Ephesians 5: 15-20 John 6: 51-58
Our minds and our hearts can be as hungry as our bellies. I remember a colleague of mine in another place insisting that people were hungry for dialogue about faith and spirituality – hungry for meaning and purpose.
The fact that we gather here this morning around a table set for supper is an indication that we too are hungry and although we will take into ourselves some bread and some wine, our hunger will not be satisfied by such physical elements but rather our hunger will be satisfied by the inward and spiritual truth which those elements represent.
And here in Jesus’s discourse in St John’s Gospel, he uses the physicality both of his body and of the contents of the larder to point towards the ultimate satisfaction of life with God in all its glory.
We often talk about bread being the staff of life because food sustains us and, without it, we would die. But those of who have faith recognise that life is much more than merely surviving until we die. One may see the purpose of survival and fully accept the human instinct to survive but is that all there is to life and is that all there is to death?
If you are very hungry – as countless millions of people in our world today are very hungry – you will yearn with all your body and with all your heart to be able to find food in order to survive so that our consideration of Jesus’s teaching in this morning’s gospel reading should not in any way be dismissive of the need for our daily bread and indeed the right to receive it.
But that is a key reason why Jesus uses the simple and familiar device of bread with which to point to glory.
Bread is truly the staff of life: it is the staff of eternal life.
Jesus draws this earthy analogy with his own body so that what we take of Jesus into our bodies enables us to take into our minds and hearts the divinity and the eternity which he represents through a body set free from the mere parameters of earthly survival for the wider purposes of life with God.
It never fails to amaze me that those who are most hungry for food and drink are most likely to live lives of faith and hope and love.
I remember an old television drama back in the 1980s set against the penury and squalor of a back street two up/two down and the funeral wake of a woman’s husband back at the house after the church service. ‘And do you believe all that God stuff?’ the widow is asked. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘Well, after all. There’s got to be something better than this.’
Most of us, if we’re honest, are sufficiently well satisfied with the material things in this life that we don’t always recognise our hunger for something else – and certainly not for eternal life which, as David Jenkins once said, can sometimes sound rather exhausting.
But I go back to my colleague in that other place and his recognition of the hunger of people to ask questions about God and about faith, about Jesus and about life, and I see all the more readily what St John sees in his Gospel: that Christ is God’s answer to people’s hunger for bread, because they are hungry for the staff of life and for so much more than mere survival.
Our burgeoning student ministry here at the Cathedral sees groups of students on Tuesday evenings after Evensong eating food together in the Solarium at the Deanery and, with mouths crammed with bread and cheese and wine glasses in their hands, they ask to know more about God through the age-old question: What’s it all about?
And it turns out that pork pies and millionaire’s shortbread isn’t enough because there’s more to life than mere survival.
Jesus makes the bread of his body the prism through which life becomes so much more than life because life itself is the prism through which we see God in much greater focus than if God were a mere concept of hope set out in the dry parchment of ancient texts.
We can’t reach out our longing hands to touch the hem of his garment but we can reach them out to receive the bread and wine of the Eucharist – the prism through which we are healed and there the heaven espy.
Michael Hampel
Durham Cathedral