Traffic jams and living bread

Creating traffic jams is easy and hardly a way of improving the life of the majority of people. How you actually define life in terms of quality, leave alone achieve it, will vary according to your viewpoint. Our definition will definitely include opportunities for education, health care and employment, but it should go a good deal further. It has to enshrine the actual protection of people through laws that are respected and enforced. When all these are in place then a person begins to breathe freedom.

What next? Well, today we celebrate an event that will never hit the headlines but which, for many Christians, takes the story a good deal further. “I am the living bread … and whoever eats this bread will live forever.” We have an amazing capacity for life which we sense but can never lay hands on. Let’s face it: we are pretty restless and are all the time searching for something beyond us. That is healthy and good and what we are made for.

The promise of Jesus is “life”. We know life. Whatever our sporting, academic or professional capacity we know the joy of achievement in some measure. We really feel good when we have done something and someone says, “Well done!” Yet we would like to go on to greater things. The media is full of people who are never satisfied, whatever they achieve. Teams may be in the habit of winning but they take a defeat as a disaster!

Jesus offers himself, his life, his teaching, his healing, his self-giving, his death and his rising from the dead – all in one simple sign: bread. His “I am” echoes the revelation to Moses in the desert (Exod 4:13), “I am He who is” (Yahweh). The manna in the desert was a sign of this bread. For many Christians the Bread of the Eucharist is the very presence of Jesus. Participating in that bread is participating in the life death and resurrection of the Son of God.