I am the Bread of Life. John 6: 25-35
Bread. Our brother George once went to a conference on Bread and came back with three volumes of papers! There is so much that can be said about bread and so many different ways of making it. Bread means many different things, on different levels, so we must not be surprised to find that in this Gospel Jesus pushes the meanings of bread to take us on an amazing journey and leave us in a beautiful place.
The story starts with the expected meaning of bread. Jesus has fed the crowd with bread and fish. He saw they were hungry. He saw their need and responded to it. That is a side of Jesus we must never forget. He was Son of God, Word made flesh, messiah and many other extraordinary things, but he never allowed himself to be carried away by those remarkable identities. When he saw sick people he healed them. When he saw hungry people he fed them. That has marked Christianity from the start. We are concerned for people. When men and women are sick we try to heal them; when they are hungry we try to feed them. We may be fascinated by prayer, scripture, study and the mystical life but we keep our feet on the ground with the people God loves. We care for them as Christ cared for them.
Yet Jesus does not stop there: “Work… for the food which endures to eternal life.” Of course the people do not understand him. They ask: “What must we do, to be doing the works of God?” Jesus answered them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” It looks like a simple answer, but is it, really? Is it enough to believe that Jesus is the Christ? In another Gospel a rich young man asks what he must do and is told, in the end, to sell all and follow Christ. Jesus does not give simple rules that can easily be obeyed. He tells us to believe in Him and to follow him. That is a journey that takes us through life. Believing in Jesus, of course, does not mean just believing certain things about Jesus. It means acting on that belief. It means trusting Jesus. We have to believe that Jesus is good and wants what is good for us. So when he seems to make demands on our lives we have to trust him and do what he asks. I think all of us in this church know that is much harder than it seems. Quite a lot of our journey to this point has involved discovering that Jesus really can be trusted, and acting on it.
The crowd don’t like this answer and so they ask for a sign. Asking for a sign is always, in the Gospels, a cop out. I mean, if you have seen Jesus feed 5,000 people with a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish, is that not sign enough? Not if you don’t want to believe. A thousand signs would not be enough. However, on this occasion they pick up the theme of bread, bread in the wilderness. They had just had bread in the wilderness but that reminds them of the bread their ancestors received in the wilderness, the manna from heaven. Now there was a sign showing what a great prophet Moses was. Not at all, says Jesus. That bread came from God. Indeed this is a good moment to remember that all bread comes from God, whether it is the bread multiplied in Galilee, or the manna appearing in the wilderness, or the bread that Charlie makes from the flour bought in the shops. All things come from God. We pray several times a day “Give us our bread.” Everything in the world is sustained by God, given by God. That is the foundation of our concern for the environment; we are destroying something that God loves and maintains. Destroying the world we live in is not only stupid; it is sacrilege because all of it is God’s world. But then Jesus raises the stakes. He tells them “There is a true bread which my father gives from heaven. This is what really gives life to the world.” And when they ask for this bread he lets them into the secret which most of them cannot receive: “I am this bread of life.”
I do not know exactly what Jesus meant when he said those words but clearly he has gone beyond the literal bread. “He who comes to me shall not hunger; he who believes in me shall never thirst.” This is not physical hunger or physical thirst. As with the Samaritan woman at the well we have gone beyond that to our deepest desires, our most fervent longings.
Deep in each of us there is a desire for God. It is that desire which brought us to this monastic life. It is that desire which takes Christians through their lives. Often it is not much listened to, or it is misunderstood. It takes several twists and turns before people identify their deep longings with God. But God appears far away. He seems made of a different stuff. How can we approach him? That is exactly why the father sent this bread from heaven. We can see Jesus, hear him and speak to him. We can follow him as he walks to the Cross and we find we can follow him through our daily life. When Jesus said, “I am the living bread.” I don’t think he already knew about the Eucharist. That was still to come. But it is where we end this sermon. Jesus is not just a nice idea, a spirit floating round the universe, or the Son of God seated at the right hand of the Father. Jesus is the bread and the wine we will receive in a few minutes time. He comes to us and makes himself one with us. Can we go to him, and receive him and want with all our heart, with all our desire, to live on him alone? That’s our challenge today.