For Sunday, August 16, 2015 – John 6:51-58
Grain products comprised a majority of the food consumed in Jesus’ time. Bread alone provided from 50 to 70 percent of an ordinary person’s daily calories and was the staple food at every meal, such a vital part of life that the word could be used interchangeably for food in general. When Jesus told us to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread,” he did not mean, ask God for a small roll with butter, just another of life’s optional extras. He meant, go to God for all you need. He meant, God is the primary sustenance, the center of every meal.
Now Jesus says that he himself is living bread come down from heaven. He himself is the central sustenance we seek. In a culture like his, tuned in to the utter necessity of bread, totally dependent on its life-giving benefits, his words invite a radical rethinking of what matters most. What would it mean to have living bread, not physical bread alone but a bread of the spirit that lets us really thrive? Might this be the kind of food that would ultimately sustain? “Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” But surely flesh cannot be consumed like bread! He shocks his listeners further by adding, “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” Unless you take all of who I am—all that I say and do—into yourself and let it become an integral part of who you are and how you live, you are not fully alive.
We cannot understand all that he means any more than a baby, moments after birth, can comprehend the extent of its need. We can only taste and see, try for ourselves what will and will not satisfy. Searching for sustenance is our central work. Jesus knows our condition, how consumed we are by the daily search for food — physical, emotional, spiritual — and how apt we are to look in all the wrong places, how apt we are not to see the true sustenance right in front of us, as common as bread. A bountiful table is already set. The life and more than life we seek is here, with us, waiting to be enjoyed.
