I stared down at unappetizing noodles mixed with brown bits simmering in an aluminum pot over a little white gas burner. Another boy mushed water together with pale powder then squeezed the resulting white glop into the pot. I was eleven years old. It was my first Boy Scout backpack trip. I was encountering dehydrated beef stroganoff for the first time.
I’d never had beef stroganoff before, so I was doubly unprepared for this concoction created of dehydrated beef in a brown gravy with reconstituted sour cream mixed in at the end. A couple of my fellow young Scouts took a look at it, turned up their noses, and went hungry that night. It was the only food we had. But I was too hungry. I gave it a try and found it wasn’t too bad. It eventually became one of my favorite backpacking meals until the manufacturer brought out a freeze-dried version, replacing the little dehydrated meat pellets with bits which actually looked like beef.
Our text for this coming Sunday from John 6:35-51, shows some of those who listened to Jesus turning up their noses at the food He offered. In effect, they turned up their noses at Jesus Himself, because He continued to expound the statement in verse 35 where we ended last week, “I am the bread of life.”
His hearers expressed indignation in verses 41 and 42 at His claim that He the Bread of Life came down from heaven. Jesus pressed them further by suggesting that He is the only meal available. In verse 45 Jesus says that anyone listening to the Father will come to Him and in verse 46 that only He, Jesus, has actually seen the Father. Finally in verses 49 and 50, He insists that other food, even the miraculous manna received by Israel in the wilderness, does not cut it. Only the Bread of Life, only Jesus, offers eternal life. “I,” He declares in verse 51, “am the living bread that came down from heaven.”
Our relationship to natural food may help us grasp Jesus’ metaphor of “living bread.” The simple fact is that all the food we eat is “organic,” in the original sense of the word, not the contemporary sense in which “organic” is a style of growing things without pesticides, etc. All food is derived from other living things. Though one can ingest non-organic substances (like a child might eat dirt), those things are not food and cannot nourish us. Even those less than palatable early backpacker meals had to be fashioned from living food sources grown and raised. They couldn’t just be mixed up from chemicals in a laboratory. To sustain life, food must come from that which is alive.
So in our physical, biological nature, we are fashioned to sustain our lives from that which is also alive. The same is true spiritually. We are created to be nourished by life derived from the living Person who is the very source of all life. Jesus presents Himself as the Bread of Life, living bread, because there is no other option if we wish to live and not die, to eat and enjoy eternal life.
We can only guess at the reason for the complaints in verse 41 about Jesus claiming to be the bread from heaven. It may have been a rejection of His claim to have come from heaven, or it may have been offense at the image of a person also being food for consumption. However, in our day Jesus’ claim to be the living bread given for the life of the world may offend in its seeming exclusivity. We know only too well the variety of food which can sustain life. Why should we think the menu is so limited in spiritual matters?
We will not serve Jesus or our neighbors well by trying to soften too much the exclusiveness of His claims. He is the one and only living bread. But let us remember our Lord’s own inclusive invitation to receive that food. While insisting on His role as the only Bread of Life, Jesus meant to open eternal life to anyone who would receive it. That’s why in verse 51 He says, “Whoever eats of this bread will live forever.”
So let us steer both ourselves and others away from lifeless substitutes for that which truly nourishes all that God made us to be. Life must come from that which lives, which means ultimately from God. Jesus is the one who came from Heaven to show us God and bring us to Him. Yet let us remember that the one and only living bread is also available to anyone and everyone who desires to receive it, be nourished, and live.