The bread of life

The whole Israelite community grumbled against Moses and Aaron.
The Israelites said to them,
"Would that we had died at the LORD's hand in the land of Egypt,
as we sat by our fleshpots and ate our fill of bread!
But you had to lead us into this desert
to make the whole community die of famine!"

Exodus 16:2 - 4

Grumbling is nothing new – from the Hebrews in the desert to the crowd at Jesus’ trial, to the letters to the editor in The Advocate. Grumbling is about expressing dissatisfaction, a grievance or complaint. Some have made it into a refined art: we do it about taxes, rates, levies, fees, government at all levels, public services and institutions, laws, regulations, rules and policies. Grumbling often occurs when there is a perceived lack of fairness, equity, justice, opportunity or choice. The majority of us like to have a whinge, and most of us get over it and move on. A matter that might really irk may well summon in us the energy to write a letter of complaint or to make that phone call. Grumbling, even in our biblical stories, often produces results, results that may surprise.

The LORD’s response to the grumbling Hebrews is to send quail and manna from heaven to feed them. As the saying goes, ‘The Lord provides’. The moaning of the crowd at Jesus’ trial results in Pilate handing him over to the soldiers to whip him and then crucify him.

In both these instances we see at play the unfolding of our story of salvation – God’s plan for us. In feeding the Hebrews the Lord affirms his relationship with them by providing the essentials for life and with the promise of a land flowing with milk and honey – if they remain faithful. The ultimate promise made by God is that we will be saved, from sin, from ourselves, from hopelessness, and it can only be achieved by Jesus’ death, and then fully revealed in his resurrection. Even grumbling has a purpose, for it picks up on that sense of yearning, of seeking what is right.

John (6:24 – 35) takes the Exodus text beyond the feeding of the Hebrews and re-presents Jesus as being the bread sent from heaven: I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst (v. 35). God’s generosity moves from the provision of food, to the total giving of himself, fulfilling the covenant he has with us. This bread we understand as the Eucharist.

For those who grumble about the state of things, how everything has worsened, the Lord unequivocally invites us to break bread at his table, to respond to his gracious generosity by giving him worship and praise. And all are welcome.

Peter Douglas

HEAD OF SCHOOL SERVICES, NORTH

TMAG Virtual Tour

On Thursday, Grade 6 students enjoyed a virtual tour experience with the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in Hobart.  We were shown interesting artefacts and learned about the history of Tasmanian Aboriginals. We learned that the women were good swimmers and dived for shellfish, and that men had short hair until they became men, and that’s when they were allowed to grow their hair longer.  We got to smell mutton-bird oil, hold a wallaby jaw which was used to poke the holes in shells for necklaces, and learn how Tasmanian Aboriginals would spray ochre with their mouths onto wallaby skin, to trace around their hands.

Libby van Tienen

THE CHARIOT

By Emily Dickinson

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school where children played,
Their lessons scarcely done;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.

We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.

Since then 't is centuries; but each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity.

HUNGER FOR THE TRUTH

John W. Martens

America Magazine

“I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry.” (Jn 6:35)

There is a fine line between having what we need to sustain our physical existence and feeling we just do not have enough. Or is that line the one where we want more and more? Once we cross that line, as individuals and as societies, to where our most notable identification is as a consumer, it can be difficult to cross back. Once this takes place, the most surprising of things begins to happen: Our own sense of worth and value can be tied up in things we own and things we buy. Even sadder, though this is sad enough, we begin to see other people as valuable on the basis of their power to buy things and accumulate “stuff.” Poor people themselves become less valuable, and all kinds of ways are concocted to explain how they are responsible for being poor and the architects of their own fate.

For many of us in the West, myself included, food is something we consume too much and waste too often, while many others suffer with too little. Part of having more than enough is being thankful for the abundance and properly stewarding what is left over. The Israelites knew what it was to be bereft and called out to God to supply their needs. God did it, but it was also a test, to see “whether they will follow my instruction or not.” God provided for their physical needs; “He rained down on them manna to eat and gave them the grain of heaven. Mortals ate of the bread of angels; he sent them food in abundance.” But the test was a spiritual one, and it is one that each wealthy nation and person must take today: How are we handling our abundance?

Jesus challenged those who followed him after the multiplication of loaves and fishes to take the same test. He asked the crowds, who continued to follow him, if “you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.” Because the human needs are so real and genuine, it can be easy to focus on them when they are met and to see that as the end of life. Jesus asks his followers to look beyond and not to “work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.” It is only the spiritual food that will satisfy our deepest needs.

It is a properly ordered life that assigns to all human needs their right place. The author of Ephesians, traditionally understood to be the Apostle Paul, challenges us to take this test and not to abandon ourselves “to licentiousness (aselgeia), greedy to practice every kind of impurity (akatharsia).... You were taught to put away your former way of life, your old self, corrupt and deluded by its lusts (epithymia), and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds.” The prominent concern in this passage is with sexual licentiousness, but sexual lust is not the only desire that can lead us astray. Unbridled passions can consume every area of our lives, corrupting and deluding us.

Aselgeia, akatharsia and epithymia can also reflect other disordered desires, whether for food, bigger houses or more cars. Social sins, of course, can be the hardest to see, because the way a society lives can come to seem the normal, the best, even the only way to live. While we might ask how people lived justifying the evils of slavery, we must ask ourselves how we live justifying the evils of overconsumption. How do we justify overuse of food and other natural resources, throwing away tons of food daily, while others go without basic needs being met?

Ephesians asks us “to be renewed in the spirit of your minds.” This is not a renewal of ideological purity, of the right or the left, of this political party or that, but a renewal in the spirit of God’s word, the word made flesh. This renewal criticizes every human vanity and every form of human impurity; it strips excuses away and leaves us hungry for the truth alone.

This is the hunger that compels us to demand, “Sir, give us this bread always.” Jesus tells us: “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” It is this bread that orders all our appetites and allows us to turn away from the desires of selfishness and indifference so that we can clothe ourselves “with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.”

John W. Martens is a professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minn.

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