BREAD AND THE BREAD OF LIFE
“Bread,” the Croatian essayist Predrag Matvejević writes, is “the condition of peace and the cause of war, the promise of hope and the reason for despair.” Bread, he observes, is older than writing itself. No one knows when some Neolithic household first gathered wild grains, crushed them, and accidentally left them near their campfire. Later, when they gathered the first bread from among the ashes, they tasted something unimaginably nourishing. It was sustaining enough to make them give up their nomadic life as hunter-gatherers and to settle down as farmers cultivating grain by the sweat of their brows.
From the beginning of the Bible to its final pages, bread plays a central role. When God expels the first man and woman from the Garden of Eden God tells them, “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground.” (Genesis 3:19). At the final chapters of Genesis, Jacob sends his sons down to Egypt in search of bread because “famine was heavy on the land.” (Genesis 41). As Israel flees Egyptian slavery, their final meal before departing is unleavened bread that they eat in haste. As they wander in the desert on the way to the promised land, God nourishes them with manna, the bread of angels. In the gospels, Jesus both tells Satan that we do not live by bread alone and also feeds hungry crowds with bread. At the Last Supper, Jesus gathers every earlier biblical reference to bread into the mystery of his own life, death, and resurrection when he tells his disciples, “Take. Eat this bread in remembrance of me.”
Rome in the time of Jesus had more than 300 bakeries. Roman citizens were allowed subsidized or free distribution of grain and later bread. Rome’s rulers recognized that bread, together with circuses, held the key to controlling the people. Jesus’ acts of breaking bread, on the other hand, are signs of liberation and freedom from oppressive control. In this Sunday’s Gospel reading from John 6 Jesus declares, “I am the Bread of Life.”
Matvejevic writes in his book, Our Daily Bread: Its cultural and religious significance throughout history, that our contemporary world revels in endless distraction and shallow entertainment. In such a world, a simple piece of bread reminds us of our connection to each other. It is, he says, the unbroken thread that binds civilizations and peoples together from the mists of time to the present day.
My maternal grandmother never set a meal on the table without there being a plate of bread. It was an indispensable part of every meal. Unless we are on a keto diet or have an intolerance for gluten, all of us eat bread almost daily in one form or another. Bread is a constant in our lives. And sharing bread is one of the primary ways we establish and celebrate relationships. So when we share bread, we are reminding ourselves that more things bind us together as people than those that set us at odds with each other.
This is part of what Jesus who is the Bread of Life means when he tells his disciples to bless, break, and eat bread for the re-membering of him. To break bread, to share bread with others, is an act of re-binding what is broken between us. It is an act of re-connecting us to past generations near and far who, like us, broke bread with others at every meal.
Matvejevic’s book was one of the last things he published before he died. He had meditated on it most of his active years as an author and academic. The importance of bread in his thinking and writing arose from a specific incident in his father’s life.
In the winter of 1942-43, amidst the depths of World War Two, Matvejevic’s father was a prisoner-of-war in northern Germany, near Osnabrück. His father – a Russian speaker from the Ukraine who had married a Bosnian Croat woman – was part of a group consigned to do forced labor felling trees and trimming wooden sleepers for Nazi railway tracks. One evening, a group of freezing, starving inmates in ragged clothes and wooden clogs was on its way back to the barracks. “We didn’t look human anymore. It was as if we had turned into mere shadows of ourselves,” his father remembered. As they stumbled back to their Nazi work camp, he and his fellow prisoners were intercepted by a stranger who invited them to his house.
Accompanied by our guard, they entered the house mistrustfully. It was Christmas Eve. The man was a Lutheran and Reformed pastor. Following Abraham’s example at the oaks of Mamre, he gave his unknown guests what he had to offer. First, a chance to warm up, wash and shave. Then, on his table were slices of bread and a glass of wine for each prisoner. In gratitude, Matvejevic’s father sat down at the piano after they had eaten this humble meal and, his fingers stiff from work and frozen from the cold, played a fragment of an old Ukrainian liturgy. When the stay was over, the pastor and the inmates embraced each other and departed out into the cold, snowy night. The guard, himself moved by the pastor’s hospitality and love, did not report any of them to his superiors.
After the war ended, Matvejevic’s father returned home and lived in a town where Russian victors often paraded captured German prisoners-of-war in the street and treated them vengefully. Looking at their starved and gaunt appearance, his father remembered how he had been shown human warmth by a stranger who offered him a simple slice of bread on Christmas Eve. So he would cut off half of the one loaf of bread that his entire family received as a weekly ration from the occupying Russians and hand it to the young Matvejevic, telling him to hide it under his shirt and give it to the first German prisoner he met, whose eyes always welled up with tears when he received it.
Matvejevic’s father’s story, which he retold every Christmas, is surely part of what Jesus means when he says, “I am the Bread of Life?” It is surely what Jesus signified when he said ‘Do this to re-member me’?” Jesus, the Bread of Life, restores us to our common humanity and invites us to share in his work of re-membering the human family across time and space, overcoming all those ways that we respond with hostility, suspicion, and cruelty toward those other than ourselves.
As we sing in one of our Communion Sunday hymns, “As Christ breaks bread and bids us share, each proud division ends. The love that made us, makes us one, and strangers now are friends; and strangers now are friends.” Amen.
Blessings,
Pastor Thomas