Dining on the Bread of Life
John 6:35,41-51
The Taste of Great Bread
There is bread
and then
there is bread. Plain bread is just plain. The loaves of plain bread
are mass produced in large kettles. Wheat, water, seasoning and
artificial flavoring, coloring and preservatives are combined and
stirred into an impersonal relationship. Bakers of plain bread watch
the loaves from a distance and remain detached. Extra potent yeast is
stirred into the dough to add more fluff. The bread is soft and
moist. It almost melts in your mouth. But bread should be chewed and
savored. It should be made of whole grains from the finest fields of
Montana. When you enter the store that makes great bread you
instantly know it. The fragrance of the freshly baked loaves fills
the building. Your mouth begins to water. The smell alone generates a
craving to taste the sweetness of the loaf.
You will also
notice a
difference between the people who shop for plain bread and the ones
who want to dine on great bread. Purchasers of plain bread are in a
hurry. Reading the label that contains the nutritional value of a
squishy loaf delays them from completing their litany of errands.
They cannot be bothered. They are bargain hunters. The price tag is
the only label they read.
In stores that
make great bread, you will find a eclectic array of people—business
people in suits, multi-pierced high-school students on lunch break,
a mom with a toddler in hand, a bike messenger, and even a homeless
man. But they all
are willing to patiently stand in line to purchase their favorite
loaf—handcrafted, whole grain, crusty, and exotically
flavored. Each slice is a feast worthy of royalty. Once you have
enjoyed a slice of bread from such a loaf, you will regret every bite
of less worthy slices. This is dining pleasure at its finest. Stores
that make great bread have taken one of the most basic commodities of
society to a new level in dining pleasure.
Bread as the basic component of a meal is not new. It is
one of
the oldest known elements of a meal. Learning to grow and harvest
grain was an important step in the transition from a nomadic life to
an agrarian society. In ancient times bread was fundamental to the
family's diet. Throughout Israel's history, peasants would go several
days without tasting meat, but a piece of bread was distributed with
each meal. Crop failure would produce disastrous results. Multiple
years of drought finally forced the patriarch Judah to send his sons
to Egypt to buy grain. The land of the Pharaohs had storehouses
filled because God had given a dream to Pharaoh that only one man
could interpret—the son that Judah thought was dead, Joesph. The
lost brother was reunited with his family because of the need for
grain to make bread. When Israel wandered in the desert and could not
grow their own grain, God provide food for them each morning called
manna. It had a dough-like consistency and they referred to it as
heavenly bread.
Jesus used the term as a spiritual metaphor to tell us
many things
about our understanding and relationship with him. However, unlike
the bakeries that specialize in exotic breads and offer several
varsities, Jesus said “I am the bread of life.” He is telling his
disciples that their eternal survival, they salvation is solely
dependent on a relationship with him. In God's culinary cook book
there is only one loaf of bread that brings salvation.
The Essential Diet
The exclusivity of this claim is constantly being
challenged in
this age. Critics argue that there are many spiritual gurus,
shamans, teachers, prophets and miracle workers who offer much wisdom
and guidance in spiritual matters. They should not be dismissed
because there are many roads to God. Others have argued that Jesus
never made such a claim. This is the thesis of the recently popular
book, The Da Vinci Code. In
the early chapters, Langdon, a Harvard historian is accused of
murder. Sophia, a French police cryptographer comes to his aid
because she knows that he did not kill one of the men he is accused
of killing, her grandfather. After barely escaping the dragnet that
the French police surrounded the Paris branch of the Depository Bank
of Zurich , they flee to the estate of a leading expert on the quest
for the Holy Grail, Sir Leigh Teabing. This Englishman aristocrat
explains to Sophia that over 80 gospels were considered for inclusion
into the New Testament but the ones chosen had been previously
altered by the disciples after Jesus' death. These altered texts
(Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) present Jesus as divine while the
unaltered (The Gospel of Phillip, Mary Magdalene, and Thomas,
sometimes knows as the Lost Gospels) are the more reliable
manuscripts. They present a more human Jesus whose romantic pursuits
with Mary Madeline produced a child.
The implications of this
metaphor are
staggering, even beyond the ancestral claim. If Jesus was just a man
then he could not have claimed superiority over any other great
religious teacher. He would be just one among many important
religious teachers. Also, the four gospels, may be interesting
reading but they should not be treated as authoritative because they
present a distorted shadow of Jesus' true teaching. Instead more time
should be spent reading the unaltered gospels that present the real
Jesus, the Messiah who is in tune with the feminine dimension of his
personality,
Time does not permit me to
throughly
shred this argument into tiny pieces of confetti. I would need to
present many technical components that would bore you to sleep.
Therefore, I must limit my rebuttal to one theme—the reliability of
the manuscripts. Even this is a difficult topic to present in a
sermon. I can see some heads nodding already but give yourself a
pinch if you find your thoughts wandering because this is extremely
important. It strikes at the heart of the faith. How do we know that
these are really the words of Jesus. How do we know that Jesus
himself said, I am the bread of life? How do we know that some other
person wrote those words and put them into Jesus mouth?
Faced with scores of
manuscripts about
the life of Jesus, the leaders of the church gathered together to
determine what should be in the canon. In this usage, canon means the
authentic works of God. The leaders of the church tried to determine
what books were inspired by the Holy Spirit and what books were the
creation of highly imaginative authors? The first step that these
leaders took was to read the literature of the second generation of
church leaders. These were men who had been discipled by the original
disciples. For example, one church leader was named Ireneaus. He was
mentored by the apostle John. The leaders of the 3rd
Century tried to identify all the verses Ireneaus used from others
sources. By doing this, the church leaders discovered that the
writings that were most frequently quoted were—Matthew, Mark, Luke
and John. These church leaders concluded that it stood to reason that
the most frequently used gospels were more likely to be more accurate
accounts, since they were written by eye witnesses. The other
supposedly, “gospels” were branded as heretical and discarded.
What does this tell us? It
tells us
that when we pick up the gospels from the New Testament we are
reading the most accurate record of the words of Jesus. And if John
records that Jesus said, “I am the bread of Life,” then we should
spend more time considering the implications of that profound truth
than arguing about whether they are really the words of Jesus. In
those words, “I am the bread of life,” Jesus makes a very bold
claim.
As bread is an essential
component of a healthy diet, so our Lord is essential for salvation.
We can survive for a few days on other tantalizing delights but
without a loaf of basic bread, we will suffer malnutrition. However,
the sad reality for all of us is that we spend more time on other
activities than dining upon the bread of life. Compare how much time
you spend surfing the Internet instead of reading Scripture. Consider
how much time you watch television rather than read. Add up the hours
you spend on your hobby whether it be golf, stamp collecting, skiing,
fishing, or tennis. All these activities are fun and exciting but
they do not enrich the soul. They also shape our attitudes and
beliefs. The Internet and television thrive on advertising. We are
bombarded with ads to encourage us to put ourselves first; to indulge
in the finer pleasures of life; to spend freely and worry about the
consequences later. These messages contradict the words of Jesus when
he said, “If anyone would come after me, he must deny
himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. (Luke 9:23)”.
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