2021.08.01 | THE BREAD OF LIFE
Today’s gospel reading provides an illustration of how John routinely used images and metaphors to teach and inspire the faithful in every generation. If you read the gospel of John cover to cover, you’ll see that John employed eight metaphors to describe Jesus and the significance of his life and ministry. These eight include the following:
Living Water
Light of the World
The True Vine
The Potter
The Bridegroom
The Good Shepherd
The Word
The Bread of Life
These earthly images always pointed to something beyond the physical world and the present day.
II
It doesn’t take a lot of imagination for me to understand the power of the images and metaphors that John used, especially when it comes to bread.
I was fortunate to learn how to make bread from scratch, from two of the best--my Grandma Nehring and my Grandma Thomsen. My Grandma Nehring taught me how to make Sweedish rye bread and white bread, cinnamon rolls, and Sweedish tea rings. My Grandma Thomsen taught me how to make whole wheat bread, rye bread, and white bread which were part of her Bohemian heritage and my grandpa’s German heritage.
Making bread with my grandmothers was always about more than making something to eat. It was always about more than the ingredients, and the techniques. It was about learning the traditions. It was about spending time with my grandmothers, and learning how to “stir in the love” that made everything taste so good.
Given these wonderful childhood memories, it doesn’t take much imagination for me to make the leap from Jesus feeding 5,000 or even 35,000 as I explained last Sunday, to understanding Jesus as the bread of life--as one who provided spiritual sustenance for a lifetime.
III
The scarcity of bread and the longing for spiritual nourishment that unfolds in John 6 reminds of the early pandemic days when several essential products were in short supply. Remember those days?
At first people flooded the grocery stores buying up all the milk, bread, eggs, toilet paper, and hand sanitizer that they could find.
Distribution of essential products got all messed up because of the shelter in place public health order; so some people resorted to making their own bread, raising their own chickens, and converting their distilleries into hand sanitizer factories.
What was most interesting to me about this purchasing frenzy in the early days of the pandemic was not that our nation reacted like we were having blizzard or that a hurricane was about to hit shore, but that long after the grocery store shelves were filled with bread, Americans were still making bread at home from scratch, and there was a new shortage--a shortage of flour.
Journalist Amanda Mull, whose article “Where is all the Flour?” appeared in the May 12, 2020 issue of The Atlantic, explained that the pandemic reintroduced middle class Americans to our kitchens. At first we made bread, she wrote, because we couldn’t find this staple in the grocery store; but we continued to bake bread long after the bakery shelves were full, because we finally had the time and opportunity to do so.
Heaven knows bread making takes time--even when you use quick-rising yeast and flour. The demands associated with dual career marriages and middle class child-rearing combined with long work commutes and shuffling kids from lessons and practices before and after school sucked up so much of people’s time pre-pandemic that most middle class people quit cooking at home--at least during the week.
Then, all of a sudden, poof--and the pandemic whipped out commutes, before or after school activities, and even in-person school, so that those who were privileged enough to have white collar jobs found time and opportunity to try something new or return to an old familiar practice, such as making bread.
IV
Journalist Kristen Aiken explained in her July 2020 article in the Huffington Post, “Why People Baked So Much Bread During Quarantine,” that there may be other reasons that account for this new or renewed interest in breadmaking during the pandemic, in addition to the structural changes in many middle class people’s lives.
Aiken argues that bread is a fundamental part of the human diet that dates back to the earliest known agricultural activity in the Middle East. So, she infers, there is something deeply human about making and eating homemade bread.
My anthropologist spouse, Stephanie, will tell you that bread is not native to all cultures. Every culture has some form of starch that is essential to the human diet, but bread isn’t the only one or the one for all. Rice is the essential starch for most Eastern cultures, and root vegetables are the essential starch in many African cultures. So, there may be something essential, even primal, about making bread for Western and Middle Eastern cultures, but not for all cultures.
In addition to bread being integral to Western and Middle Eastern cultures, bread making and bread eating are essential to the history and cultures of our Jewish and Christian faith tradition. Think, for example, of how central unleavened bread is in the Passover story, or how the Hebrew people needed bread in the Wilderness, and how God (not Moses) provided manna.
Remember too, how Jesus routinely broke bread with the disciples, how he celebrated the Last Supper with his followers and gave them a New Commandment--that they love one another, and how all of these stories are integral to our holy history.
V
It’s hard to overstate the significance of bread (and other starches) as an essential element of the human diet, or the centrality of bread to the holy histories of Jews and Christians. But that is not all there is to say about bread and the Christian faith--at least not for John.
John takes one step further in the fourth gospel in that John invites us into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. John invites us to encounter and embrace--not simply the historical Jesus--but the spiritual essence of Jesus that transcends time and place--and that can nourish and satisfy our hunger in this life--in a way that no earthly mixture of water and wheat, and leven and lard can ever provide.
No wonder Jesus’ disciples said to him, “Sir, give us this bread always.” (John 6: 34) Amen.