CHRIST AND OUR FAINTNESS

"I AM the Bread of Life; he that cometh to Me shall never hanger, and he that believeth on Me shall never thirst.*’ — St. John vi. 35.

On all the emblems under which our Lord describes Himself as responding to human ' need, none is more realistic than this one of Bread. Bread is the general word we use when we mean food. We call bread the staff of life; we speak of man’s working for his bread; we pray, "Give us this day our drily bread." And food represents man’s primary need as an animal being. Other things he may make shift to do without; food he must have, or he dies. When Christ, therefore, calls Himself our Bread, He uses the strongest figure at His command. He means that He is what we want — nay, what we must have — if we would live. He is as truly and essentially the proper food for the human soul as the fruits of the earth are for the human body. Upon our acceptance or rejection of Him will depend our spiritual life or death.

The Occasion.

Bread was much in the minds of those who listened to our Lord as He said these words. A great multitude had followed Him, having seen the miracles which He did. He had asked St. Philip, "Whence shall we buy bread, that these may eat?" With the five barley loaves and the two small fishes He had wondrously fed the multitude, and His disciples had filled twelve baskets with the fragments that were left. It was on the following day, after the night on which Jesus had come to the relief of His distressed disciples on the lake, that the people, finding Him, to their surprise, on the other side, ask Him anxiously, "When earnest Thou hither?" In reply He taxes them with a motive in seeking Him, which some of them at least must have felt that they deserved. "Verily, verily, I say unto you, ye seek Me, not because ye saw the signs, but because ye did eat of the loaves, and were filled." He adds the warning, "Labour not for the meat which perisheth, but for that meat which endureth to everlasting life."

These words constitute an introduction to what follows, and furnish a very searching preliminary test. Before going on to inquire as to how Christ is the Bread of Life there is the prior question for each of us — "Do I really, want Bread of Life, or are my aims exclusively material? Even in my desire to be connected with Christ and His Church, am I thinking mainly of temporal advantage — of what He can give me in the way of position, or repute, or comfort in this life?" Missionaries tell us of the extreme difficulty of knowing the real motives of their would-be converts, and of the numbers who expect something in return for their Christian profession, such as land, or influence, or the redress of their wrongs. We all need to put it very clearly before us that we are to seek first, i.e. chiefly, the kingdom of God and His righteousness. All good gifts, it is true, come from above. Our Saviour did not ignore the body; He came eating and drinking; He provided men with food and drink. But He makes it clear that these are not His distinctive and essential gifts. They are not what He came to offer, nor what we must seek Him for. The hunger and thirst He comes to satisfy are those of the human spirit, and the first necessity is that we really have that hunger and thirst.

Christ the Bread.

What is this heavenly food, then, that Christ bids us seek? It is Himself. "I am the Bread of Life; He that cometh to Me shall never hunger, and he that believeth on Me shall never thirst." By adding the word "thirst" He makes the figure a more perfect one, embracing the two great necessities of food and drink. If our Lord never actually says in so many words, "I am the Water of Life," He says practically the same to the woman of Samaria at the well, and also to the people at the Feast of Tabernacles. The parallel between food and drink is kept up throughout His teaching. As He speaks of living Bread, so He speaks of living Water. His words here, "If any man eat of this Bread, he shall live for ever," correspond to His words elsewhere, "The water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life." We must take the word "Bread" in the widest sense, indicating that He satisfies the wants of the soul as completely as food and drink satisfy those of the body.

In saying "I am the Bread of Life," our Lord refers in the first place to His source and being: where He comes from; what He is. In the second place, He refers to His purpose and work: what He achieves; what He bestows. The Bread of Life means the Bread which contains life in itself, and which is therefore able to give life unto the world. On the one hand, Christ comes to us living, and from the source of life. "I am the living Bread which came down from heaven." On the other hand, He comes to us that we may live, and that our life may be eternal. "If any man eat of this Bread, he shall live for ever." The two ideas are intimately connected; life begets life. "The Bread of God is He which (a) cometh down from heaven, and (b) giveth life unto the world." "As (a) the living Father hath sent Me, and I live by the Father; so ( b ) he that eateth Me, even he shall live by Me." In a word, the Bread of Life is both living and life-giving.

