090802 Bread

How is your relationship with bread? Dr. Atkins is famous for changing our country’s relationship with carbohydrates. I became aware of his approach to dietary health about fifteen years ago, when a few people in my congregation started telling me about eating all the bacon, eggs, steak, and pork rinds they could handle. And they were losing weight. The secret to the Atkins Diet? Limiting carbs forces the human body to find that energy elsewhere – namely fat cells. Keep your carbs low, and your body will eat the fat, while maintaining muscle because you’re loading it with protein. Millions of people shunned all things bread. Low-carb everything hit the shelves: bread, beer, chips, soft drinks, and even ice-cream. The Atkins Diet, and then the South Beach and certainly others, have changed our relationship with bread.

Jewish people thought a lot about their bread. In Jesus’ day, the majority of Jewish people were poor. They lived in the Promised Land, but under Roman occupation. When they thought about bread, they thought about the difference between living and dying. But beyond literal grains, yeast, and sugars, when they considered bread, their thoughts also turned to their faith. In their history, God instituted some feasts they were mandated to observe: Passover, Pentecost, and Tabernacles, for instance. Food was central to each of these feasts, and bread was a natural part of the celebration. They remembered special bread made without yeast – central to every Passover meal, recalling the night of their redemption from Egyptian slavery. They remembered manna – the weird bread from heaven the whole nation of people received every morning as dew as they journeyed to the Promised Land – it was tasty and nutritious.

So, when Jesus started doing his ministry, and began suggesting that he was more than your average rabbi or prophet, people naturally asked:

“Hey Jesus – what’s your relationship with bread?”

In the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel, Jesus gives his answer: “I am the bread of life… I am the living bread of heaven… I am the true bread that came down from heaven… And for those who eat it, they will receive eternal life and be raised on the last day and live forever.” Statements like this is what led C. S. Lewis to proclaim that Jesus was either everything he said he was, or an absolute lunatic. Not a great teacher or prophet if he says this kind of stuff and can’t back it up.

Volumes of interpretive work have been written about this, but let me simply sum it up with this… The people raising the question were looking for the “what” to do to keep God on their side – a question that religion seeks to answer. Jesus wasn’t a big fan of religion, however. He gave his life to helping people know what it meant to have a relationship with God that works personally, for relationships, for families, communities, and for the whole world. That relationship would change our very sense of being, making us whole, reshaping our worldview, reprioritizing our values, refocusing our passions. To eat this bread was simply to believe in Jesus. But believing wasn’t just mental.

For Jesus, believing meant your whole life found its center in the Way he was modeling and teaching. For Jesus, believing meant lifelong learning, growing intellectually regarding who God is and who we are through personal study, teaching, and group dialogue. For Jesus, believing meant growing closer to God emotionally – finding spiritual intimacy privately and through community. And for Jesus, believing meant behavioral change – being like Jesus with the way we use our passions, gifts, skill-sets, and other resources. Eating this bread – believing in Jesus, would lead us to the best of life here on earth, and a growing confidence in life past the grave.

The communion bread was the Passover bread – made without yeast because God was going to redeem them quickly – no time to allow the bread to rise. Good choice on Jesus’ part, because when we really look to Jesus for our very sustenance (instead of mere religion), we find our lives being saved. Saved from whatever limited and limiting definitions of life, to the source of endless, everlasting, abundant life.

There are many accounts in the Bible of people who chose to eat this bread. Guess what? It worked! We are here today because it works. The question of the hour, though: is it working for you?

Think…

1. How’s your relationship to the Bread of Life? Are you full or hungry?
2. Do you treat Jesus like a religion – something to do to keep God on your side? Or do you treat Jesus as the author, teacher, modeler, and provider of the Way that leads to relationship with God?
3. How does your life validate or repudiate your answers above?
4. How is your influence affecting those under your care?