Eat this bread

“Eat this bread” John 6:56-69

Sunday 22 August 2021, 8am Eucharist | Revd Catherine Edenborough

Sara Miles, the former restaurant critic and journalist, turned food pantry manager and lay minister, writes in her memoir, Take This Bread:

“One early, cloudy morning when I was forty-six, I walked into a church, ate a piece of bread, took a sip of wine. A routine Sunday activity for tens of millions of Americans — except that up until that moment I'd led a thoroughly secular life, at best indifferent to religion, more often appalled by its fundamentalist crusades. This was my first communion. It changed everything. Eating Jesus, as I did that day to my great astonishment, led me against all my expectations to a faith I'd scorned and work I'd never imagined. The mysterious sacrament turned out to be not a symbolic wafer at all, but actual food — indeed, the bread of life. In that shocking moment of communion, filled with a deep desire to reach for and become part of a body, I realized what I'd been doing with my life all along was what I was meant to do: feed people.”

She describes how eating the bread in communion that day transformed her life and work. She went on to work for the church and set up food pantries around the city of San Francisco. The act of taking communion set off a train of events in her life that she would never have anticipated.

Her surprise at the experience of her first communion echoes the nature of the gospel passage this morning. The shocking news Jesus has been delivering to the Jews through the second half of John 6 is that he is the bread of life – the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever, and - most shockingly of all - the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.

This is a whole step-change from the manna in the wilderness. The food the Israelites were given during their years in wilderness sustained them physically, but still they died. Now Jesus tells them that eating his flesh means they will never die. No wonder they go on to argue amongst themselves about how he could possibly say that and find it so difficult to accept.

Three aspects of this that seem important this morning: first, this living bread transforms us – body and soul. “The words I have spoken to you are spirit and life,” he says. This means that our faith is not something we can practise

from the neck up alone. We so often see it that way. It is easy and tempting to keep our faith contained within an intellectual box - to say yes to God with our minds, believe it fully in our heads, but somehow avoid truly embracing the life that we are offered, because we want to stay in control. If we do that, we miss out on so much of what God wants to give us. We experience only in part the life in all its fullness that God wants us to know.

Second, this living bread Jesus is talking about satisfies ALL our hungers. This is the opposite of the manna, and the food we eat every day, which fills us up for a while and then we feel hungry again – much like a Chinese meal can do – after feeling stuffed at the time, you feel hungry again a few hours later. This bread Jesus offers is not a temporary fix; yes, we need to keep coming back to receive it, and in doing so it feeds our souls and stays there, the truths that free us creating a bank of spiritual goodness inside, which resources us and feeds us continually.

Third, this hunger we experience for God is actually a response to God’s desire and hunger for us. It is a mutual thing. Our spiritual hunger is put there by God and our seeking after God is a result of his work within us. As we let our hunger for God takes its course and speak to us, we find that God leads us gently into the life that he promises us.

This is not a God who is distant but who longs to know us in the most personal sense, wanting to commune with us body and soul, and reach into the intimate parts of our lives. It can feel challenging. It is a physical and therefore potentially a messy business - not neat and tidy, with a beginning and an end we can predict. Not being in control can feel rather uncomfortable. We have to accept and deal with the messiness of our own lives and that of our brothers and sisters in Christ too.

But this discomfort is all part of bringing us alive. As we eat the bread of life over and over again, we find ourselves transformed, our hearts full and we desire more of the same.

So as we come to receive communion this morning, let us be open to the transforming power of this bread.

Amen