The vagaries of life being what they are, it so happened that I was in the church kitchen for a portion of time yesterday, helping some children to mix, and then try to form, small, flat rounds of dough, which I then cooked on the top of the stove. It was a horrifically sticky mess, and hard work for the children. Getting the dough to stick to itself and not to your own fingers seemed a monumental task. Some children got the knack, and managed rounds that puffed up nicely in the pan. Others ended up imprisoned by dough, and frustrated.
I flitted back and forth between the children and the stove, adding more flour everywhere, trying to encourage the downcast. For many weeks I’d been sitting with these same children, asking a series of hard questions–hard for anyone who comes close to Jesus and discovers that the priorities of one’s quiet ordinary life are turned upside down. In John 6 Jesus provides bread for thousands of people, lazing about on the grass, and it’s so delicious–and such a rest to have it just appear in your hand rather than casting the seed, harvesting the wheat, separating the chaff, grinding the grain, and then struggling along with a lot of unmanageable dough–that the people cry out, “evermore give us this bread”. John tells us that they wanted to make him king.
And you’d think, the tang and delight of this perfect bread still lingering on the tongue, that Jesus would have been happy that the people wanted him, and wanted this bread. After all, isn’t following Jesus about depending on him? Not wandering away to drink from other fonts and eat some other bread? But Jesus ruins it all and says, “I am the bread of life,” and the people shudder and back away to disappear into their ordinary lives. Because free bread is delicious, wherever it comes from, but Jesus is meddlesome, and sometimes bitter to taste, and is always ruining the boundaries and distinctions that are so necessary for human happiness.
“Unless the grain falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone,” says Jesus in John a while later, “but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” And not being a farmer, or even a very decent gardener, it is hard for me to conceptualize the totality of Jesus’ identification of himself with the bread. He isn’t just the bread. He is the seed that is cast out by the sower, falling onto good and bad soil. He is the seed that falls into the ground and dies. His kingdom is like a woman who takes three measures of flour, and mixes into it leaven, or sin, so that the pure leaven-less, sinless bread of the Passover is exchanged for the loaf full of leaven at Pentecost. The kingdom of God grows and spreads out over the whole world, but imperceptibly, like the leaven raising up dough. You can’t see it with the naked eye. The leaven is mixed in and then two hours later you come back and it’s all puffed and enormous. Jesus’ visible body, the church, is a growing, expanding, jumbling together of the believer and unbeliever that reaches over the whole earth. In other words, there isn’t any portion of the life sustaining process by which the world eats and is filled that Jesus doesn’t associate himself with.
Why would he call himself something like bread? I kept asking this of the children and they would smile at me and ask how much longer before the class is over. You have to eat bread to live, and you have to drink water or you die. But Jesus wants us to feed on him, as if, by so doing, we might live forever.
But feeding on him is a troublesome business. Once you’ve eaten something, you can’t take it back out of yourself. It joins itself to your cells and your chemistry and your bloodstream. If you eat a piece of bread, you can’t get it back again and reconstitute it so that it looks again as it did. But don’t be confused by the imagery. Jesus, joining himself to you, doesn’t disappear into the jumble of your mind and heart and body. The power of his life works its way out in you. His kind of bread, his kind of sustenance overtakes the leaven-laden nature of your mind and heart. Once he’s in there, you can’t separate yourself from him, no matter how hard you may try, no matter how painful it becomes. The crowds were right to be cautious, when Jesus told them he was the bread.
It’s a mess, slewing flour around to make bread. I left the mess and took all the bread upstairs for communion. And when I came back, the kitchen had been totally cleaned, by whom I know not. And so I came home and collapsed in a chair, and wondered some more about God’s mercy, and what kind of a God he is to liken himself to something so plain and necessary, but something that, when I can’t have it, I feel like I might as well die.
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