A friend was teaching Sunday School once, and had just tried to explain to her class the significance and symbolism of the Holy Eucharist. As she lined the children up to return to church for communion, she taught them a little song with the words, “Jesus Is the Bread.” After singing this refrain once, a little girl paused and said loudly, “Jesus is the bread?” with an intonation indicating this was the dumbest thing she’d ever heard.
That’s the reaction some of the people listening to Jesus had when he talked about the bread of life that comes from heaven. When they replied, “Okay, then, give us this bread always,” his response was outrageous: 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. What did he mean, he was the bread of life?
We need a mind for metaphor when we encounter Jesus in the Fourth Gospel (and possibly anywhere…). But we also need to mine the metaphor to its depth. There we discover he means it as he says it: he is the “staff of life” and has to be taken in, accepted, received, and reside in us if we are to grasp the life of God around us. He was saying to those people, who were so hungry for something, that they could find in him everything they thought was in the manna – provision, protection, presence. All those gifts are 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, as he is taken in, accepted, received, living in us. And as we allow him to 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 for us 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?
Another little girl I knew was better able than the first to accept the symbolic. She knew she was receiving Jesus when she took communion, and would loudly proclaim as I came down the altar rail towards her, “More Jesus bread!” More Jesus bread makes us into Jesus bread, so everyone can have some, never hunger and never thirst.
To receive Water Daily by email each morning, subscribe here.
No comments:
Post a Comment