This morning’s Gospel reading is John 6:41–51:

The Jews murmured about Jesus because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven,” and they said, “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph? Do we not know his father and mother? Then how can he say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” 

Jesus answered and said to them, “Stop murmuring among yourselves. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him, and I will raise him on the last day. It is written in the prophets: They shall all be taught by God. Everyone who listens to my Father and learns from him comes to me. Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father. Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the desert, but they died; this is the bread that comes down from heaven so that one may eat it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.”

Who among us does not love bread? It's one of my dietary weaknesses, especially when traveling. In Rome, the bread and the pizzas push me off any pretense of moderation, which fortunately gets balanced with all of the walking necessary to get the city's true flavor. In Ireland, the soda bread and the brown bread have a quality that is difficult to duplicate at home -- although my wife does an amazing job in baking both. New York has its bagels; San Francisco its sourdough; Texas has its toast.

Okay, I'm kidding with that last one. Mostly.

The scriptures are filled with talk of bread, of course, and not just in the Gospels. The New Testament has roughly 100 references to bread, and the Old Testament more than 300. The first reference comes in Genesis 3, as the Lord explains to Adam the hard life that he and Eve have chosen in betraying Him. "In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken." The last reference comes from Paul's letter to the Hebrews (9:2), in which Paul recalls the central role of bread in worship after the first covenant. 

Bread is a core component of human culture, and each community has its own take on it. In scripture, however, it has meanings that encompass both humility and transcendence, the latter especially in the Gospels. There is no more common food to all, and thus is almost a basic staple of subsistence living, as the Lord warned in Genesis 3. And yet bread becomes transformed into our salvation through Jesus Christ. 

But even in the Gospels, that tension exists. Jesus Himself castigates Satan during His trial in the desert when the devil tempts him by suggesting that Jesus turn stones into bread to satisfy His hunger. In Matthew 4:4 Jesus responds, "Man does not live by bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God." In the Gospel reading last week, Jesus tells the crowd at Galilee much the same thing, rebuking them gently for following Him because of the bread and fish He provided rather than the spiritual food Jesus intended to give them:

Jesus answered them and said, “Amen, amen, I say to you, you are looking for me not because you saw signs but because you ate the loaves and were filled. Do not work for food that perishes but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For on him the Father, God, has set his seal.” 

And yet in times of great difficulty and despair, the Lord has provided literal bread to sustain the faithful. He did so after the Exodus, providing manna in the desert (along with quail) to the Israelites who had begun to despair with starvation on their way to the Holy Land. In our first reading from 1 Kings, Elijah despairs of his worth as a prophet and asks the Lord to take him in death. Instead, the Lord sends an angel with bread and with a mission:

Elijah went a day’s journey into the desert, until he came to a broom tree and sat beneath it. He prayed for death, saying: “This is enough, O LORD! Take my life, for I am no better than my fathers.” He lay down and fell asleep under the broom tree, but then an angel touched him and ordered him to get up and eat. Elijah looked and there at his head was a hearth cake and a jug of water. After he ate and drank, he lay down again, but the angel of the LORD came back a second time, touched him, and ordered, “Get up and eat, else the journey will be too long for you!” He got up, ate, and drank; then strengthened by that food, he walked forty days and forty nights to the mountain of God, Horeb.

So what are we to make of bread? Is it a humble staple of a poor people that we need to set aside to focus on salvation? Or is it an expression of divine will that will lead us on that mission?

The answer is, of course, both. The Lord provides for us the sustenance for our journey, and sometimes miraculously. The crowds to whom Jesus speaks are the same people who received the miracle of the Multiplication of Fishes and Loaves at the start of this chapter in John's Gospel. The Lord worked through Moses to provide manna for that journey to the Promised Land, and again for Elijah above. 

The Lord takes the humble and makes it divine. That is the model by which we know Jesus Christ, too, who did not come in regal form to impose the Word on an unwilling world. This is what causes the "murmuring" against Jesus as a Messiah among the Pharisees, which He rebukes for its ignorance of His mission. Jesus came as the infant son of a poor family in a little-celebrated town called Nazareth, to become one of us and to create a path for salvation for fallen humanity by connecting to our humility before God. 

He does that through our most humble, ubiquitous, and yet pleasurable food -- bread. We have to dig in the dirt to make it into the "fruit of the earth," as the Lord warned in Genesis 3. But when we offer it to Him in the name of Jesus, it transforms into His body as the wine transforms into His blood in the Mass. It becomes the marriage of the humble to the sublime, which is precisely what the Lord promises us as salvation -- the marriage of the Lamb of God to His Church in the Word. 

The real question for us is this: For which bread do we hunger most? Jesus answered this for us last week and this week, warning us to set aside the bread of human subsistence and instead to hunger for the "living bread from heaven," in which all becomes one in the Lord. It feeds us in our humility and connects us to the Divine, whereas what we make on our own simply fuels the body for short periods of time and leaves us eternally hungry for true sustenance. 

When we put aside our material appetites and instead hunger for the Lord, we set our feet on the road to salvation -- and true fulfillment.  

Previous reflections on these readings:

• You are what you eat: Sunday reflection (2021)
• The fragrant aroma and the hard truth: Sunday reflection (2018)
• Sunday reflection: John 6:41–51 (2015)

The front page image is "Jesus Teaches People By the Sea" by James Tissot, c. 1886-94. On display at the Brooklyn Museum. Via Wikimedia Commons. 

“Sunday Reflection” is a regular feature, looking at the specific readings used in today’s Mass in Catholic parishes around the world. The reflection represents only my own point of view, intended to help prepare myself for the Lord’s day and perhaps spark a meaningful discussion. Previous Sunday Reflections from the main page can be found here.