Speaker: Pastor Caleb Schrock-Hurst
Bible Passage: John 6:32-36, 41-60
Summary: Jesus is our bread of life, providing sustenance and meaning to our lives. When we celebrate communion — and really every time we eat — we should remember God’s grace for us and that God wants us to follow Jesus’s example of serving and loving others.
To start this morning, I want to share two interesting instances of wordplay: one from a theology book, and one from NPR.
I was reading a book called an eco-activist testament, a book of reflections on combatting climate change as a Christian, and the author used an interesting verb: he that we should seek to conspire to preserve the natural world; conspire, apparently, comes from the latin word for ‘together,’ con, and spire, breathe. When we conspire to make the world better, we breathe together — something we as Christians should do while remembering that God’s spirit, God’s breathe, is within us.
The other instance of wordplay, from NPR, is about a french word. In French, the word for ‘friend’ has an interesting literal meaning — do we have any french speakers in the house? [Does anyone know the french word for friend? Sorry for my french pronunciation, but yes, copan] And, any guesses about what co-pan literally means?
Co, like our english co, for together or with, and pan, bread — our friends are who we share our bread with. If Jesus is our chosen and mutually affirmed bread of life, we become friends, copan, and conspirators, as we share bread and spaces together as we eat and drink at Jesus’ table, recognizing that God’s creation is all around us; that God shows up in the bread and wine at communion, but is always with us every time we “break bread” together.
Today, we’ll be talking about how Jesus being the bread of life does three things — first, it sustains us; second, we need to find ways to celebrate this fact and to remember Jesus in our lives; and finally that Jesus’ sustains us for a purpose: so that we can go into the world to do good.
You might be correctly asking yourself, though — what does any of this have to do with wordplay?
Well, in addition to starting with wordplay just because I find it fun and meaningful, I chose to start this way because we shouldn’t forget that words have meaning and associations that we sometimes miss or forget, and even more so in translation — bread, for example, is a simple word, but it is loaded with cultural and contextual meaning that we can unpack as we think about Jesus’s comments here. In fact, before we get to that, though, there is some significant wordplay at play in Jesus’s ‘I am’ statements we should think about, and also even in Jesus’s own name.
Jesus is the Greek form of the Hebrew name Yehoshua — a name we’ve more directly received this name as Joshua in English. But what we may miss is that Yehoshua is extremely close to the tetragrammaton — the Y-H-W-H, what we Christians pronounce as Yahweh, or Jehovah, the name of God in the old testament. Joshua emerged as a hebrew name taking the first two letters of the tetragrammaton and adding ‘shua’ — which means saves. So, Jesus’s very name ties him to the idea of providing salvation and to God the father.
The “i am” statements also tie Jesus directly to God the father in another way — when God first reveals himself to Moses at the burning bush, he reveals his name Yahweh, but also says something else: when Moses asks who God is, God responds, I am who I am — and if anyone in Egypt asks you who I am, tell them I AM has sent you. ‘I am’ functions as another core name for God — the great I am.
So — when we get to the book of John, and Jesus is making these ‘I am’ statements, he is doing two things: first, helping us better understand God the creator of the old testament, clarifying and enlightening us to God’s core characteristics; and secondly, Jesus is claiming to be, miraculously, one with this same God, who, above all and through all and in all, is. No wonder some of Jesus’ disciples thought this was a hard teaching — claiming to be one with God the father is a bold claim, but it is who Jesus was.
Ok — Before we go any further, I want to quickly look at the other six ‘I am’ statements from John that Tig has led us through the past two months. Then, we’ll look closer at ‘I am the bread of life.’
But — one other note before we dive in — I’m using the common english bible today for all my quotations, and you heard our passage for today in that translation already. Why? Because it’s the translation for the anabaptist bible; CEB was chosen because it’s a readable and simple translation. Where the NRSV has an 11th-grade reading level, the CEB has an 7th grade reading level — by using this translation, we can try and make the bible more accessible for ourselves and for others.
