A friend of mine was once teaching Sunday School, and had just tried to explain to her class of 5-year-olds the significance and symbolism of Holy Eucharist. As she lined the children up to come into church for communion, 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 most ludicrous thing she’d ever heard.
Some of the folks 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. And we need to mine the metaphor to its depth, where we discover that he means it as he says it: He is the staff of life and has to be taken in, accepted, received and digested - take up residence in us - in order for us to grasp the life of God around us. He was telling those people, so hungry for manna from heaven, that everything they thought was in the manna – provision, protection, presence – is to be found in him.
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, integrated, living in us. And it doesn’t stop there. As we 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?
One day another little girl, eyeing me as I came down the altar rail giving out communion, said loudly to her grandmother, “I want Jesus bread!” She understood. On our best days, so do we.
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