08/11/2024

‘I am the bread of life’ We are still in the synagogue in Capernaum in our Good News reading today. And the conversation is still about bread. It is hardly surprising, I suppose. John, in his gospel of Jesus, invites us to pay greater attention to life by circling around key words, almost repeating himself, but not quite. Slowing us down, drawing us in to look again and again with a slightly different perspective. Challenging us to go deeper so that we can feel our mental and spiritual ‘muscles’ being stretched. And ‘I am the bread of life’ is the central Word of Jesus in this sermon. It is a classic Word or commandment of God – a short pithy phrase uttered by God which stands for all time and shapes the world around it. Words of God carry the creative power of God. Can you feel its power? This is the first of the ‘I am’ words of Jesus in John’s gospel. There will be seven in total – the number of completion and perfection. (And the number of churches in our group.) Each of the ‘I am’ words, or ‘sayings’ as we often call them, invites us to pay greater attention to the identity of Jesus. To pause and look again and again at Jesus. It is a practice designed to stretch and reshape us, if we let it. We are shaped by what we repeatedly listen to. Consider how people within our nation, and others, have been misshapen by repeated lies and hatred – twisted into people who spread violence with words and bring destruction to the streets. These are the very actions that we were warned against in our second reading. Instead, we are all invited to be hearers and speakers of the truth, spreading God’s Word of unity, peace, and salvation. So, let’s return again today to Jesus’s Word, ‘I am the bread of life’. Jesus offers us nothing less than his identity – ‘I am’, ‘ego eimi’. This is a shocking phrase for Jesus’s hearers. The only time this is used in the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Jews most holy scriptures, is by God to describe God-self to Moses. Jesus is speaking like God. Jesus identifies as God. ‘I am’ declares Jesus, a bloke from the village down the road. Can you feel His power? Jesus is God come amongst us. And he goes further, to reveal more than was revealed to Moses. ‘I am the bread’ says Jesus. Let us not forget that this too is shocking. God identifies as bread. The all powerful is the work of our hands, which we break, and digest. Really? But slow down a minute. Look again. In our western communities served by supermarkets with all manner of processed food, or in an eastern culture based on rice for that matter, we might miss how dependent on bread the Middle East is. Every meal is bread based. No social gathering is complete without the sharing of bread. No religious Jew will eat bread without first blessing it. The memory of the Exodus in which God rescued the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt is made present each year in the sharing of unleavened bread. Jesus is in a community which is physically, socially, and spiritually dependent on bread. Bread doesn’t throw its weight around. But it is dangerous foolishness to ignore humble bread’s importance. Bread is quietly necessary, rather than an optional extra. Our first reading gives us a picture to help us visualise this dependence. The great prophet Elijah is as isolated as a solitary broom tree. His physical, emotional, and spiritual strength is so depleted that sits down to die. He cannot go on, unless he eats. We are creatures that must eat to survive, let alone thrive. Without food, we are lost. Bread reminds us that we are part of creation, and dependent on God. ‘I am the bread’ declares Jesus. Can you feel this subtle power? We are face to face with the humility of God. Let’s return to Jesus’s word one final time in this sermon. For Jesus identifies what kind of bread he is. ‘I am the bread of life’ When God rained down bread from heaven in the wilderness, that bread remained mysterious. The people responded to it by saying ‘Ma na?’ ‘What’s this?’ Manna was rather limited bread which didn’t last the night. This was so that it could not be hoarded. During the 40 days that God supplied the manna, the Jews relationship with God and the world was still marred by conflict and death. God’s people moaned then as they do in the gospel reading, and as we do today. Little changes. We live in a messed up world which cannot see the sacred in the material. Bread is used as a tool for oppression. The economics of the world are not even. Some hoard bread, whilst others starve. And it is to this very world that Jesus has come and does come and will come. He comes - the bread of life rather than bread of survival. (In the Greek the word is Zoe rather than Bios.) Jesus is the abundant, joyful, inexhaustible life of heaven made flesh. We have his word, ‘I am the bread of life’, as he offers himself to us – God-self, humble, and life-giving.