I Am The Bread Of Life
I AM THE BREAD OF LIFE
September 10, 2000
Did you notice the food themes of the Introit and OT reading? The Psalmist says, “The eyes of all look to you, and you give them their food at the proper time.” The OT personifies wisdom who invites all who are simple and lack understanding to participate in her banquet. The call of the Gospel is an invitation to a feast, a banquet meal that gives life and understanding. Today’s Gospel draws us to see that this meal is a literal one centering in Christ, the bread from heaven. Many of the people who had been following Jesus turned away at this invitation to eat and drink the flesh and blood of Jesus. The same thing happens today.
I think an example from the terrible California earthquake of a few years ago will help us understand. A man was on his way to work in his new BMW when the quake hit. The man was seriously injured as his car dropped into a large crack in the earth. Crawling out of his car, he didn’t notice that his left arm had been severed at the elbow. He just stood staring at his new car and crying, “Oh, my Beemer, my Beemer.” A bystander who had witnessed the disaster said, “How can you be crying about your car? Don’t you realize that your arm has been cut off?” The man looked down in horror at his missing left arm and said, “Oh, my Rolex, my Rolex!”
As silly as it might sound, we are by nature just like that man. Our life can be in the condition of being cut off and still go unnoticed when our focus is on the mundane things of this world. Even in religious thinking our sinful nature wants to self-reference our spirituality and talk only about what’s going on inwardly in our own hearts. That, however, misses the obvious and is tantamount to rejecting the external and outward way God deals with us. The result is division among those who hear Jesus’ words. Some simply cannot take it in and grasp it.
Nevertheless, faith clings to Christ, who comes to us from the outside. Jesus stands before a crowd of people to proclaim the coming of God’s bread from heaven. Yet he goes unnoticed for what and who he is.
John speaks of this external coming of Christ in the flesh in the first chapter of the Gospel. “He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him.” Now Jesus himself says, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. … This bread is my flesh which I will give for the life of the world.” And who will partake of it? How can it be that Jesus’ flesh is real food and his blood real drink? It makes no rational sense.
Illustration: The fiery iron.
The external coming of Christ in preaching and the Sacraments.
Jesus gives us his life in the banquet meal of Holy Communion.
Faith clings to Christ, who is truly present in his flesh and blood.
Jesus’ flesh is real food and his blood is real drink, which give us everlasting life and resurrection.
Receiving the flesh and blood of Christ in faith causes us to abide in him and he in us so that we share in the very life of the Holy Trinity.
Martin Luther: For Christ surely will make even our body eternal, alive, blessed, and glorious. … Therefore he wills to be “in us by nature,” says Hilary, in both our soul and body, according to the word in John 6, “He who eats me abides in me and I in him.” If we eat him spiritually through the Word, he abides in us spiritually in our soul; if one eats him physically, he abides in us physically and we in him. … For he is not digested or transformed, but ceaselessly he transforms us, and our soul into righteousness, our body into immortality. … So when we eat Christ’s flesh physically and spiritually, the food is so powerful that it transforms us into itself and out of fleshly, sinful, mortal men makes spiritual, holy, living men. This we are already, though in a hidden manner in faith and hope; the fact is not yet manifest, but we shall experience it on the Last Day. Amen.