I Am the Bread of Life
Taken from a Red Rock News Article
Rev. Dona Johnson | August 11, 2024
Like many ancient societies, Egyptians and Israelites were dependent upon cereals and grain; so much so that the word for bread, “lechem,” is synonymous with food. And in many countries today, bread is still a major source of food that satisfies the hunger, malnourishment and nutritional needs of both people of poverty and people of means.
Now Jesus understood and often addressed the reality of human hunger. In John 6:22-35, Jesus had just fed over 5000 people by multiplying several loaves of bread and a few fish. But he also understood at a deeper level that every human being lives with a spiritual hunger. The crowds who had witnessed Jesus supernaturally multiply the bread and fish and those who were fed, were truly amazed at the miracle. They were so intrigued by the whole encounter, that the crowd wanted more of this good thing. So they followed Jesus and the disciples to the other side of the lake. They saw something was strangely different about Jesus.
When the crowd finally caught up with Jesus, he went right to the heart of the matter. He was not their gravy-train or traveling food truck. He said, ‘You’ve seen wonderful things. You’ve seen how God’s grace enabled thousands of people to be fed. Your attention and affections ought to have been turned to God who fed you. But instead, you
are still thinking about how you can get more free food. It’s as if Jesus said, ‘You cannot take a moment to think about your souls because your focused on your stomachs.’ Jesus was concerned not for their physical hunger but on the state of their souls—the eternal. He proclaimed and offered himself as the bread of life, an eternal bread. A bread that satisfies hungry hearts. A bread that feeds the soul, tempers our lustful desires, quells our greediness and need for power and our insatiable appetite for wealth and possessions.
There is a human temptation to see God as a Genie in a bottle. If you worship God and pray in the right way, God will grant your wishes, keep you from all hardship and increase your prosperity. Some of us worship God with the hope that all our prayers will be answered quickly and meet our desired outcomes. In other words, some of us seek all the benefits of Christ without the desire to commit our lives to him. And this is exactly what we see in the hearts of the crowds who followed Jesus. All the crowds cared about was getting their stomachs filled with bread from the world, rather than feeding their souls with bread from heaven.
God desires nothing more from us than that we love him and seek him not with divided loyalties, but with our whole hearts. God desires that we put him first in our lives. Because when we do this, all the others things in life fall into place— our marriages, relationships, livelihoods and our consumptive lifestyles.
Once Napoleon and a friend were talking about life. It was dark; they walked to the window and looked out at all the distant stars. Napoleon, who had sharp eyes while his friend was dimmed sighted, pointed to the sky: ‘Do you see all those stars?’ he asked. ‘No,’ his friend answered. ‘I can’t see them.’ ‘That,’ said Napoleon, ‘is the difference between you and me.’
Are we too dimmed-sighted? Sometimes our vision of God is too small. Sometimes our concerns and what we don’t have right now are so anchored in the present, in getting our own needs met, that we can’t see the hope and power of God that lies right in front of us and beyond our current circumstances. Jesus sums all this up quite nicely, ‘Don’t work for the food which perishes but for that which lasts forever and gives eternal live.’ Amen.