1. Living Bread.

The Bread of Life means, first, the Bread that comes to us living, and forms the source of life. "I am the living Bread which came down from heaven." He claims a heavenly origin, a Divine ancestry. He compares and contrasts Himself not only with the bread with which He has just fed the multitude, but with the manna by which God had sustained His people in the wilderness. Some of His hearers have referred to this manna, quoting the words, "He gave them bread from heaven to eat." Our Lord replies that He is the true Bread from heaven, as superior to the manna of the wilderness as to the loaves of His own giving. The Jews murmur at this, and ask how He can thus speak of coming down from heaven. He is only "Jesus the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know. How is it, then, that He saith, 'I came down from heaven’?" In reply, our Lord is extremely explicit as to His heavenly origin. Six or seven times throughout this discourse does He speak of Himself as having "come down from heaven." They had fallen into the common error of thinking that what they knew of His origin explained everything about Him. Familiarity, as it often does, had bred contempt. The prophet had no honour in his own country. Nor are they the last who have argued that because Jesus is human He cannot be Divine.. But men will argue in this way about anything. They will say that because man’s body may have been evolved from lower forms of life, his soul can have no real existence. Or they will argue that because a man has sprung from the people, he cannot have refined feelings or noble instincts^ But God’s ways of working are not limited by any such rules. He can make man in His own image, and so distinguish him from all the lower creation. He can put the fire of genius in the humblest peasant’s soul. He can incarnate Himself in all His fulness in one frail human form. In Jesus Christ we find not only the Bread, but the living, the heavenly Bread. The best gift is that which contains in it most of the giver; and so God’s best gift to man is not a book or a rule, but a Life. What God gives us in Christ is His own Life, and that is why Christ can speak of Himself as living and heavenly Bread. "In Him we have God, and in Him we touch the actual source of all life. In Him we have the one thing within our reach which is not earth-grown, the one uncorrupted source of life to which we can turn from the inadequacy, impurity, and emptiness of a sin-sick world."

2. Life-Giving Bread.

The words "Bread of Life," however, mean more than this. They mean not only that Christ has eternal life in Himself, but that He is the source of eternal life in others. "He that cometh to Me shall never hunger, and he that believeth on Me shall never thirst." "If any man eat of this Bread, he shall live for ever."

Observe the condition attached to the promise. It is described both metaphorically and literally; metaphorically by the word "eateth," literally by "cometh" and "believeth." The one use of bread is to be eaten, and the one way of benefiting by it is to eat it. With food on the one side and a hungry man on the other, eating is the natural and necessary consequence. You get no good by seeing or smelling or touching bread; you can only benefit by eating it, living on it, making it part of yourself. This, as applied to our bodily life, seems almost childishly simple. But it is what many men completely fail to realise in the spiritual life. Once be sure that Christ is the Bread of Life — the true, the living, the heavenly Bread — and then, surely, the only safe and sane course is to feed upon Him, to take His nature into yours, to fill yourself with His fulness, to assimilate Him and be partakers of Him. Yet that is where so many of us fail. We look, we hear, we touch, but we will not eat and live. We talk about Christ, read about Him, sing to Him, call ourselves by His name, associate ourselves with His Church; but we will not come to Him that we may have life; we will not let Him dwell in us, occupy us, transfigure us. What a power would Christians exercise in the world did their lives express the spirit of St. Patrick’s hymn —

Christ be with me, Christ within me,

Christ behind me, Christ before me,

Christ beside me, Christ to win me,

Christ to comfort and restore me,

Christ beneath me, Christ above me,

Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,

Christ in hearts of all who love me,

Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.

Acceptance is the condition; life is the and. The living Bread, from a living God, makes living men. "As the living Father hath sent Me, and I live by the Father; so he that eateth Me, even he shall live by Me." The bond is a living one throughout. Christ’s own meat and drink were to do the will of Him that sent Him, and ours must be to do the will of Him that has sent us. The result will be — life; the only life worth living.