Ok — let’s quickly refresh our memory on the seven I am statements in John.
As you can see, due to a convoluted preaching schedule, we’re closing this series on the first I am statement! We’ll spend much more time here in a bit, but the main idea is that, just as bread sustains physical life, so Jesus sustains our lives; he is bread not just for Christians but for the whole world.
In John 8, we have “I am the light of the world.” The basic idea here is that Jesus offers himself as a guide to us, and to everyone.
In John 10, we have “I am the gate,” where Jesus promises to protect those who follow him, keeping out harmful things and allowing in good things.
This is followed almost immediately, in the same chapter, with “I am the good shepherd,” where Jesus commits to caring for us, despite us being merely sheep, who probably don’t understand everything that’s going on.
In John 11, we then have “I am the resurrection and the life,” which highlights God’s desire to give us life, both now and in the hereafter.
Then, in chapter 14, we have “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” which Pastor Tig preached on last week; I loved Tig’s message, highlighting that this text has often been used to hurt folks of other religions, when it should be used to motivate us as Christians to remember that Jesus is God, the best source we have to know what God is like. One of my favorite scriptures is on a related theme; Hebrews 1:1-3 — In the past, God spoke through the prophets to our ancestors in many times and many ways. In these final days, though, he spoke to us through a Son. God made his Son the heir of everything and created the world through him. The Son is the light of God’s glory and the imprint of God’s being. He maintains everything with his powerful message.”
The final ‘I am’ statement, then, is “I am the true vine.” Here, Jesus reminds us that we are all attached to Christ, and we owe our lives to him — we can resist this fact that we are rooted in Jesus’s way of love and mutuality, and try cut ourselves off from God’s intended way of love, or we can accept it, seek God as revealed by Jesus, and bear good fruit.
So — why recap these today? First, because if you’re like me, you don’t retain things when you only hear them once! Second, because reminders about who God is — a protector, a provider, a life-giver — these are beautiful, comforting reminders that we need with us as we navigate this confusing and broken world. And that’s not all — we need to remember these attributes of Jesus, because we want to be more like Jesus — this is what discipleship, the Christian walk, is all about.
This week, if you feel so inspired, pick one of these ‘I am’ statements, whichever one comforts or challenges you most, and find a way to make it a part of your routine for the week — write it on a piece of paper and carry it with you every day; find a way to display it somewhere in your home; memorize the passage it appears in. And do this both as a comfort and an aspiration — because scripture, marvelously, can sustain us and challenge us at the same time.
Ok — let’s turn to our passage for today, where Jesus dialogues with the crowd and makes his ‘I am the bread of life statement.’
It’s helpful to glance back at the events of the chapter before this and at the events earlier in the chapter, so we know what footing we’re on.
In the previous chapter, we have the story of Jesus meeting the woman at the well; and while Jesus doesn’t outright say to her that he is the water of life — aka, he doesn’t quite make an I am statement — very much at play in that story is that Jesus has, or is, the water of life, the Messiah, living water that we drink from and that satisfies our metaphorical thirst for justice and peace and meaning. Then, at the beginning of chapter six, we have the feeding of the five thousand, where Jesus miraculously turns only a few loaves of bread into enough to feed five thousand men and their families, with plenty of leftovers.
So, by the time we get to this dialogue, Jesus’ disciples — and the crowds who followed them around — had bread and water on their mind, and clearly knew about Jesus’s powers over nature; it’s in this context that Jesus says, “i am the bread of life.”
Of the seven “I am” statements of John, I think this is my favorite — because bread is such a rich metaphorical symbol. Food is the locus of so many discussions of culture, and bread is, at least historically, the heart of so many people’s diets — its food that travels well, that fills our stomachs, that sustains us; and this was very true for the poor people who followed Jesus. One of the innovations and successes of the Roman empire was their providing cheap, government-subsidized bread for the poor. For the first hearers of this ‘I am’ statement, Jesus was saying that he was the bread that sustained them and gave life — it should also remind us that God is the foundation that sustains us and gives us life and energy to go about our lives.
