Bread Of Life

Elijah went a day’s journey into the desert, until he came to a broom tree and sat beneath it. He prayed for death saying: “This is enough, O LORD! Take my life, for I am no better than my fathers.” He lay down and fell asleep under the broom tree, but then an angel touched him and ordered him to get up and eat. Elijah looked and there at his head was a hearth cake and a jug of water. 

After he ate and drank, he lay down again, but the angel of the LORD came back a second time, touched him, and ordered, “Get up and eat, else the journey will be too long for you!” He got up, ate, and drank; then strengthened by that food, he walked forty days and forty nights to the mountain of God, Horeb. (1 Kings 19:4-8)

Our Church selected this reading from Kings as a way to introduce the Gospel reading (below), or at least so it seems.  Elijah ate and drank and was strengthen by an angel of the LORD after which he walked 40 days and 40 nights in the desert on his travel to the mountain of God.  We eat the Eucharist and sometimes drink the blood of Christ after our walk to the altar.  It’s our sustenance for every day’s journey when the troubles of the day can make us feel as if we are in a desert with broom trees under which we sit where perhaps we are angry, bitter, and resentful.  

The Eucharist serves to wake us up from under those trees and then do the following described in today’s second reading from Ephesians (4:30 – 5:2): Brothers and sisters: Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were sealed for the day of redemption. All bitterness, fury, anger, shouting, and reviling must be removed from you, along with all malice. And be kind to one another, compassionate, forgiving one another as God has forgiven you in Christ. So be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and handed himself over for us as a sacrificial offering to God for a fragrant aroma.

The Eucharist is our “manna from heaven,” our bread of life.  Our Gospel reading makes that clear: The Jews murmured about Jesus because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven,” and they said, “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph? Do we not know his father and mother? Then how can he say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” 

Jesus answered and said to them, “Stop murmuring among yourselves. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him, and I will raise him on the last day. It is written in the prophets: They shall all be taught by God. Everyone who listens to my Father and learns from him comes to me. Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father. 

Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the desert, but they died; this is the bread that comes down from heaven so that one may eat it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.” (John 6:41-51)

We eat the Eucharist, and we live if we believe.  That is our faith in the power of Christ.

Deacon David Pierce