Bread of Life

 About a week ago, Saundra made some olive bread. It is a sort of soda bread with black and green olives embedded. Wonderful stuff. It takes us back to the time when every home baked bread, had olive trees, pressed their own olive oil. In short, it takes us back to the time of Christ in the eastern Mediterranean area.

In America today, our bread is made using hard wheat, a type of wheat that contains much gluten, the protein that helps bread dough stick together. If you’ve ever eaten gluten-free bread, it is made from other grains like barley or millet. And because they don’t have gluten, the bread is crumbly. It falls to pieces easily. And because we have such a large area in the Middle West which is ideal for growing wheat, and because we have such good transportation systems, few people grow their own grain, or even bake their own bread, preferring to buy bread in loaves at the store that is baked in regional bakeries from cheap, but good wheat flour.

But in the Holy Land in those days, bread was made from many different grains, because different grains grow better in different places. Buckwheat, Teff, millet, sorghum, barley, spelt, wheat, oats, rye, sesame, bulgar, farro, einkorn, Khorasan, flax, And in the Middle East, there are dry places and wet places, high altitude areas that get very cold and windy, low places that stay warm and humid, rocky soils, sandy soils, fine black soils and red clays. Each of these places best grow different grains – and since everyone had to live off the grains they grew and the transportation systems were so poor – think donkey carts – bread was different from town to town, even from household to household. But everyone ate bread because it was the cheapest source of calories, in a time when everyone worked at hard, farm labor and used twice the calories we do today. Bread was the basis of life in the Holy Land.

You see, the diet of that day was very restricted. Bread was the basis for every meal. Olives were available in season and they were pressed for their oil, which was used for cooking as well as burnt in oil lamps and used to keep germs out of wounds. Dates and figs were eaten fresh and dried. There was no corn, no sweet potatoes, no pineapple, no strawberries, few types of squash or beans, for all of these foods were native to the Americas and had not yet been taken to the Old World – the “corn” talked about in the Old King James Version refers to wheat, which is what the  word “corn” still meant in the early 1600’s.

No, in the Middle East grew some basic melons, pomegranates and peaches, but not apples. Grapes were grown widely and wine was made to preserve the sugar content as alcohol. Chick-peas  were the most common legume, butter and cheese were made from milk, honey was harvested from wild hives. Goat and mutton were the most common meats, as well as cattle for the wealthy. Pork was forbidden, as was shrimp and non-fish seafood. The most common vegetables were members of the onion family, very little other vegetables were eaten. But the most common foods were bread, meat stew, olives, grapes, dates, figs, wine, and milk products.

You know, in most places, there is a starch which is the basis of our food. In southeast Asia, it is rice. In Central America, it was maize corn, In Ireland it was potatoes until the great famine when the potatoes fell victim to fungus. In the tropics, it is cassava and tapioca, which are roots. In northern Asia it is noodles made from wheat flour. In Italy, it is pasta, which is made from durum wheat dough which is pushed through molds and dried to become pasta. And through the Middle East, through Europe and America, Australia, and New Zealand, it is wheat bread.

In the holy land, the most common form of bread is what we today call sourdough. In sourdough, a bit of natural yeast is left in the dough. Additional flour is added to a bit of dough left over and allowed to rise overnight. The yeast grows and produces carbon dioxide bubbles which rise the bread. In the morning, most of the dough was then baked to form small loaves or possibly what we call pita which are then filled with a meat and vegetable mixture. But a bit of the wet dough was kept, protected and allowed to act as starter for the next day’s bread. It was considered miraculous that the dough would rise, almost like a living thing – which, we now know, it was with the yeast growing inside the dough. The yeast was a leavening agent, which comes from very old words meaning “lifting”. The yeast, though, requires hours to work it’s magic. If there is no yeast, the bread simply forms crackers, known in Hebrew as “Matzo”, which is of special note around the time of the Passover, because the Israelites had to leave Egypt so quickly the bread could not rise.

Last week, we saw Jesus feed the five thousand with five barley loaves and a couple small fish. He then walked across the lake, catching up with the disciples in the middle of the lake. Our reading this morning continues the next morning as the crowd awakens and realizes that neither Jesus nor his disciples were there, so they got into the boats and went to Capernaum on the other side of the lake looking for Jesus. I’m so glad we don’t have to row across a lake to find Jesus.

They asked Jesus, “Rabbi, when did you get here?”

