Readings:
Exodus 16: 2-4, 9-15;
Psalm 78:23-29;
Ephesians 4: 1-16;
John 6: 24-35

Collect:
Gracious Father,
revive your Church in our day,
and make her holy, strong and faithful,
for your glory’s sake
in Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.

Reflection

This week’s gospel reading is the first part of a long sequence in John’s gospel (and in the lectionary) in which Jesus talks about bread: about heavenly and earthly bread, bread which lasts and bread which perishes, and what it means to say that Jesus himself is the bread of life. We might be reading quite a lot about bread over the next few weeks! 

Bread has many resonances within and beyond scripture. Last week’s story of the feeding of the five thousand is just one of many meals in which Jesus breaks bread with people. We might think of him coming to supper with Zacchaeus the tax collector, or eating at Bethany with his friends Martha, Mary and the newly-risen Lazarus. We might think of the times when, in the breaking of bread, something is revealed about who Jesus is: in the Upper Room as he declares “this is my body”, or in the house at Emmaus where the disciples have not seen that it is Jesus with whom they have been walking and talking, but suddenly in the breaking of bread “their eyes were opened and they recognised him.” And of course, when Jesus himself teaches his friends to pray he recognises the importance of bread: “give us today our daily bread.”

For Jesus’ disciples too, bread would have had scriptural resonances, and in today’s reading we hear them discussing with Jesus one of the best known ‘bread stories’ from the Old Testament: the manna in the wilderness. Jesus draws some interesting contrasts and comparisons between that kind of bread – “the food which perishes” – and the kind of bread he is offering – “the food that endures for eternal life”. 

The disciples want to know what work they need to do to receive this kind of bread. But Jesus is offering not only a different kind of bread, but a different kind of work: “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” This is not the kind of work which depends on human effort or exertion, on trying a bit harder or doing a bit more. It is the kind of work which depends on a willingness to turn and re-turn to God, to live in the process of continual conversion of heart and transformation of life to which Jesus calls us. 

There is another contrast here with the story of Moses and the manna in the wilderness. Moses gives bread, but Jesus is bread. “I am the bread of life.” The life-giving sustenance which Jesus offers is less about what he does and more about who he is. And so it is with the life he calls us into: the work of believing is less about what we do and more about who we are: transformed and transforming disciples who recognise in Jesus the bread we need.

Ruth Harley