7-30-15 - Jesus is the Bread?!?

A friend of mine was teaching Sunday School once, and had just tried to explain to her class the significance and symbolism of Holy Eucharist. As she lined them up to come into church at the appointed time, she taught them a little song with the words, “Jesus Is the Bread.” After singing this refrain once, one little girl paused and said loudly, “Jesus is the bread?” with an intonation that indicated this was the dumbest thing she’d ever heard.

Some of the people listening to Jesus that day when he was talking about the bread of life that comes from heaven probably had a similar reaction to what he said next. When they said, “Okay, then, give us this bread always,” 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.” That probably sounded to many like the most preposterous thing they’d ever heard. And what did he mean, he was the bread of life?

We need a mind for metaphor when we encounter Jesus in the Fourth Gospel. But we also need to mine the metaphor to its depth, where we discover he means it as he says it: he is the staff of life and has to be taken in, accepted, received, take up residence in us, in order for us to grasp the life of God around us. I think he was saying to those people, so hungry for something, that everything they thought was in the manna – provision, protection, presence – is to be found in Jesus the Christ.

Indeed, everything we’re hungry for - which we seek in so many places – is to be found in Jesus the Christ, taken in, accepted, received, living in us. And it doesn’t stop there. As we do allow him to reside in us, fill us with the life of God through the Spirit, we become communally the bread of life.

We enact this at the Eucharistic table – we take the bread, now become the body of Christ, broken for us; we receive him into ourselves, his life renewing our lives; and as we disperse, we become the body of Christ, broken for the life of the world. How might we operate differently in the world if we were more aware of being the bread of life in Christ? Whose hunger and thirst might we address?

That little girl didn’t yet comprehend it, but she was on the way to being able to say, “I am Jesus bread.” I would have loved to see the expression on her face when she heard that one.