The Bread of Life

Wednesday afternoon I was running out the door to get in my car to pick up my daughter from Water Polo practice. I grabbed a piece of the Pretzel Bread my wife bought the other day at Costco. They are little round pieces of bread about half the size of a baseball and they are really tasty. As I hurried out the door, I took a bite and jumped in my car to start it.  Then I took another bite, when I noticed something. As you can see in the picture, there is a picture of a cross.

Now, normally I try to talk about golf related subjects, but today I just felt that I needed to show this picture as a reminder. In the book of John chapter 6, Jesus is asked when He had arrived to His destination, verse 25, where He had come from. He gave them a different answer than they were looking for. An answer to remind them that they were not looking for Him, but the bread they had eaten during His feeding of the multitudes in the beginning of chapter 6, or in this case, the day before.

As Jesus answers them, He tells them this, John 6:35 “I am the bread of life…” they began to grumble amongst themselves as the passage explains, but then Jesus tells them to stop grumbling amongst themselves and proclaims this staggering statement in John 6:53 Jesus said to them, “I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” You may be thinking as the listeners of His time did, “what the heck is Jesus talking about…is Jesus talking about cannibalism?”

The bible says that many of His followers began to leave and the story continues as part of Jesus ministry. But the point I would like to highlight is that Jesus is our provision, even when we are not thinking about it. The piece of bread I was eating wasn’t unique at all. In fact all of the breads had a cross on the top. I just realized it as I began to eat the bread when I thought of this story in the book of John that is rarely talked about.

The connection in this story involves different phases of Jesus’ time on earth. Jesus was born in Bethlehem, which in the Hebrew language means “House of Bread”. The little town of Bethlehem was a village that was known for its bread. I see a little God irony here, don’t you? Jesus takes this story in John chapter 6 and tells the listeners that he is the bread from heaven, not just the manna that came in the desert during Moses life.

As I began eating the bread, it reminded me of what Jesus was talking about when He told His followers that they must “eat His flesh and drink His blood”. His message is, we must consume Him. Just like eating the bread to nourish my body, I must consume His words and His spirit to nourish my soul, spirit and body. Like oxygen, we need Jesus because He is life and is the maker of life. If we begin to think of Jesus as our life and not just as an appetizer, we will become more fulfilled and attractive to a world that needs “the bread of life”.

Maybe as we move forward in our daily walk we will think of Jesus as our provision for everything and not just bread!