Jesus, as usual, doesn’t answer their question directly, but deals with the real issue – why the people were looking for Him. He said, “Very truly I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw the signs I performed but because you ate the loaves and had your fill.”

In other words, Jesus said the crowd had followed Him because they saw Him as their free lunch. Despite the miracle of the feeding of five thousand, they simply saw Jesus as a free lunch. Which is a warning to those of us today who would establish regular free community lunches – there is more to do than simply provide the food for the body. If we establish give-way programs, we must provide spiritual food as well as free physical food to accomplish God’s will. As Jesus went on to say,

“Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For on him God the Father has placed his seal of approval.”

The normal food we eat can spoil, but there is food for our soul that lasts to eternal life. Perhaps Jesus is giving us a metaphor here, that His teachings are food for our souls that will feed our souls and lead us to eternal life. The crowd certainly understood this to be metaphor, an analogy, for they immediately changed their line of questioning.

“They asked Him, “What must we do to do the works God requires?” They wanted to know what they had to do to be right with God.

And Jesus responded with “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.”

The crowd understood He was talking about Himself as the one God had sent. So the crowd asked for proof. “What sign then will you give that we may see it and believe you? What will you do?” They wanted proof that He was sent by God. Then they suggested, “Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written: ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat’” quoting our Psalm for today.

But Jesus understood that they thought Moses had given them the bread, for it is very easy to think that Moses had some special magic. Jesus wanted to turn the attention to God – and to Himself. He wanted to turn from the man who stood in front of the burning bush to the God who was in the burning bush, the great “I am that I am”, which is the name God gave to Himself.

“Very truly I tell you, it is not Moses who has given you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who give you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is the bread that comes down from heaven and give life to the world.”

Jesus was pointing out that life comes from bread – on this they all agreed. But Jesus also wanted to remind them that there is ordinary bread, which would mold – and special bread from God, which gave life to the world.

Jesus said, “It is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is the bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”

They responded, “Sir, always give us this bread.” They were probably still thinking of manna, they were still looking for a free lunch. They still were thinking about their tummies, when Jesus hit them with the zinger. We went

Jesus declared, “I am the bread of life.” Jesus intentionally used the “I AM” phrase, which was not commonly used in Israel, because that was the name of God. Jesus applied it to Himself. And then He explained further, “Whoever comes to me will never go hungry and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

What Jesus was saying here requires some more background. The Apostle John gives it to us at the beginning of his Gospel when he tells us that the Christ was the Word of God. John tells us that everything that was made was made through the Word. So if the Christ was the Word of God, then everything made was made through Christ, who is the Word of God.

So God initiates the Creation, and Jesus forms the Creation. It is as though there is a water system which has high pressure water, and there is a man standing there, controlling and directing a hose through which that water flows. God the father is the water system, while Christ is the man directing the hose.

And this includes the creation of life, and sustaining that life.

We think that if God walked away from the Universe, everything would continue onward for a while, perhaps slowly falling apart. But that is not true. God is actively maintaining the Universe. If God walked away, the Creation would disappear faster than a video game or a TV show disappears when the electric power stops.

Life is the same way.

In fact, life must be sustained.

We all know that people die when they stop eating. It takes a while, but they die. Bread sustains life.

Now remember when Jesus said, “Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.” The men of Israel and us have often assumed that this is a metaphor, an analogy that the “food” the Son of Man – Jesus – gives us is His teachings.

But what if that is not a metaphor, but Jesus means this literally.

On the night of the Last Supper, Jesus passed around a loaf of bread which was shared, and he said, “This is my body, given for you.”

What if He was serious and literal about the need to eat the Communion bread which Jesus gives us to gain eternal life? What if that bread somehow was spiritual food for our souls?

We do not believe that this bread during Communion is the literal physical body of Jesus, but we don’t believe it is just bread, either. We believe that when we eat this bread and drink this juice, we are somehow spiritually connecting with Jesus, that He is present here with us, that these elements somehow help give us eternal life. Although different groups of Christians will disagree about the exact meaning and purpose of Communion, almost all groups of Christians agree that it is very important to participate in Communion regularly. The founder of the Methodist movement, John Wesley, felt it best to join in Communion everyday if possible.

And so, I ask you to look today at these elements in a different way today, not as just a piece of bread and a bit of grape juice, but truly as if Jesus has given them to you, touched them with a bit of His glory, brushed against them with His essence, put a bit of His eternal nature into them. Look and believe that these elements are one of the ways that Jesus gives His grace to us, leading us to an eternal life with Him one day.