Thought for the week - 11 August 2024

This is the third week that we have been listening to St John’s discourse on the bread of life, and still the crowd are struggling to understand what he is talking about, and I am glad that Fr Michael preached last week, because I would have had trouble finding three novel things to say about it as well, even if fortified by tinned rice pudding.

And to be sure, we can find it easy to understand why they found it so hard to understand – we might now, with our two thousand years of hindsight, understand something of how Christ is the word made flesh, but we probably do not think of Him very much as the Bread come down from Heaven – even if at our Mass each day, such a thing happens here on our altars. But what sense could these people make of this statement? I remember there used to be a pub near Bury called the ‘Staff of Life’ with a picture of a cottage loaf in a field of wheat as the pub sign. I never went, which I regretted when it closed down because you never quite know what a place might have been like – that’s why I go into every church that I pass which is open, even though I know what I am likely to encounter – but I go into supermarkets too with a similar sense of expectation at what will be inside. Imagine, though, if you went into a supermarket, say Lidl on German week, and there was a beerhall and Oompah band, and imagine that you went on the train to Preston and rather than passing through Poulton, you passed through Honolulu? And imagine that you went to church and found a lovely community of people loving each other and a palpable sense of the one bread on the altar, transforming visibly our lives? And we can understand why the people find it hard to understand, because life takes on a familiarity after a while which robs it of deeper potentialities until, suddenly, the glory of God bursts forth and we know what we have always searched for. What sense could they possibly make of someone who says that he is the bread of life come down from heaven? They have just been given baskets and baskets of bread for Goodness’ sake, surely he just means that? But they have had it, they have consumed it and just like a modern audience on social media, they want to consume something else now. One small step towards understanding ‘the bread of life’ might be to ask what it means to be alive. If life is just a short period of time in which you are alive, it would be surprising if any of us ever encountered anything of the divine and that kind of nihilism and lack of comprehension and lack of eloquence and a feeling of helplessness might just make people go out onto the streets of our towns and cities and destroy that which does not look like them. How could they understand? Where is the bread of life? Where is the Body of Christ in a riot of a war of in a dying body in a hospital bed?

Is life just a short time of biological vitality between conception and death? These people are looking for bread in this sense, that just lets you survive from one day to another. It is the bread just to keep on living rather than the bread of life.

Jesus says that he has come that we may have life abundantly. St Irenaeus famously said that the glory of God is a human being fully alive. Jesus offered these hungry people the bread of life in abundance. There is a wonderful excess, vastly more than is needed for mere survival, twelve basketfuls left over, we are honoured by God in being given much more than what is needed to stay alive, and there is no bread given out here, but the one true bread of life and that is the bread of eternal life – but I want to make clear that these people could not understand that because eternal life is not what happens after you die, like going to Honolulu after you stop in Preston, though some people confuse Honolulu and Paradise, they are unlikely to confuse Preston and paradise. Eternal life is not pie in the sky when we die. It begins now whenever we manage to share God’s love and forgiveness with each other. Love is already a sharing in the eternal life of God.

The people ask for break like they asked for manna in the desert, and are given enough to live off, enough hope to stay alive for, enough faith to know this is not just a short time that we exist for between two endings, we have enough to feed us abundantly, and we are also called to realise this by making a more fundamental Exodus than leaving the slavery of Egypt. We have to die to ourselves and learn to love. If we are to live to the full, then we have to die to ourselves as the centre of the world. Love is not just a nice feeling. It is a radical loss of self-centredness, a transformation of our humanity.

St Paul writes, in the second reading: ‘Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamour and slander be put away from you, with all malice, and be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.’ That is what it means to come alive. At this Eucharist, we receive the bread of eternal life. This is more than sustenance for survival. It is a share even now in love’s victory, the bread of Heaven- and unlike them, we can understand this because we also understand the cross from whence it flows.