Life In the Bread

Scriptures: Exodus 16:4-18, John 6:48-60

As I indicated last week, I’m flip-flopping themes these two Sundays.  Having looked at the freedom Christ gives us, leading to love and resulting in service last week, rather than a typical July 4 sermon today we’re ready to turn to how that freedom manifests itself in out life together – which, first and foremost, is in the sacrament of holy communion.

It was characteristic of Jesus that when he explained the Kingdom of God to his listeners he used very common things – things that were a part of everyone’s common life – so that anyone who heard him could understand the reference.  Thus, he used the image of the shepherd to depict his own role – an image which was immediately understandable to the people of that time and place since they either raised sheep or knew those who did.  Or, when he met the woman at the well, he spoke about living water – using perhaps the most common element in human life as a metaphor for a spiritual reality.  Here, in John’s account of the instituting of communion, Jesus once again takes something very common and makes of it a metaphor for eternal life – the bread of life.  This was a particularly significant choice because bread itself has always been a symbol for life.

Perhaps in an affluent society, where something so common as bread can be pretty much taken for granted (although it does have a heightened significance for us in this congregation because of our participation in the bread run), we have lost much of the symbolic meaning of this food staple.  Especially among the diet-conscious, starchy white bread has become almost a negative symbol – destructive of our health needs.  Yet, in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, as you will recall, Jean Val Jean was given what we could consider to be a cruelly unjust prison sentence and was then persecuted throughout his life, for what? – for stealing a loaf of bread.  The impression is left with the reader that it is not so much the specific action that was so harshly punished as it was the symbolic action – stealing a loaf of what we still sometimes refer to as “the staff of life”.  This symbolic meaning comes home to us even today if we recall that “bread” and “dough” (from which bread comes) are slang synonyms for money, and this certainly testifies to the power of bread.  Or, to take it back to Jesus, when he wants us to pray about our most basic needs Jesus would have us say, “Give us this day our daily bread.”

Seen in this context, it would seem that no other symbol could be so fully adequate to signify our relationship to eternal life.  It is the very commonality of these elements that makes the bread and the juice special.  Think of how ludicrous it would be, for example, to use cake and champagne as the communion elements – ludicrous not just because of tradition but because these things represent only a small part of the people – the wealthy — and would be meaningless for those people whom Jesus claimed as especially his own – the poor, the disenfranchised, the exploited – those who needed the promise and the reality of eternal life.  (Although, as a side bar, on youth group retreats I have used soda and pizza for communion elements; sometimes you do have to adapt to the crowd you’re with.)

But when Jesus used this metaphor of himself as the “living bread” his listeners were troubled, and perhaps this is still a stumbling-block for some who would seek a fuller understanding of Christianity today.  Even the disciples responded:  “’This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?’”  And it is a hard saying indeed for those who took it literally.  For Jesus to say, “’…unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you,” hinted at cannibalism and vampirism – and this haunted the early church throughout those first centuries.  Wilbert P. Howard has reminded us how repulsive the idea of drinking blood would be to any Jew.  It almost seems as though Christ was using this statement deliberately to antagonize those who wished to follow him.

And in a sense this is true.  The reaction of the disciples that “’This teaching is difficult…’” echoes among potential Christian disciples down through the ages, as they are exposed to the full gospel and end up saying, in effect, “This is too hard for me; it offends me; it forces me to give up too much – too much of my wealth, of my own ideas, of my own prejudices, of myself; why, it even calls upon me to give up my whole self in obedience to God!  This is too much; I can only go part way.”  This relates back to last week’s scripture when Jesus tells those “would-be followers” to leave the dead to be buried by others and not return to their homes to say goodbye if they want to follow him; we were talking about this afterwards at coffee hour and recalled the song from the musical For Heaven’s Sake that says, “Use me, Oh Lord…but not just now.”

What’s more, Jesus offended his listeners all the more by referring to one of the greatest events in Jewish history (the Exodus) and saying that, “’This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died.  But the one who eats this bread will live forever.’”  The point Jesus is making is that it is false to feel that God is simply a beneficent God who hands out free manna for the asking like a bread line.  This image of God is inadequate to represent the God of our forefathers and foremothers, the God of history, the God of revelation.  Rather, the living bread that gives life must be taken and eaten – that is, it must be responded to by a willing obedience to a God who is not a gift-giver or a problem-solver, but a God who reaches out in love with the promise of eternal life.

Even understood as the metaphor that it is and not as a literal statement about eating flesh and drinking blood, this is still a hard saying.  It is hard because it makes clear where the source of true life is:  not in ourselves, not in anything we do, or think, or feel.  The source of true life is, metaphorically, in the bread and juice, when these are accepted as relating to Christ’s sacrificial life for us.  Arthur John Gossip reminds us of the metaphoric nature of this saying, and in so doing he shows us what importance this has for our lives, when he says,

“But surely what has to be remembered is that this is a metaphor, to be understood and used like every other metaphor.  When Luther chalked on the table, ‘This is my body,’ as if that were final and conclusive – Christ said it, and Christ meant it, and that is that – someone else might have inscribed, ‘I am the door’ – Christ said it, and Christ meant it, and it must be believed.  No doubt!  But no human being because of that saying thinks of Christ as a literal door, swinging on its hinges.  Why should one metaphor be read with such prosaic woodenness, while all the rest are not?  Understood as a metaphor, the saying is arrestingly vivid and lays down what is precisely and exactly the plain truth.  Really to receive from Christ what he has to give us, really to have experience of his saving power, we must feed on him – there is no other word that expresses it with a like accuracy – must absorb his teaching, his character, his mind, his ways; must appropriate the virtue there is in him, till his mind becomes our mind and his ways our ways; till we think somewhat as he would do if he were in our place; and can be and do what without him we could not be or do; and this because his power has passed into us and become our power.”

If Dr. Gossip is right, and I firmly believe that he is – it is not difficult to see why the disciples – in fact, disciples down through the ages – look upon this as a hard saying.  Really to appropriate Christ in this way – to “feed on him”, in Dr. Gossip’s words – would demand giving up much of what we now hold as precious.  Many have and will fall away from the kind of obedience this metaphor of living bread demands.  Yet, later on in this chapter, when Jesus is unsure even of the twelve and asks of them, “’Do you also wish to go away?’”, Peter answers him – the same Peter who was to deny him and indeed go away if only for a short time – in words that ring as true now as then:  “’Lord, to whom can we go?  You have the words of eternal life.  We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.’”  And Jesus responds:  “’Did I not choose you…..?’”

“To whom can we go?”  This is the question, for there is no one else who holds out to us the promise of eternal life.  We have here laid out before us the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ, as symbolized by this bread and juice.  By accepting these elements of communion into our bodies, we accept the life that is in them – a life that was given for us.  We can only come in obedience and in thankfulness for the service that is ours.  Yes, sometimes it is a difficult service, but it is one we gratefully accept because of Christ’s life and death for us.  A hymn that we sometimes sing, even though its language may be a bit archaic, sums up nicely that grateful acceptance:  “We thank thee, Lord, thy paths of service lead/To blazoned heights and down the slopes of need;/They reach thy throne, encompass land and sea,/And [those] who journey in them walk with thee.”

Amen.

Dave Pomeroy