Living Bread

Living Bread :     Sermon by John Bradley

John 6:51      ‘I am the living bread that has come down from heaven; if anyone eats this bread, he will live for ever. The bread which I shall give is my own flesh, given for the life of the world.’

If you have followed the Bible readings for the past few Sundays, the theme running through them is bread. First we had the feeding of five thousand with five loaves and two fishes. Last Sunday we had manna in the wilderness and in today’s Gospel reading, Jesus is saying that he is the living bread.

First today we heard from the Old Testament. Elijah has just had a literal mountain top experience. On top of Mount Carmel he has seen with his own eyes the mighty victory of the God of Israel. But now the threat of Queen Jezebel has thrown him into despair and depression. He runs away into the wilderness and just wants to curl up and die. But God hasn’t finished with him yet and the first step of his recovery is to eat some bread.

Every time we pray the Lord’s Prayer we ask God to give us this day our daily bread but we live in a land where up to one third of the bread purchased is dumped when it could be eaten. At the same time, half a million people rely on food banks.  But the good news is that the bread of life, the true bread that gives life with a capital ‘L’, life in all its fullness that is so strong it can survive even death, is free.  It’s not cheap but it remains, as it has always been, absolutely free.  You can’t buy it, you can’t earn it and you can’t deserve it.  All you can do is accept it and enjoy it. ( to read more, click on the title)

But your appetite for living bread can be ruined by too much junk food. Ernesto reminded us last Sunday of the first verse of Psalm 23: The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want, or in the Good News Bible ‘The Lord’s my Shepherd, I have everything I need.’ That is not what the suppliers of junk food want. About forty years ago I heard an interesting talk by the chief poultry buyer for Marks & Spencer. He said that they defined quality control as a repeat purchase. In other words, their aim was that the customer would be so satisfied with their purchase that they would gladly buy the same again. That is not like the subtle consumerism which surrounds us today. Advertisers go to great lengths to try to make us dissatisfied with what we have, creating artificial appetites for what we don’t need and can’t afford. The brave new world they are fabricating has no place for loyalty or self-restraint. Here is the latest thing you need to be a fulfilled person! Don’t worry if you can’t afford it; here, have another credit card! Of course, it is all false. It is God who so loved the whole world – including you – that he gave his only son so that whoever puts their trust in him should not perish in hopeless futility but receive the free gift of life that is total fulfilment. It is Jesus who said that whoever comes to him will never be hungry, and whoever believes in him will never be thirsty. (John 6:35)

Another word for this living bread is salvation.  Long ago before traffic noise became deafening and crowds became suspicious, one way of passing on the good news about the living bread was to announce it in the open air.  One day a group of us went to Sheffield and a friend of mine from Glasgow got up on the back of a lorry and announced: ‘Everybody wants salvation!  The English want salvation because they can talk about it; the Welsh want salvation because they can sing about it; the Irish want salvation because they can fight about it; and the Scots want salvation because it’s FREE!!’  In case you think that was a total waste of time or too embarrassing for words, let me say that afterwards I got chatting with a young man who just happened to be passing by and we ended up praying together and he took a big bite of the bread of life that day.

The trouble with preaching, or any kind of public speaking, is that there is a difference between what you think you’ve said and what people think they’ve heard.  I’ve been caught out more than once.  But so was Jesus.  When he pointed to his own body and said ‘destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up again’, people didn’t get it and thought he was being a terrorist and threatening to knock down Herod’s Temple in Jerusalem which they were so proud of.  It was the same when he spoke about receiving salvation as being like eating his flesh and drinking his blood.  If people today find that language offensive, so did the original hearers.

We used to sing hymns such as

There is a fountain filled with blood drawn from Immanuel’s veins

And sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains!

But today that would be dismissed as ‘slaughterhouse religion.’  Especially in a sophisticated city like this, apart from the vegetarians, 99% of meat-eaters have never seen an animal slaughtered, let alone slaughtered one for themselves, so it’s no wonder we’re squeamish.  The early Church appeared from the outside to be some kind of secret society.  When people heard snatches of Christian language such as worshipping the Son of God by eating his flesh and drinking his blood, it’s not surprising that some thought that these strange and dangerous people practiced child sacrifice and cannibalism.

My old headmaster had an expression, ‘what I mean is what I meant you to understand by what I told you!’  So what did Jesus mean us to understand by this shocking language?  He clearly wasn’t advocating cannibalism but he was pointing to a relation to him as close as we have to that which we eat and drink.  Behind the expression ‘you are what you eat’, lies the fact that the only part of the world around us which actually becomes part of us is our food.

I find it interesting that this passage, which is central when we try to understand what is happening when we celebrate Holy Communion, is found in the Fourth Gospel which is the only one not to have an account of the Last Supper.  We have debated endlessly what exactly Jesus meant by ‘this is my body given for you’ and what happens when we repeat those words today.  But whatever Jesus thought he said, I think what his disciples thought they heard was ‘this is me… for you!’  This shows us the second key fact about the living bread: not only is it free, it is also costly.  Some eighty years ago Dietrich Bonhoeffer was writing that grace is free but not cheap.  He struggled and challenged the Church in the face of the hideous corruption of Nazism to proclaim costly grace, not cheap grace.

‘Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church. We are fighting today for costly grace. Costly grace is the Gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the Cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.  Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of His Son: “you were bought at a price,” and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us. Above all, it is grace because God did not reckon His Son too dear a price to pay for our life, but delivered Him up for us. Costly grace is the Incarnation of God.’

Just as the Hebrews in the wilderness found it hard to let go and trust God to supply His special bread one day at a time, we too find it difficult.  It’s much easier to work things out for ourselves and then call on God to help us when we run out or when things go wrong.  So which is it going to be: the living bread of trusting in Jesus and allowing his love to flow through us or the junk food of cheap grace religion which will soon grown stale and mouldy and in any case won’t satisfy you for long?  And if anyone asks you what all that has to do with the price of bread, now you know!