Bread from Heaven: A Meditation on Exodus 16 and John 6, for the 10th Sunday after Pentecost

Bread in the ancient world was synonymous with life.  To have bread was to have sustenance, and to be without it was to be in famine.  If the crops yielded well, there was grain enough for all to eat bread, but if the crops failed or were destroyed, the people might perish from hunger.  While the people might eat many things, bread was the foundation, since the grain necessary to make bread was also related to the crops necessary to feed the sheep, goats, oxen, and other livestock.  To have bread was to be sustained in life, and to be without it was to be in peril of death.

For the people of God in Exodus 16, they had been led from the slavery of Egypt into the desert wilderness, finding that there was little to eat.  They feared for their lives and the lives of their children, eventually complaining against Moses and their God, saying it would have been better to die by the Lord’s hand in Egypt where they had plenty to eat, than to die by the Lord’s hand in the wilderness of starvation.  As the people were reduced in their needs to depend solely upon their saving God for their very lives, God provided for them a bread from heaven to sustain them.  Every morning, He sent for them enough food for a day’s meals, and challenged the people to gather only what they needed for the day.  On the day before the Sabbath, He sent enough food for two days, and nothing on the Sabbath itself.  The people were given very specific terms for how to gather and consume their daily bread, violation of which led them to hunger, worms, and other foul consequences.  In this pattern the people of God lived for 40 years until they reached the Promised Land, sustained by the grace of God’s bread from heaven, received in faith on the terms by which God had given it.

In the sixth chapter of St. John’s Gospel, the image of bread returns.  Having fed the people earthly bread earlier, Jesus begins to teach the people about the bread they really need.  If earthly bread is sustenance for earthly life, there is also a bread which sustains the spiritual life.  Explaining to the people that striving only for earthly bread will result in the same kind of eventual physical death that their fathers experienced in the desert with Moses, Jesus goes on to teach them about a bread that will sustain their life forever.  And just as the people of God with Moses were confused about the manna provided so many centuries earlier, the people with Jesus were confused about this new bread from heaven He was offering them:

Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on

me hath everlasting life. I am that bread of life.

Your fathers did eat manna in the wilderness, and

are dead.  This is the bread which cometh down from

heaven, that a man may eat thereof, and not die.  I am

the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man

eat of this bread, he shall live forever: and the bread that I

will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the

world.

The Jews therefore strove among themselves,

saying, How can this man give us his flesh to eat?

Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you,

Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his

blood, ye have no life in you. Whoso eateth my

flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will

raise him up at the last day.  For my flesh is meat

indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth

my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in

him.

As the living Father hath sent me, and I live by

the Father: so he that eateth me, even he shall live by me.

This is that bread which came down from heaven:

not as your fathers did eat manna, and are dead: he that

eateth of this bread shall live forever.

The other Gospel writers also refer to this bread from heaven, and make explicit reference to it when they quote Jesus establishing His Supper.  As Jesus celebrates the Passover with His disciples, He very clearly took the bread and said, “This is my Body, broken for you.”  Afterwards He took the cup and said, “This cup is the New Covenant in my Blood, which is shed for you, for the forgiveness of sins.” This Supper was to be, and has been every day since, the very ongoing connection of God’s people to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.  The same Jesus which was nailed to the Cross for their salvation, would be present in the bread and the wine of Holy Communion on every altar where His peopled gathered in faith around His Word.  Here the forgiveness of sins He won on His Cross would be literally eaten and drunk by his people, sustaining their spiritual life in Him forever.

In the time of Moses as in the time of Jesus, the people were scandalized by the means God used to sustain His people.  Many people in Moses’ time rebelled against God, and tried to have His manna in ways God had not provided it, with the result that instead of being a life sustaining bread, it became to them a curse of worms and disease.  In Jesus’ time, many of His disciples decided to abandon Jesus after He told them they must eat His flesh and drink His blood to have eternal life, leaving the life-giving Bread from Heaven behind so as to cling to their own disbelieving death.  St. Paul would even write to the Christians at Corinth, that their mistreatment of the Lord’s Supper—their disbelief and lack of discerning the real presence of Jesus’ Body and Blood together with the bread and the wine—brought a cause of physical illness and death in their congregation.  Today many Christians turn up their noses at the Lord’s Supper, either disbelieving what Jesus said about it, treating it with contempt, changing it according to human desire, removing it from the church’s Sunday worship, or avoiding it altogether.  Such unbelief is dangerous for anyone who would receive from Jesus the eternal life He came to give them, abandoning the terms of the covenant Jesus Himself established for their salvation.

In our age, as in every age, God comes to His people on His own terms.  He comes to offer forgiveness, life, and salvation, but He does so according to His own wisdom and will.  To the Old Testament people, God came to them in ways that foreshadowed the fulfillment of His coming in Jesus.  For the people who have been brought to faith after Jesus’ resurrection and ascension by the preaching of His Word through His Prophets and Apostles, the terms of God’s free gift of grace and life are on the same terms Jesus established while He walked among us.  By the power of His Word, He established Holy Baptism to be a lavish washing away of sins, exchanging the sinner’s death for the Savior’s eternal life.  By the power of His Word, He sent forth His Apostles and their successors to preach repentance and the forgiveness of sins in His most holy name.  By the power of His Word, He established a Holy Communion in His very Body and Blood, by which His disciples of every time and place would be nourished in grace by faith unto everlasting life, fed upon the true Bread from Heaven who is and was and is come forever the very Word of Life.

For those who are afar off, and those who are near, the Word of the Lord calls.  He calls to you, dear sinner, that you might not die of starvation in the wilderness of your sin.  He calls to you, that you might abandon your unbelief, and embrace His means of grace by faith unto everlasting life.  He calls to you, that the life begun in you by His Holy Spirit working through the Water and the Word, might be sustained in you through all the battles and brutalities of this fallen world, through the blessed Communion of His Body and Blood.   Here is the true Bread from Heaven, who has given His life to save you, and even now beckons to you, that you might be fed by Him, never to hunger or thirst again.  Here is Jesus, the very Word of God made flesh, giving His flesh to you as food indeed, and His blood to you as drink indeed.  Here the Lord Jesus Christ sustains not only your body for life in this world, but your soul unto everlasting life.

Hear the Word of the Lord.  Behold the Body and Blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, given unto death, that you might partake by your lips of His everlasting life.  Repent, believe, and live by the true Bread from Heaven.  Amen.