One of my fond childhood memories is that of coming home from school to the smell of my mom’s hearty homemade bread, fresh from the oven. A slice with a little butter and honey made a great after-school snack!
Not only was Mom’s bread delicious, it was healthy. It was made with nourishing ingredients like stone-ground flour, cracked wheat and molasses. In fact, we had a long-standing family joke about this bread: whenever I, or one of my five siblings, accomplished anything of note, whether a good grade in school or a satisfactory check-up at the dentist, it would be attributed to Mom’s homemade bread!
As good as Mom’s bread was, it does not compare to the bread that Jesus talked about in the sixth chapter of the gospel of John.
In this chapter, we find Jesus being followed by a large crowd of curious people. On the previous day Jesus had fed the crowd using only a boy’s lunch of five barley loaves and two fish, multiplying the food until it provided nourishment for everyone, with leftovers! Of course, the people were quite taken with Jesus and his ability to feed them.
While the people were focusing on physical bread to fill their stomachs, Jesus tells them of a different kind of bread: “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” What an astounding claim!
Here Jesus uses bread as a metaphor, a figure of speech, to describe the spiritual gifts that he has to give. And the bread that he offers is extraordinary: bread that fills a person’s deepest needs for love, forgiveness, comfort and hope.
Like the people of Jesus’ day, we know what it is like to experience spiritual hunger. In our quiet moments, we may become aware of a gnawing emptiness in our lives. We may feel the pangs of damaged relationships; we may feel guilt for the harm we have caused others; we may feel the pain of death that robs us of our loved ones. The nagging hunger inside of us causes us to look for something to quiet our hunger pangs, to satisfy us. We may try to fill our emptiness with any number of things: work, recreation, relationships, status, creativity, even spirituality.
In the end, there is no food that satisfies our hunger other than the bread that Jesus talks about, for Jesus offers what human beings need: he offers us himself. “I am the living bread that came down from heaven,” says Jesus, “Whoever eats this bread will live forever.”
Jesus offers the bread of life: life that is rich and meaningful, life that begins now and stretches into eternity! Check out John 6 to learn more.
Each week the clergy of the Cook County Ministerium offer Spiritual Reflections. This week’s contributor is Pastor Deborah Lunde of Zoar Lutheran Church in Tofte.
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