Also for the first listeners, bread was not some special dish — Jesus didn’t say he was the equivalent to thanksgiving turkey, he said he was bread — the baseline, everyday reality dish. In this way, by claiming to be the bread of life, Jesus is identifying with the ordinary, and the mundane, reminding us that God is with us in our daily activities, not just on special occasions. God is not only out there in high liturgy, or in special icons, or with us when we fast and pray, or on religious holidays like easter and Christmas — God is with us at all times, in the quotidian and borning; with us at breakfast, lunch, dinner, and even late-evening snack.
Two interesting problems quickly arise here, though — is Jesus talking about his body and blood metaphorically, or literally? And secondly, what about cultures where bread isn’t the main food source, or even a common dish?
Both these questions have been huge sources of theological controversy. The question of if these statements were metaphorical was a big part of the reformation, particularly in the guise of the debate over, seminary word alert, transubstantiation. Quite a few Christian traditions, from Catholicism to Lutheranism, believe that the bread and cup, when blessed with the words of communion, literally transform into the blood and body of Christ; we in the Anabaptist tradition, on the other hand, believe that communion is a memorial, and that, yes, Jesus is present during communion in the hearts of the gathered body, but that the elements symbolize Jesus body and blood; they aren’t transformed into them.
One wordplay tidbit here I can’t resist sharing — we all know the phrase hocus pocus, which we use as sort of a fill-in magic incantation. This phrase actually comes from a misheard part of the Latin mass, hoc est corpus meum — latin for ‘this is my body,’ the words of communion! Since everyday people didn’t speak latin, they just knew this moment of incantation was somehow magical, turning ordinary bread and wine into Jesus’s body and blood.
Ok — back to that second question — is true communion tied to bread and wine only, or, are other foods okay? For example, in cultures where the staple is rice, can we take communion with rice and green tea, or is Jesus only present in western-based wheat bread?
I am firmly in the camp that we need to share the idea of Jesus’s message within the culture people come from — and that Jesus is the ‘daily bread’ of the people, in whatever form that ‘daily bread’ takes in a given culture. This is sometimes called contextual communion — that Jesus’ centering his identity — his flesh — in bread and wine was because these were the two cheapest and most common forms of food and drink in that time and place. In fact, some of my friends serving with Virginia Mennonite Missions in Thailand do exactly this — celebrating communion with sticky rice and tea, the traditional food and drink of the rural Isan region.
But we can also practice contextualized communion in our own lives, here in North America. Pastor Phil Kniss, who just retired after 28 years at Park View Mennonite in Harrisonburg, in one of his final sermons, preached about his discipline of contextualized communion — that, at the beginning of meals with fellow Christians, he always raises a glass and states, simply: ‘we remember Jesus.’ While I don’t think this practice should replace our celebrations of more formal communion, I do think this might be a little of what Jesus was up to here — reminding us that he, the creator and sustainer of the universe, is present in every meal we eat, sustaining us, sending us to be agents of reconciliation the world; and we need to celebrate and remember this good now.
Now, we aren’t doing communion in any form this morning, and that’s fine — in fact, I think that fits well because I agree with Pastor Phil — every meal we eat together as Christians, be it together with our families at home, or together after church, these meals, not just the holy meal of communion, feature Jesus’s presence with us. In fact, I’d go so far as to say, if we trust the opening words of the book of John — that Jesus is the word, the logic of the universe, then in one sense Jesus is literally present, yes, in communion, but also whenever we eat. And, while we do care about getting it right, we shouldn’t get lost in these controversies, it is abundantly clear — Jesus wants his followers to eat together, and to know that he is present in the food and drink they know best.
