In his “I am the bread of life” discourse, Jesus becomes increasingly, alarmingly precise. He moves from “I am the bread of life” to “I am the bread that came down from heaven” to “I am the living bread that came down from heaven,” and finally to this astonishing statement: “… the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
We will explore next week how graphically Jesus “fleshes this out,” as it were, and becomes yet more controversial. But today let’s stay with this idea – that his flesh is bread that he will give for the life of the world. What connections and responses does that set up in us?
For sacramentally oriented Christians, it is easy to read back into Jesus’ words a eucharistic connotation. Beneath that is the sacrificial understanding of his crucifixion, that something life-saving, world-transforming occurred in Jesus’ offering of himself and his brutal death, something that broke the hold of sin and death upon humankind for ever.
In these words are also written the story of his incarnation – God choosing to save the world through flesh and blood. For some people, that is the most radical idea of all – that the One who is Spirit came into Flesh in order to redeem flesh. We have no salvation without the Holy Spirit, I don’t believe, but also none without Jesus made human being, healing the human condition from the inside out.
And God still works through flesh. We, gathered at the communion table, become the bread of life, and the Spirit of Christ now dwells in our frail and fallible flesh to make known the love of God to the world. It is simultaneously a huge responsibility – for we need to be willing and to show up, and none at all, for it remains God’s work, accomplished once and for all by Jesus on the Cross, and worked out in the world through us, one encounter at a time.
Do you bring your body into this faith life along with your mind and spirit? Are you willing to be the embodiment of God's love to those whom you meet today? We might begin our day by opening our arms in a big gesture of offering and openness to the Spirit, even kneeling in humility.
Today is the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, when humankind demonstrated how profoundly “flesh” is capable of destroying the world. And in the Christian calendar, it is the Feast of the Transfiguration, when Jesus’ spiritual nature was briefly revealed to three of his followers as he shone with God-light. It is because he was God and Man that he was living bread that saves. It is as we take his life into our flesh that we too become bread for the world that can heal instead of destroy.
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