A loaf of bread, the walrus said....

John 6:51-58 New International Version (NIV)

⁵¹ I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.”

⁵² Then the Jews began to argue sharply among themselves, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”

⁵³ Jesus said to them, “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. ⁵⁴ Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. ⁵⁵ For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. ⁵⁶ Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them. ⁵⁷ Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. ⁵⁸ This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your ancestors ate manna and died, but whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.”

I’m going to start my blog with a stanza from a poem. You may even be familiar with it:

A loaf of bread,' the Walrus said,

Is what we chiefly need:

Pepper and vinegar besides

Are very good indeed —

Now if you're ready, Oysters dear,

We can begin to feed.'

This is a poem about a Walrus and the Carpenter who lure the young oysters out onto the beach and then feed on them.  Oysters and pepper and vinegar…. And feeding on bread.  It’s by Lewis Carroll, from his book “Through the Looking-Glass”.   

Our reading today is about Jesus telling his disciples that he is the living Bread from heaven and that anyone who feeds on this bread will live forever. There are some edgy verses in there, especially vs 53  “⁵³ Jesus said to them, “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

The Jews find the idea of eating the flesh of Jesus a bit hard to understand. “How can this man give us his flesh to eat” they ask.

This passage has been debated down the centuries and it would take a better scholar than me to explain the deep theological reasons for this. And I’m not going to try

What we’re going to think about this morning is what it might mean to us when we see Jesus as the bread of life, in a symbolic sense.

I think it could be fair to say, that we are now a feasting nation;  I would go so far as to say we are the party nation.  We love to eat, drink and party. Everything about our life seems to revolve around food.  Flick through any of the TV channels and there are literally dozens of programmes about food – preparing it, eating it, travelling to other places to find and cook it;  reality TV shows about cooking it in competition with others;  there are restaurant guides; diet guides, scientific facts about what the next super food is.  There are magazines devoted to food;  books, blogs, social media pages and of course advertising.  I’ve even seen instructions on how to crochet food – cute little crocheted patty cakes and the like! Even unrelated things like lipsticks are created in food-like colours… cheeky chocolate;  paint colours are called things like pale avocado.  And there are more varieties of bread than you can throw a scone at!

As a society, we are absolutely crazy about food.

It’s no accident that Jesus uses so much imagery about Himself and His Kingdom and relates it to living, growing plants and processes in the world (I am the true vine;  the Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed etc).  He did that because it was something people could relate to, because they were directly connected to growing food to eat, to keep them alive.

But I don’t think the people of Jesus day could ever comprehend or understand our absolute addiction to and worship of food.  For a start, they would never be able to imagine the reality of so MUCH food.  I heard on sbs the other day that there are now more people dying from too much food, than from not having enough.  And I wonder what God thinks about that?

It’s harder for us western Christians to understand the significance of Jesus being the living bread for our souls (and therefore essential for our spiritual health), because we are far less dependent of bread for our physical sustenance, than were the people of Jesus’ day.

How then, are we to appreciate these verses about Jesus being the very stuff of life, in every way, when we can take food so much for granted?  How can we cleanse our minds a little and get back to the basic idea of bread? How do we do that?

To try and re-engage with bread as a Godly life-force purely in our own strength is to put the cart before the horse. No!  We need some spiritual power to get us back into the right attitude to bread.

Let’s try to remember three things:

Firstly, we have the verses in John which tell us that Jesus is this bread and he has laid down his life for us.  .  The bread we eat during Communion are symbols of Christ’s body and blood given in exchange for every awful thing we’ve ever said; every unclean thought we’ve ever had;  every lie we’ve ever told;  every prejudice;  every wrong attitude.  In fact everything about us which is unholy and imperfect is covered by Christ’s death on the cross.  Bread, and His body are connected forever as the sacrifice and the symbols of that sacrifice.

