This past week, the daily lectionary has been allllll about bread. So here I go: 

My love affair with bread started early and blossomed when I learned how to make it in 6th grade Sunday School. I took the recipe and enthusiasm home and got my mom and siblings hooked on baking bread. At church, we had real bread for communion every week and I now knew how it got there. And I was old enough to get the various metaphors bread is for the Christian community – the body of Christ, the many gathered into one, something to be shared. 

When I hear Jesus say, “I am the bread of life,” (John 6:35) I am on board with that image! Yet I also know that, standing here in 2025, there is a lot more to that image that the original audience understood. Ways in which Jesus saying, I am the bread of life, might have had more power. 

Bread is at the root of civilization as we know and experience it. It was the growing and gathering of grains that led humans to settle into villages. Planting, harvesting, milling, and cooking with grains became the heart of family and community life in cultures around the world. Grains became so central to life, in fact, that when we make peace with each other, we say we are breaking bread. In English, when we say we are eating a “meal,” literally, we say we are eating grain. 

When Jesus says, “I am the bread of life” he is tapping into something that was more urgent for the people of his time than for many of us in the developed world today. In the first century, more than 90% of people lived at a subsistence level – constantly in danger of hunger or starvation. Bread literally was life for them. They didn’t have the luxury of being on a low carb diet. 

Jesus makes reference to another way bread was life-giving for his community – he is like manna, the bread from heaven that fed their ancestors in the wilderness. So, bread for the people in Jesus’ community saved their ancestors in the past, and saves them when they eat it in the present. It sustains their bodies, and because it is a gift from God it nourishes their spirits, as well. 

And now, Jesus is taking bread to another level of meaning. If manna from heaven fed their ancestors in the past, and their daily bread feeds them in the present, Jesus now says he is bread that will keep us fed forever. 

This is where the image gets tricky – certainly for me and maybe for those who first heard it. I have a hard time thinking about forever, about eternal life. And I get hungry every day – physically and spiritually. So making those two things meet is hard. 

Forever is an extraordinary concept. It is beyond my capabilities to understand. When I googled “forever is hard to understand” I got a message that said, “An AI Overview is not available for this search.” But while eternity is hard to grasp, bread is not. So, while it might be impossible to understand what eternity is, when Jesus links the bread we share to him and then him to eternity…it becomes, if not easier, more real. 

Maybe that’s why Jesus used the image of bread to talk about forever, about eternal life. Jesus uses this ordinary image from daily life to point us to the extraordinary. Bread contains some of the most common, basic ingredients – grain flour, salt, water, and leavening. When it all comes together, you can share these ingredients in a way you could not before. 

Bread sustains life, for many (even today) it is a matter of life and death to have bread. Yet bread is perishable and so are we. You will perish if you don’t get enough bread, and bread itself perishes if it is not eaten. 

“I am the bread of life,” says Jesus. “I have come down from heaven…”

When eternity comes to us, it looks like bread. Ordinary. Basic. 
When eternity comes to us, it is from creation- grain and salt and water.
When eternity comes to us, it is for sharing. 
When eternity comes to us looking like bread, it becomes part of us and nourishes us. 

Jesus is bread and Jesus is eternal. Therefore – eternity is within our grasp because it has come to us. We don’t have to “get” it. It is not an intellectual concept.

Bread, of course, is a central image in Christian worship – the bread of life broken for us, blessed on the altar and shared. There has been a lot of complex reflection over the last 2000 years about the meaning of the Eucharist and the meaning of the bread we share at the table. But I think it is important to remember how simple and basic this meal is. To remember that bread – one of the oldest foods known to humans – is necessary to our lives. To remember that gathering to break that bread together IS the meaning of it. 

When Jesus says, “I am the bread of life,” he reminds us he is as basic to our wellbeing as bread. We remember that it is in the ordinary things of life that we will encounter the holy and the eternal. And conversely, we remember that when we are looking for the eternal, we can turn to the ordinary things in our earthly life. The gifts of the earth, the people we know. 

When we gather at the table to break bread together, the bread from heaven shows us how necessary we are to each other as we become the body of Christ. We become that bread, we are unified in that bread. By calling himself bread, Jesus links the past with the present with forever. 

Forever, is a hard concept to grasp. So, God comes to us in ways that are accessible. God comes to us in and through the creation that we are part of. At the communion table, and with Jesus’ words, we are asked to consider how fundamental bread is. The necessity of the fruit of the earth that God gives us – for the wellbeing of our bodies. The necessity of Jesus, the bread at this table, for the wellbeing of our spitis.

This is a lesson I began to learn – and continue to learn – when making bread. Grain from the earth is mixed with water and salt. It is enlivened with leavening. It is worked with the hands and after time and heat is transformed into something to nourish and share. I remember seeing all those tiny particles of flour – so powdery and separate that the smallest puff of air would scatter them – become one solid thing. I remember all the individual ingredients with little or bland taste become something savory and substantial. I remember seeing the loaf on the altar and distributed to hundreds of hands. 

If I never understand anything more about what eternity is, that is enough. 

(Based on a sermon preached at Seminary of the Southwest on 5/7/25)