A Bread for all Time – Deut. 26:1-11; John 6:25-35

In this passage from Deuteronomy, Moses is preparing the people of Israel for the time when they shall enter the Promised Land.  As a wandering people, the Israelites were unable to set down roots and enjoy the fruits of the land. Each day was a new place, but as they moved, they were fed by the hand of God who provided for them wherever they went.

In the future they would build houses, sow crops, and reap harvests. But the people were to remember where they had come from and to never forget the One who provided for them during their wilderness experience. When that time came, the people were to remember their past. The head of each household was to come to the priest and present a basket containing the first fruits of the land. But the presentation had two parts. The first was a declaration that affirmed the person knew that they had entered the land promised by God to the people. The second part was a remembrance of the fact that the historical roots of the people’s journey to the Promised Land began with the calling of Abram who became known as Abraham and then to Jacob and his son Joseph who was sold into slavery but came to be the redemption for the nation. And while the vow that is presented abbreviates that history, it encompasses it and keeps that journey from slavery to freedom ever before the people’s eyes.

They are to never forget that God brought them from a place of slavery to a place of freedom. They are to never forget that God enabled the angel of death to pass over their homes and only take the first born of the Egyptians. They are to consecrate their first fruits to God as a sign that they do remember where they have come from and how they have come to this Promised Land.

While physically we may never have experienced the wilderness or slavery as the people of Israel did, spiritually we can probably identify times in our lives when we struggled and felt trapped or bound. It is at those times that God draws near to give to us the strength, the wisdom, and the hope we need to come through those times.   When we are able to let God work in our lives to free us, we come into a freedom, into a Promised Land, as we experience something of the Kingdom of God, the new and eternal Promised Land.

Perhaps we have come to see the offerings we bring each week as simply a means of sustaining our place of worship. But the offerings we bring are to be for us the first fruits that affirm that we know God provides for us. In the prayer that Jesus taught the disciples, there is the constant reminder that the journey we take through this life is one that requires us to be nourished in body, mind, and spirit. It is one that reminds us that daily nourishment is required for our continued strength. It is one that reminds us that we daily need to move away from being enslaved to things that will harm us and be drawn to that which will enrich our lives.

For the people of Israel, the offerings that they were to bring were to be for them not a way to appease God or keep God happy but a visual reminder to them of the provision that God chose to make for them. By giving the tithe – one-tenth of all that they were blessed with, the people were openly acknowledging their devotion to God.  They were acknowledging that their very existence was a gift from God, and it was a public display of their commitment to be the people of God.

Our New Testament lesson today follows the record of the feeding of the five thousand and Jesus walking on the water. While the two events do not seem to be related, they have a bearing on what happens the next day. The people who were fed by Jesus have come looking for him. The filling of their bellies has encouraged them to come looking for more. He encourages them to not work for food that perishes but for the food that endures for eternal life. This food will come from Jesus himself.  Believing that this food that endures requires performing certain tasks, they ask: “What must we do to perform the works of God?” Jesus’ answer is to receive this food you must believe in the One God has sent.

Bread that is consumed through the mouth and is digested in the body gives strength and feeds us physically. Bread that is consumed through the mind and heart and soul gives strength and feeds us mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

The people received the manna in the desert as a gift from God to sustain them in their wilderness journey.  It was new each day with the exception of the Sabbath when provision was made for two days.

The people would gather only what they needed for that day.

Now they were being challenged to believe in a bread that had come from heaven, but a bread that would feed them in ways they had never experienced before. This was a bread required not just eyes to see or hands to touch or mouths to ingest but a bread that required hearts and minds and souls willing to believe that Jesus was the ultimate bread from God, the bread that could sustain life not only for the moment, not only for the day or the week or the month or the year or even for a lifetime on this earth but sustain life unto eternity.

How would the people receive this bread? They would receive it as they believed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The sacrifice made by Jesus to give of his body and his blood would signal the overcoming of anything that might ever separate God and the people. Their belief in Jesus as the ultimate bread of life would fill any and all empty, hungering places in their being and take away any thirst they might have.

And while the manna in the desert was a bread that sustained people living under laws written on stone, this bread would sustain people living with laws written on their hearts and minds and souls.

In his own desert experience which we know as the temptations, Jesus declared that we do not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. That word that proceeds from the mouth of God is Jesus, the created Word from the beginning. And it is that bread that we are invited to ingest each day along with the bread that feeds our physical beings.

In the past people ate bread to sustain them in the moment. With the coming of God in Jesus, people were invited to eat bread to sustain them for their whole life both now and into eternity.

May we all ever eat of this bread giving thanks to God for the life we live now and the life we look forward to in the kingdom of God!

AMEN