On a much less theological level, eating creates powerful social bonds, as the french word for friend shows, because it’s very hard to hate people that you eat together with on a regular basis. The table provides such an important point of connection for people, be they people of different cultures, or different political persuasions — when we come together, sharing our food and drink, and reflecting on our lives together, God is always there. We may not always know what to do in the face of evil and hatred — but one tangible thing we can do is invite people to gather, give thanks together, share, and eat together.
Okay — as we wrap up this sermon, let’s think a little more about application: what does Jesus being the bread of life, and being present at communion and every meal we eat, mean for us, in the US, in 2024?
I want to bring in one more gospel text where Jesus talks about bread — when he is tempted by the devil. When Jesus has been out in the wilderness for forty days and forty nights, the first temptation he’s presented with is to turn stones into bread, and Jesus responds — man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. What does this scripture tell us in conversation with Jesus being the bread of life?
I think, first and foremost, it tells us not to push our analogies about bread too far — yes, we need bread to survive, but we do need to look at bread in a metaphorical sense too; we cannot survive merely on food; we also need meaning — Jesus doesn’t just sustain us as individuals and as communities for no reason; but he sustains us so that we can do his will.
This is an important fact that we can miss in our economic-centered world: economic success alone — bread alone — will not make us happy, neither as individuals, families, communities, or countries. Just surviving won’t fill us — placing financial success as the highest good, with religious meaning, belonging, and community as perhaps good things, but afterthoughts, is what has led, even though we live in the most abundant age in the history of the world, huge amounts of anxiety and fear and social dislocation, particularly in wealthy countries. We cannot live on bread alone — but we can live on the bread of Jesus, the mission of sharing the good news of Jesus; that we are loved, and are forgiven, and can live now in the kingdom of peace — because God is our protector and provider, where none will go hungry and all will be fed.
But of course — we still face hard and real questions en route to this vision. What do Jesus’s assurances about who he is mean in the face of war in Ukraine and Sudan, in Lebanon and Palestine? What do Jesus’s statements mean for our own country, facing up to an election that feels existential and wrapped in fear?
I don’t have all the answers — but I know I find comfort in the church as a community of belonging, of sitting together and mourning the brokenness, and of finding ways, large and small, to resist the evils of the world. When we remember God’s love for us and the world, we go out as symbols of hope for a better future — a future beyond war and hate and fear.
For our God’s way is the way of love — it is standing against the gods of nationalism, that place a few over the many; it is standing against the gods of unregulated wealth, that places the haves over the have nots; it is standing against the forces of death, proclaiming that we are moving towards life, and life to the fullest, for all people created in the image of God, and there is enough bread to go around.
Each day, and wherever we go, we can find ways to commemorate Jesus in big ways and in small — building friendships over meals, breaking bread together, growing bonds of hope and trust. We can always breathe deeply the air that God has created for us, and remember that we share this air with people of all tribes and races. And we can remember that Jesus is our bread of life — for God does not want us to simply eat, drink, and be merry, but to be his hands in feet in a world still in need of forgiveness.
Before I close, I want to briefly introduce the two response songs we’re going to sing together. The first, let us break bread together, was one of the main Christian songs of the African American church during the civil rights movement, reminding us that when we come together to celebrate communion — when we come together to humble ourselves before God — we are reminded of our mutual humanity, a humanity sustained by Jesus. We are all equal, regardless of race, or class, or gender, before God — and God knows us, loves us, and desires the best for all of us.
The second song is one that I wrote when contextualized communion was on my mind and some of Mennonite World conference was gathering at EMU for a conference. Through two verses, I try to cover a bunch of the staple foods and drinks of many countries of the world.
So — as we go this week, let’s celebrate Jesus, for he said — I am the bread of life. Remember: God is creating and sustaining you; may this bring you meaning, and gives you energy; may you be empowered to follow God, go into the world with joy, and purpose, and kindness. May we seek to serve our servant king, Jesus, who loves us, who shows up for us all around the world, guiding us in the way of life. Amen.
