Bread of Life

This morning we awoke to several inches of snow on the ground. Since most of the outside winter preparation work is complete, I decided it was time to start baking bread. I learned to bake bread from my father in the summer of 1994. Lozanne and I were visiting my parents in Victoria, British Columbia as we so often did when my parents were still alive. I know this from the laminated instructions and recipe that I wrote down in my daytimer on Thursday, August 4, 1994. My father was seventy-six years old that summer and his day long lesson is one of my most vivid memories of his senior years. In his retirement, my father had taken to baking bread according the recipe used by his mother, my grandmother.

Bread is not a very complex food. It consists of flour ground from grain, water, oil, salt, sugar and perhaps yeast. I know very well what is in a loaf of bread because I bake bread on a regular basis during the winter months. I enjoy baking it. We enjoy eating it. There is a very special aroma that fills the house when bread is in the oven. I believe that home made bread satisfies an emotional need within us and has for many centuries. Reading and following a recipe for baking bread is usually not sufficient to bake good bread. Some training is required. Actions like deciding what is lukewarm, proper kneading of the dough and recognizing when the dough is ready at several stages in the process are just as important as the mixing of the amounts of ingredients.

This morning, as I was doing the heavy work of mixing and kneading the dough, I thought of the words of Jesus in John 6: 35.

35 And Jesus said to them, "I am the bread of life. He who comes to Me shall never hunger, and he who believes in Me shall never thirst.

What did Jesus mean when He said he was the bread of Life? As often happens in the word of God, the simplest of things offer the most profound of truths. To understand the significance of what Jesus said, we have to try to think like we are in the first century. Bread, in modern western society, although a prized commodity, is often thought of as something to complement a meal. During the ministry of Jesus, bread was more often than not the main course of a meal. In the first century, grain was the storable miracle food that could sustain life from day to day. It was harvested in the summer and stored for use over the winter months. It required no refrigeration and no preservatives. It simply had to be kept dry in grain or flour form and freezing would not even harm it. Without bread to sustain you in history, your life was over. The Lord’s Prayer, probably the most famous prayer in the western world, includes the petition, “Give us our daily bread”.

When He said, “I am the bread of life”, Jesus was speaking to a first century Jewish audience. How I wish I could have been there to hear just how he stated that very clear sentence. Verbal language is always so much more revealing than the written word. When Jesus referred to bread, all present knew He was talking about the most significant and important aspect of their very survival. Bread would have been so very important to this audience. Indeed it was an absolute necessity to their way of life. When we read that Jesus is bread, we know that He is making a comparison of Himself to something that is quite simply life sustaining. It couldn’t be any more important with lasting significance to all of us. We simply can’t do without it.

We simply can’t do without Him. Jesus follows verse 35 with another simple verse. If we desire everlasting life, we simply cannot do without Him.

40 "And this is the will of Him who sent Me, that everyone who sees the Son and believes in Him may have everlasting life; and I will raise him up at the last day."

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