“How Bread Changed Everything”
August 11, 2024
John 6:35, 41–51
Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. Then the Jews began to complain about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” They were saying, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” Jesus answered them, “Do not complain among yourselves. No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me; and I will raise that person up on the last day. It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father. Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
In 2016, Netflix produced a series called Cooked, based on food-writer Michael Pollan’s book by the same name. For more than thirty years, Pollan has been writing about the places where the human and natural worlds intersect: on our plates, in our farms and gardens, and in our minds.
A basic theme of Cooked centers on how cooking transforms food and shapes our world through the four basic elements of fire, water, earth, and air.
Although the series was full of surprises regarding the history of food, it is fairly easy to imagine how fire, water, and even earth create the food of myriad human cultures. But air? Pollan admitted at the outset that “air” as transformation is the most mysterious, perhaps the most spiritual, of all the ways in which we cook. Despite the mystery of it, “air” has also given us the most basic of all food: bread.
About 6,000 years ago bread came about as a bit of an accident when, as Pollan says, “some observant Egyptian must have noticed that a bowl of porridge, perhaps one off in a corner that had been neglected, was no longer quite so inert. In fact, it was hatching bubbles from its surface and slowly expanding, as if it were alive. The dull paste had somehow been inspired: The spark of life had been breathed into it. And when that strangely vibrant bowl of porridge — call it dough — was heated in an oven, it grew even larger, springing up as it trapped the expanding bubbles in an airy, yet stable, structure that resembled a sponge.” (Cooked, p. 207)
Bread. With bread, everything changed. We learned how to turn grasses into food human beings could eat, store, and transport. We learned how to cultivate grains and manage fields, how to harvest and mill and leaven and bake. We created agriculture. We developed entire communities — entire civilizations — devoted to the making of bread.
Egyptians call bread aish, a word that in Arabic means “life.” No wonder that in Arabic the words bread and life are the same word. And in cultures where the words are different, bread is so basic that the term is often used for food in general, and later, when modern economics were born, we even nicknamed money, bread!
And Jesus said, “I am the bread of life.”
Just the day before he said these words, Jesus and the disciples had fed the multitude with only five loaves of bread. The disciples had handed Jesus those few loaves, and after they quieted the crowd, “Jesus took the loaves, and gave thanks.”
He probably prayed the ancient Jewish prayer the one traditionally used before a meal:
Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the Universe,
Who brings forth bread from the earth.
From: myjewishlearning.com/article/shabbat-blessings
The bread is broken and shared, and as the story goes, all were fed, fully fed, satisfied. The disciples gather up the leftovers, and there were twelve whole baskets of remains from the original five loaves.
Although the text does not say so, Jesus likely prayed again over those fragments. Jewish tradition, based on Deuteronomy 8:10, directed God’s people to pray after meals. And, most particularly, they were to pray this prayer when bread had been served:
Sovereign God of the universe, we praise You:
Your goodness sustains the world.
You are the God of grace, love, and compassion,
the Source of bread for all who live;
for Your love is everlasting.
In Your great goodness, we need never lack for food;
You provide food enough for all.
We praise You, O God, Source of food for all who live.
From: theloveofgod.proboards.com/thread/3930/deuteronomy-birkat-hamazon-blessing-after
Jesus’ words, “I am the bread of life,” fit into a larger story. Jesus has set a table on the hillside, where there was little bread and abundant bread appeared. There were blessings and thanks, and all were fed. This is Jesus’ miracle of abundance, the echo of the ancient story of manna in the wilderness, where God’s people were fed real food, a food that sustained them when lost in the desert.
This is God’s long dream for humankind — that we all might live without lack, that our world might not be one of scarcity, but one of abundance. At the beginning of the creation story, Adam and Eve lived amid abundance, where the earth brought forth its harvests, where hunger was unknown, where the tilling and keeping of the garden was not a labor, but a joy. But Adam and Eve chose wrongly, and one of the consequences was that abundance receded, the earth yielded bounty less readily, nature was disordered, and bread became a backbreaking chore.
As a result, as Diana Butler Bass writes in her blog Sunday Musings, our ancestors created towns, cities, and civilizations that controlled bread. Scarcity, not abundance became the by-word. Kings and pharaohs hoarded bread, distributing it at their whim, reaping fortunes through it and even oppressing their people by withholding it. The garden faded in memory, and the toil and terror of empire took its place. And bread, the staff of life, became a commodity in a struggle for wealth and power.
Jesus said, “I am the bread of life.” And then he added, “Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”
To our modern ears we think that Jesus sounds narrow, exclusive. Only those who believe in this bread and eat of this bread will be saved. But that is not the point at all. Jesus is reminding his followers that bread is for everyone. That God is the Source of Abundance; the One who promises that in the Age to Come no ruler, no Caesar would control the bread. Instead, there will be bread — bread for all, bread that will not lead to death, but abundant bread, the bread of life. Jesus tells us to pray for our daily bread, a radical vision if ever there was one — that bread shall be at the table, every table, every day, the gift of God.
And then, Jesus says, that Age, the Age of the Bread of Life, has arrived, “For the bread of God is the one descending out of heaven and imparting life to the cosmos!” (John 6:33). Bread shall no longer be a tool of empire, a product of toil, the reminder of slavery and sin. Bread will again be as it was intended, the life of the cosmos.
Bread is real food and bread is the spiritual food of the Age to Come. In the same way that actual bread is transformed by air, so Jesus’ bread is transformed by the Spirit. The bread of life descends from heaven; it is cooked with spiritual leaven. In another Gospel, Jesus says: “The Kingdom of Heaven is like the yeast a woman used in making bread. Even though she put only a little yeast in three measures of flour, it permeated every part of the dough.” (Matthew 13:33)
As an inert porridge becomes infused with life, its dough rising, so the cosmos, now sluggish in sin, is surely, slowly being yeasted. The bread of life has come, it sparks and bubbles among us, the table is set, and the blessing proclaimed. This is the wisdom of God, the miracle of Jesus: that all will be fed, that the ills of a world based on scarcity are passing, and that the time of abundance is here.
Prayer: Giver of All Good Gifts by Walter Brueggemann, 1933 -, in his book Prayers for a Privileged People
You are the God who feeds and nourishes. You are the God who assures that we have more than enough, and we do not doubt that you satisfy the desire of every living thing.
Even in such an assurance, however, we scramble for more food. After we have filled all our baskets with manna, we seek a surplus-enough education to plan ahead, enough power to protect our supply, enough oil to assure that protection.
And in the midst of that comes your word, that we share bread and feed the hungry, even to the least and so to you.
We mostly keep our bread for ourselves, our neighbors, and our friends.
It does not occur to us often, to feed our enemies, to share your bounty with those who threaten us.
We do not often remember to break vicious cycles of hostility by free bread, by free water, by free wine, by free milk.
Until we remember that you are the giver of all good gifts, ours to enjoy ours to share.
Stir us by your spirit beyond fearful accumulation toward outrageous generosity, that giving bread to others makes for peace, that giving drink to others makes for justice, that giving and sharing opens the world and assures abundance for all.
We pray this even as we ponder the gift of your Son whom we ingest as bread and wine, and tasting, find ourselves forgiven and renewed.
Feed us till we want no more!
