bread

But God nourishes both body and soul Lenten question #7

John 6:5-7 Jesus saw a huge crowd of people coming to look for him. Turning to Philip, he asked, “Where can we buy bread to feed all these people?” … Philip replied, “Even if we worked for months, we wouldn’t have enough money to feed them!”

John 4:31-34 The disciples urged Jesus, “Rabbi, eat something.” But Jesus replied, “I have a kind of food you know nothing about. … My nourishment comes from doing the will of God, who sent me, and from finishing his work.”

Do you remember the end of The Last Battle when the children were sailing to the end of the world, so filled with wonder and spiritual sustenance that they weren’t hungry for physical food? I wonder whether C.S. Lewis got that idea from these passages in John. As we know, Jesus performed one of his most spectacular miracles after his interchange with Philip, multiplying a young boy’s five barley loaves and two fish to feed an enormous crowd. The men alone numbered about 5,000 (v. 10). This is one of the few events recorded by all four evangelists, though only John tells us the loaves and fish were provided by a young boy, who apparently shared that information with Andrew.

Shutterstock: ArtMari

I’m intrigued by Jesus’s concern in verse 12 that nothing be wasted. If you had the power to feed thousands of people from one lunch, would you be worried about the scraps left over? On the assumption that everything Jesus did and said was purposeful, what do you think this means? And the fact that the leftovers filled twelve baskets? What do you think the disciple did with the twelve baskets of scraps? I would love to know your thoughts!/

I remember my shock when as a teenager, I heard a sermon in which the preacher claimed this incident wasn’t really a miracle of multiplication, but rather a miracle of generosity—that the young boy’s gift shamed others into sharing the food they had brought along. The preacher believed this was as much a miracle—the softening of people’s hearts into concern for their neighbors—as Jesus literally feeding a multitude from five small loaves and two small fish would have been.

Except this isn’t what the text tells us. In each of the four Gospels, we read about Jesus multiplying the food. John says, “When the people saw Jesus do this miraculous sign, they exclaimed, ‘Surely, he is the Prophet we have been expecting!” (6:14). The people weren’t congratulating each other for their generosity. All eyes were on Jesus, the one who, as Matthew 14, Mark 6, and Luke 9 tell us, had spent the day healing the sick and teaching them about the Kingdom of God—ministering to their bodies and their souls—even while carrying a burden of grief for his beloved beheaded cousin, John the Baptist. And before he calmed the storm after Peter’s attempt to walk to him on the turbulent waves.

In ourselves, we never have enough for the needs of others, no matter how much we share and sacrifice. We can’t be enough. Yes, we are asked to share what we have been given. It was the disciples who walked around through that huge crowd serving the people. But the Source of nourishment is God’s overflowing heart of love, for both our bodies and our souls.

The Love of God by Frederick Martin Lehman, sung by Mercy Me

1 Corinthians 5:6-8 Your boasting about this [a sinful situation in the Corinthian church] is terrible. Don’t you realize that this sin is like a little yeast that spreads through the whole batch of dough? Get rid of the old “yeast.” Then you will be like a fresh batch of dough made without yeast, which is what you really are. Christ, our Passover Lamb, has been sacrificed for us. So let us celebrate the festival, not with the old bread of wickedness and evil, but with the new bread of sincerity and truth.

I grew up watching the magic of yeast: the dense lump of dough growing to double its size, soft and pliable. The fragrance of baking bread in our home wafted from the bathroom, because that’s where we had a cast iron stove with an oven. We had the best-smelling bathroom in the world. If our family wanted bread, we had to bake it. Same with cookies, cakes, etc. Noodles too, though they weren’t baked. For a time, my little brother’s favorite joke was, “Mom makes our cookies because she’s too lazy to go to the store.” (The nearest store was hours away.)

Our kitchen stove was made of concrete blocks with space for a fire and a griddle on top. But at some point, Dad lugged to our mountain village this stove with an oven. Its firebox required “little wood”—half the size of the wood used in the kitchen stove and the fireplace. My big brother chopped the wood in half and even the youngest toddlers helped carry “little wood” to the bathroom, while older children lugged “big wood” to the kitchen and living room.

One day a week, we made a fire in the bathroom stove. That day was bath day, baking day and ironing day, with irons heated on the stove. We didn’t have a shower; just a bathtub. I still associate taking a bath with the aroma of baking bread, enough for a week for our large family. A warm memory.

One time when we expected guests from the United States in our little home in our small village at the end of the long, twisty, bumpy road, Mom realized her yeast was long expired. But she had in her mind the kind of bread she wanted to make for our guests. She decided to put in twice—no, three times—the amount of yeast the recipe called for. The result was a disaster that our guests never knew about: the bread didn’t rise, but it was permeated with such a strong taste of yeast it was barely edible. In our house, we didn’t waste anything though. After our guests left, we all ate that awful bread until it too was gone. I don’t remember who the guests were, but I remember the terrible taste of the bread!

So, was Jesus against eating leavened bread? No, because in the Gospels he sometimes refers to the Kingdom of God as yeast (Mt 13:33, Lk 13:21). Yeast was used as an idiom to mean a change agent that is subtle and gradual, yet thorough. Put in a little, and it will spread to affect the whole. The results depend on whether the change agent is good or bad.

Paul applies the idiom to sin, so being without it is a good thing. He makes the connection to Passover bread. Matzah was called for at the Passover because there wasn’t time to wait for bread to rise (read about the first Passover in Exodus 12). He calls Jesus the Passover Lamb, sacrificed in place of the sons of Israel. When the Angel of Death saw the blood of the lamb smeared on a door, he “passed over” that home. His blood on the cross does the same for us.

In light of Christ’s sacrifice, can we indulge in sin, harming ourselves and others? No. That’s like sacrificing Jesus all over again. Purify us, Lord. Multiply in us sincere love and truth.

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But Christ is our Passover Lamb