Secondly, the spiritual bread is from heaven.  We’re told that in verse 51. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. We have all the divine nature of heaven available to us, spiritual strength; holiness, renewal, purity;  to be nourished and fed by the indwelling Spirit-bread of Jesus is to have access to all the heavenly virtues.  He can overcome any temptation (even the temptation to eat too much).  And more, he is the ongoing, ever-renewing source of spiritual energy and strength whenever I turn my life over to His control. He dwells and abides with us, as bread for our souls.  He’s food for now (on earth) and food to go (to heaven).

We have a portal into the dwelling place of the eternal spirit which was present at the creation of all things. I believe, like all the theologically uneducated people before me, that on a simple spiritual level, Jesus is the Bread of Life in all senses;  He encompasses every type of Life there is;  earthly and heavenly.  The bread is Creator Life; is physical life; is spiritual awakening.  All of these are aspects of Jesus, who was there when God called the world into being.

We need not do it in our own strength. He can constantly renew and nourish our hearts and spirits.  He can change us here and now, from glory to glory, until at last, when we see Him face to face, it will be the ever so gently passing from our world to His, in the twinkling of an eye.  That leads us to the third point… the forever bit.

We have the promise that whoever eats this bread will live forever. We have His promise that when we physically die, we go to be where He is. Vs 58 says “This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your ancestors ate manna and died, but whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.”

But how do we really feed on the Bread of Life, and claim this eternal inheritance?  Do we just come and take communion once a month?  Is that what these verses mean?  I don’t think that would quite cut it.

We have to invite the living, dynamic Christ into our hearts and lives on a daily basis, to be able to eat the real bread of His life and His divinity and His Spirit.  We have to really understand and believe and acknowledge the sacrifice Jesus made for us.  And we have to remain and abide in Christ. That’s the whole crux of the matter.  The bread of Life gave himself for us and if we don’t live and believe on that daily, we may as well paste a picture of a slice of bread on our heads.

We do need to come regularly and take communion together.  But the eating of the bread and wine are symbols.  They are just the outward appearance of what should be going on inside our hearts.  We have the outward symbols and we have the inner bread which is baked in heaven.  If we physically eat the symbols, without searching for and abiding in the living risen Christ, we die to God, even while we are alive physically.   

We have to take a few minutes every day to read the Bible, privately, at home.  Some of us have perhaps gotten out of this habit.

We should talk to God.  Some of us set aside a time every day and read the Bible and talk to God. I’m sure you’ve discovered long ago, what works for you.  I can’t read the Bible at night because I end up falling asleep;  I can’t pray at a set time every day;  it’s too regimented and contrived.  I just pray through the day, as I think of things.

I lived for years near the coast, at a little place called Tinonee, near Taree on the Mid North Coast.

Another resident of this village was a Christian man of Scottish descent.  He was the epitome of the Scottish personality (or the way we think of Scottish people being). He was rather a dour man but with a very dry, and sometimes cutting sense of humour.  He did not suffer fools gladly. He was also extremely careful, not just with his money, but with his worldly goods as well.  He was recycling long before it was the norm. Pause….And he was a bit eccentric.

I would often encounter him on my way to and from work on the road from Tinonee to Taree.  He rode a very economical 250cc motorbike. It rains a lot more on the coast than it does here and when it rained, this man was nothing if not inventive;  I would see him riding his motorbike carefully along the road, with his raincoat on…. And to stop his gloves getting wet, he would wear bread bags on his hands. I’m not joking nor jesting, he wore bread bags on his hands (demonstrate) to keep his hands dry. He would insert his gloved hands into the bags and secure them at the wrist and off he’d go.  He didn’t care that it looked a bit silly. He was a very practical gent and I’m sure it was perfectly natural to re-use the bread bags as little raincoats for his gloves.

But what if he just took the bread out of the bag and threw it away?  What if he didn’t actually eat the bread before using the bread bags as glove covers?

So my point is that unless we take the Lord Jesus into our hearts and lives, we will be like my Scottish friend;  we will be just wearing the bread bags without eating the bread.