I am the living bread

In the Soviet Union all shops were owned by the state. Shopfronts did not bear the names of companies or individual proprietors, and most of them only had one word in large letters – it might be Clocks,  Knitwear or Shoes.  It was the simplest form of advertising, almost stark in its simplicity. What you see is what you get.

Out in the sticks, that starkness and simplicity survived the collapse of Communism for some years. I remember in the year 2000 spotting two adjacent shops in the main square of a provincial village. One was labelled Books and the other Bread. I pointed them out to my host, a Russian writer and a devout Orthodox believer. “That’s all we need” was his response.

Today’s Gospel has the same kind of starkness and simplicity. Jesus says:

“I am the living bread”

Some of the starkness of those words is lost on us because bread is only part of the rich and varied diet that we are privileged to enjoy and we have lost some of that sense of its being “the staff of life”, though there are contemporary cultures which preserve that. The Arabic word for bread, aish, also means life.

Jesus forcefully identifies himself with what was the main source of nutrition for his hearers, and goes on to say something equally stark and simple:

“Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life”

This language shocked many of those who heard him. Some who had followed Jesus deserted him as a result. The words still have the power to shock and to puzzle. Jesus was, however, speaking within one thread of the Jewish tradition, as today’s reading from Proverbs reminds us. Wisdom invites people to a feast, and the people who are invited are those who are simple, even those without sense:

“Come, eat of my bread
and drink of the wine I have mixed.”

That passage from Proverbs helps to remind us of one of the most important themes in today’s Gospel – for what Jesus is doing here is to issue an invitation, and invitation to participate in his life and thus to participate in the life of God.

But there is more to this passage than a simple invitation, for Jesus is also showing  what God is like and what participation in the life of God means. What you see in Jesus is what you get by entering into a relationship with God.

By speaking of himself in terms of food and drink that can be consumed, Jesus is telling us that God is completely free from the defensiveness and individualism from which we humans, broken as we are, suffer. God’s self-bestowing in creating and sustaining the universe is absolute and complete. God in Christ shares God’s self and God’s love without limit or reservation, a sharing and a giving which involve the laying down of his life. Those disciples who heard Jesus say

“Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life”

and who continued to follow him cannot fully have understood what he meant, and would only come to understand it in the light of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection.

In his simple, stark invitation, Jesus is teaching that eternal life comes through accepting the invitation to be nourished and transformed by him. Though this requires a personal response from each of us, it is not an invitation to enjoy a closer and deeper companionship with God as individuals. And it’s worth remembering that our words “companion” is derived from two Latin words which mean “with bread” – companionship is literally the sharing of bread. To be nourished by Christ, as we are in the Eucharist, is to be drawn into companionship with one another as well as companionship with him, and it is the companionship that is transformative, for it enables us to experience something of eternal life in the here and now. Behind the stark and apparently simple challenge of Jesus’ words is a profound wisdom, the insight that what truly nourishes and sustains us is our relationships, the relationship with God made possible by the Incarnation and the right relationships with other people that become possible when we acknowledge that they too are children of God.