Our Daily Bread

Psalm 34 • Psalm 33
Gen. 12:1-7 • Heb. 11:1-12 • John 6:35-42, 48-51

Jesus’ “bread of life” imagery in today’s reading from John sits at the center of one of the most vivid and fertile passages in the Bible. First of all, John 6 is literally packed with miracles: Jesus feeds the 5000. Jesus walks on water. You would think that those two feats might have quieted the critics in the crowd.

But when the Jews begin to “grumble” about Jesus’ right to claim that he is “the bread that came down from heaven,” he knows the power of evoking Exodus 16, where the Israelites also kvetched about what they perceived to be a bread-related problem—namely the lack of it as they were starving the wilderness. In Exodus, God promises Moses that God will send manna down from heaven—which God does, feeding the Israelites for 40 years until they reach Canaan. Biblical scholars would recognize the Exodus-Gospel of John liaison as a typology: an incident in the Old Testament (the “type”) is mirrored in an incident in the New Testament (the “antitype”).

But the context of John’s gospel enriches the John 6 passage in two ways so that it does more than simply echo Exodus. First, recall that John’s gospel establishes in Chapter 1 that Jesus is the “word made flesh” who has come to dwell with us, so Jesus’ assertion that he is the bread of life rings with the truth that he is the Word made palpable, made real, made corporeal. Second, recall that, earlier in Chapter 6, Jesus had taken the two small barley loves and the five fish and, having blessed them, produced enough to feed the masses and still have food left over. Jesus, figuratively the bread of life, creates literally the bread of life—and the supply of that nourishment knows no bounds, no ends.

Written by David Jolliffe

David looks forward to singing in the choir again at St. Paul’s and to coordinating another event the Tippy McMichael Lecture Series next spring.