The life, too, will be an eternal one; for this is a point on which our Lord insists with the most marked emphasis. If there is anything more emphatic than His reiteration of the phrase "I came down from heaven," it is His assurance of immortality contained in such words as "He shall live for ever," "He shall never die," "I will raise him up at the last day." The bread with which He had fed the multitude, wondrous though it might be, was only "meat which perisheth"; the other was "meat which endureth." Nay, the very manna given in the wilderness — bread from heaven though it was — was bread of which their fathers had eaten and were dead; whereas "he that eateth of this Bread shall live for ever." It must always be so. Live on what is temporary, evanescent, fleeting, and you yourself will become a mere creature of a day, possessing nothing that can endure to the end, no fruit that can remain. Live on what is permanent, eternal, immortal, and you yourself will have a place among the immortals; you will have that within you which cannot die. "The world passeth away, and the lust thereof; but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever." Poets and alchemists have dreamed of an elixir of life, by drinking which a man could secure perpetual life and youth. But Christ affords the only elixir that will not disappoint or embitter us. "If any man eat of this Bread, he shall live for ever." Apart from Him there is no immortality. Take His life into yours and you cannot die. You are one with God, because you live on Him Who lives on God.

Life through Death.

It is significant that in the latter part of His discourse our Lord finds even the word "Bread" insufficient to express His meaning, and changes it to a stronger and more specific term — "flesh." "The bread which I will give is My flesh, which I will give for the life of the world." This expression seemed to those who heard it even more harsh and strange than the former. They had "murmured at Him" when He called Himself the Bread from heaven. They now "strove among themselves, saying, How can this man give us his flesh to eat?" Yet there was a reason for the transition from the one term to the other. While bread and flesh both mean food, there is this difference between them, that flesh can become our food only through death. What is death to the one being is life to the other. We have already seen how the Bread of Life is both living and life-giving; life-giving because living. But it is only now that we are given the real connection between the two. It is by giving up His life that Christ gives life to others. Jesus had already contrasted Himself with the bread He had given to the hungry people, and with the manna rained from heaven in the wilderness. Here, however, He compares Himself to another and still more sacred food. This was the lamb of the paschal service, whose flesh was eaten by the people, and whose blood was sprinkled on their houses, in memory of God’s deliverance. When He says, "The bread that I will give is My flesh, which I will give for the life of the world," He is expressing the same truth emphasised in His later words, "This is My Body, which is broken for you.... This is My Blood of the new covenant, which is shed for many for the remission of sins." The law of death-in-life finds its full expression in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. He became poor that we might be rich; He suffered that we might reign; He died that we might live.

Thine the sharp thorns, and mine the golden crown:

Mine the life won, and Thine the life laid down.

Had Jesus merely spoken of our eating the Bread, we might have imagined that He was but referring to our copying the example of His earthly life. But when He speaks of our eating His flesh and drinking His blood, He touches a principle deeper and more vital. We are to believe on Him as the One Who died for us and lives again. We are to appropriate His sacrifice and make it our own. We are to act out in practice the beautifully suggestive words of St. Paul: "Always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body."

Christ the Bread of Life, then, means to us the indwelling Christ — the Christ in man. What is it that gives the Sacrament of the Holy Communion its eternal vitality? What makes it, under all forms and in spite of all controversies, the service of the Church? Largely, no doubt, our Saviour’s command, "This do in remembrance of Me." But this only takes us a step farther back. Why was the command given? we ask with all reverence. Why was this act, of all others, perpetuated? Surely because it responds to an essential want in man’s nature — that he must eat in order to live. Man’s principal need is not a strength without but a strength within; not a strength on which he must lean, but a strength by which he can stand. We are not merely to admire and follow Christ, but to possess Him re-incarnate within our own being. In Christ the Good Shepherd we have a Guide, a Friend. We know His voice, we feel His hand, we lean on His bosom. But in Christ the Bread of Life we can have Him within ourselves. His voice rings out in ours; His mark is on our forehead, His grace in our countenance, His strength in our arm. "Should any one," said the great German reformer, "knock at my breast and say, ‘Who lives here? ’ I should reply, * Not Martin Luther, but the Lord Jesus.’" Let us cling fast, then, to the truth expressed in the words, "I am the Bread of Life." Let us find in Christ the satisfaction, the nourishment, the strength of the soul. Let us see in Him the true, the living, the heavenly, the enduring Bread. Let us realise what He gives us, and how He lays down His life that it may be the source of new life in us. As He gives, let us receive. Making Him our very own, feeding on Him, strengthened by Him, we shall receive out of His fulness the gift of everlasting Life.