For Sunday, August 9, 2015 – John 6:35, 41-51
Some lessons are harder than others to convey and to learn. Jesus confounds many of his listeners when he tells them, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” Is he simply waxing poetic with his eloquent use of metaphor and hyperbole? Or is he using poetry as a means to open the ears of his listeners, to help them reexamine long-held certainties and imagine something new?
Like many students who think they don’t understand poetry, they complain about the complexity of what he is saying. They question how he can call himself “the bread of life, who has come down from heaven” when he is to them just Jesus, a young man whose father and mother they know. He didn’t arrive in a special delivery bread truck from heaven but grew up among them. But Jesus is not teaching a genealogical lesson, nor is he deliberately trying to confuse his listeners. He simply hopes to reveal a bit more truth about who we are, and who God is. Because the truth is, none of us understands either ourselves or God very well. We tend to think of God as separate from us, remote and aloof, when indeed God is close at hand, actively healing, instructing, invested in our lives. Neither do we understand ourselves, or the fact that God woos us with the scents of love, trying to feed us morsels of truth beyond our understanding.
God sends us the nurturing gift of bread, the aroma of which draws us closer and increases our desire. Jesus says he is this bread of life, sent to us by a loving God. And don’t you think if Jesus is saying he is more than he seems, not only a man but also God’s bread, he might be suggesting that you and I are more, too? That we, too, bear gifts of life for the world? The bread God sends, Jesus says, is not reserved for insiders only but is for absolutely everyone. We only need to believe it’s possible that God still bakes up batches of goodness. God kneads the dough, shapes it and lets it rise and then sends it, loaf by loaf—to us, through us—to feed the soul of the world.
