful about this discourse. Flowing beneath it is tide of human desperation. It betrays that pathetic human longing for something (anything!) that lasts. Life can be a comedy (to laugh at) or a tragedy (to weep over), but it must not have no meaning. What in life is eternal? What is God-connected? What, in this place of perishability, can we hitch our boats to? Or is there nothing? Do we simply "creep this petty pace from day to day"? Without faith, life isn't worth living -- a string of disappointments and tragedies. Plans interrupted. Promises broken. Hopes dashed. Loves that turn sour. Dreams that don't come true. Disabilities and illnesses that cut us down in the prime of life. Injustices that infuriate us and break our hearts. All topped off by death's dark victory. The individual loses cause us pain, but we recover from them somehow and go on. What is truly terrible is to conclude that life has no meaning. That there is nothing to believe in, no bedrock on which to build.

It is this depth of human despair (We would call it "depression.") that Jesus is addressing when he calls himself, "the bread of life." All other breads, even that wonderful bread Moses gave you in the wilderness, he says, will leave you hungry. But I am bread from heaven. I am your lifeline to God. Feed on me, and never be hungry again. And the human race answers, "Lord, ever give us this bread."

How to balance our need for two breads: the bread of this world, which we know we need (and which Jesus told us to pray for), and the Bread of Heaven for which we may not be hungry every day, but which we know we need if our spirits are not to die. Busy people sometimes get irritated when reminded of the heavenly bread -- which is Jesus. They're up to their necks acquiring the world's bread. We need to make a living, we need to buy clothes and food, we need to mow our lawns and weed our gardens, and look the best we can, and set high standards, and take care of our families. We have to bring home the bacon! I don't think Jesus ever questions that. His prayer might just as well have been, "Let us bring home this day the bacon." That's what it means, "our daily bread." Jesus does question, often, the wisdom of putting one's ultimate trust in the world's bread. And we know he's right when he says people don't live (don't really live, don't live abundantly, don't live eternally) by the world's bread alone but by the Word of God. We need both. We need to eat, and we need to be fed.

It is possible have both, and not always to be caught in the either-or. Ordinary bread can become the bread of heaven (as it does in communion), and heavenly bread can be come down to earth (as it did in Jesus). In communion we feed and are fed, and we don't ask, "Which bread is this?" The five thousand ate earthly bread, but doubtless some fed on heavenly bread that day. When Christians sit down to eat, they pray -- not only thanking God for earthly bread but asking him to feed us with the bread of heaven, "feed us till we want no more." Thus we make sacraments out of the ordinary things.

"Lord, ever give us this bread." How do we get it? If Jesus is the Bread of Life, how do we "feed on him", how do we take him into ourselves, absorb him into our systems -- that our souls might be satisfied? First, we do religious things religiously. We worship him who is the Bread. Worship services are the vitamins of faith. In prayer and praise and song we come before him, regularly. Rituals, are important. They remind us who we are. There is much out there that wants us to forget. At the close of our training session for Disciple Bible Study, an elderly black woman rose to say what the training had meant to her. She was obviously a wonderful person of faith, and in her remarks she said something, just one short phrase, that got stuck in my head. She said, "I'm a fasting, praying lady…" and then she went on. But I stopped there. It was said so simply and with such integrity -- not a hint of boasting, no embarrassment. She had simply chosen to describe herself by the elements of her devotional life: a person who fasts and prays. By what regular activities would we describe our lives? In the long run, what gets our time and attention gets us. We need to structure our lives in such a way that there is opportunity, every day, for the things of God.

Then, if we are to eat of the Bread of Life, we need to know the Bible. St. Jerome translated the old Greek Bible into Latin, and his translation, called "the Vulgate," became the official Bible of the Roman Catholic Church for eighteen centuries. It was Jerome who put it so succinctly, "Ignorance of scripture is ignorance of Christ." We need not be Bible scholars, like St. Jerome, but if we're not reasonably familiar with the Bible's great passages, its wonderful promises, and the story of salvation which it tells, it's hard to imagine how we can know Christ.

And, finally, we manage to chew up, swallow and digest Christ (the Bread of Life) when we love and serve others. He turned to his disciples one day and said, "I didn't enter this world as the wealthy patron enters a restaurant, expecting to be coddled by the staff. No. I came as a waiter." If our Lord Jesus (with all options open to him) chose to come as a servant, how can we, his followers, choose a higher place? We have no choice but to love and to serve. When we marry God we marry his whole family, all the children of the world (red and yellow, black and white) become our brothers and sisters. And we undertake, in a most serious way, to love them all, as he, in a most serious way, loves us. John said it with great power, "If anyone says he loves God and hates his neighbor, he is a liar." In some miraculous way, when we love and serve others, we take the Bread of Life into ourselves -- perhaps because he, himself, is love. As we feed God's sheep, we are fed ourselves.

We should not insult our faith by thinking it should come to us easily, through osmosis, while we are pre-occupied with other things. So many of the church's critics have never made the effort. They don't worship, or pray, or fast. They know nothing of the Bible, and they have never sought the Bread of Life by loving others. It is as if they tossed their heads skyward one day and said, "Well, Lord, here's your chance. Catch me if you can." And, when nothing happened, they concluded there was no God. The image of bread for God suggests a relationship far deeper than that. It says we must take him in, chew him up, and make him part of our very selves.