"I am the Bread"

When I was in bible college I attended a "field trip" to the city, where as students we were going to learn what it meant to live on the streets. The purpose of this trip was to live on the streets for a short period of time in order to expose us to the harsh realities of street life. We were told to "dress appropriately" and to not have eaten for 24 hours prior to our coming.

Coming from a school which focused largely on outdoor education, we naturally understood "dress appropriately" as "dress warm". So as our class poured out of the school vans, fully decked out in North Face and other such expensive outdoor clothing, we soon realized we had already begun to defeat the purpose of the exercise.

Being a college aged boy, the fact that I hadn't eaten for what seemed like an eternity, started to play a role in my experience. We were instructed that we could only eat if we either panhandled for the money, or scrounged for the food. I instantly made my way to the Eaton's Center cafeteria and had the feast of a life time on other people leftovers. I was so hungry after having not eaten for less than a day, that I was willing to gorge myself on the scraps of others. If this was the feeling I had, imagine how those on this same planet must feel when they haven't eaten for days.

When Jesus says "I am the bread" in John 6, I don't think people are really grasping what he is saying. In our North American culture, bread is often something we try to avoid since it is high in carbs and goes straight to the hips. We are so over fed that while in other parts of the world people are struggling to find food, we are desperately trying to cut ours back. When Jesus said "I am the bread", he was saying "I am the sustainer of all life, apart from me there is only starvation".

Jesus is not just a preferential religion that we can choose should it be the one that suits us best; he is the only life that we can ever have and apart from him we are dead. Perhaps if we desired Jesus like a person dying of starvation hungers for bread, our churches would look very different.

Rob