Food, you want to talk about food?

Here we are in the wild and wide and Jesus wants to talk about food. How can he want to talk about food at a time like this? We are here in the open and exposed to the elements. We are in a place of sorrow and tears and he wants to talk about bread. What’s up with that?

It’s quite simple actually: he wants you to remember where your bread and thus your life comes from. It doesn't come from the kitchen and it doesn’t come from a store. It doesn’t come from the clergy and it doesn't even come from a spiritual great like Moses. It comes from God and God alone. God caused the wheat to grow, the water to flow, the salt to supply in the earth. We ground the wheat to flour and carried the water and dug the salt from the earth and we add the yeast to make it rise but we received these things from God’s hands. Our hands were empty and God filled them. We are reminded that our bread and therefore our life, comes from God. Such a reminder is important in a place like this; where we remember, where we are exposed and know that we are in a place of sorrow.

And we are prompted to recall that without our bread, our Christ, we cannot be sustained. There may be a solitary existence but there will not be life – not full life as God intended it to be. And certainly new life in the new creation remains impossibility without our living Bread. Only in Christ is the hungry heart satisfied and the restless soul finally at peace. We are reminded in this particular place (at this particular table) that bread must be broken before it can be offered. In this place we realize what it is we proclaim – that there is bread that leads to eternal life. That the Bread of God was broken and offered for us that we might eat and live. We come to this table to recall that there is hope in the life that God offers and we need to take hold of it. That we are called to that great table together with those who have gone before us to feast in the presence of God and truly live. We have a choice and the lives of our loved ones ought to remind us that we need to make it; to live every day and to do so for the hope and the life that is within us because his life, his grace, his hope is within us. He is within us.

We ought not to forget that – we are what we eat! Christ is within us and he will raise us up at the Last Day. We need to recall that he is the resurrection and the Life. We need to be drawn into the life that is offered – even if it means that we are drawn in haltingly and with resistance. Surrender is never very easy for us. Nonetheless, lets us remember that even here at this table, in this exposed place, where our life comes from and where our lives as Christian people are going. And let’s eat and live!