Bread of Life

I love to make bread. I must confess that I cheat and use a bread-making machine, but the end product is wonderful. At first I was rather scientific in my production methods, carefully measuring out each ingredient. Now I feel more artistic, throwing in this, that and the other with a confidence which comes from experience. You set the machine to turn itself on during the night and then wake up to find the house infused with the smell of freshly baked bread.

Bread is powerful stuff. It represents the most basic of all food. Yet to break and share bread also has connotations of sharing, friendship, fellowship and communion. To break bread with others is to build relationships with them in a special way. When I was a curate, my Vicar used to hold an ecumenical breakfast once a month for the leaders of all the denominations in town. The town was designated as a Local Ecumenical Partnership, but somehow relationships had not really taken off as they might have done. The introduction of the breakfast changed all that and, as people broke bread together (and ate freshly laid eggs from the vicarage hens) friendships were born and the LEP took on energy and life.

It is no wonder that Jesus shared meals with others, often with his disciples, yet also often with people that otherwise respectable people would not be seen dead sharing food. On the night he was betrayed he shared in new last supper with his friends and he infused the breaking and sharing of bread with a profoundly deep meaning. When all this is over, he told them, meet together and do this in remembrance of me. Even then, his disciples cannot have comprehended what was to come. Jesus would die the shameful death of crucifixion, yet on the third day he rose from the grave to the new life of the resurrection. What had seemed a defeat was now a glorious victory and those disciples remembered the words of Jesus and began to meet as a new community, empowered by the Spirit, as they broke bread together.

Do this in remembrance of me. Today we still take bread and wine, give thanks over them, break the bread and share them. It brings the reality of a real body broken, and real blood out poured, into the present moment of our lives. It does so in a way that binds us together into a community, whose sense of identity is forged by the shared experience of being sinners for whom Christ has died, yet also inheritors of the new world of the resurrection life. The risen Christ is profoundly and vividly present in our midst as we share this sense of deep communion with him, and so also with one another. And if we cannot share such communion, because we no longer agree on whatever the contentious issue of the moment might be, then that only goes to show that we have forgotten our Lord’s command. It no longer is the shared experience of being drawn to the cross that defines us, for we have become as Pharisees, defining ourselves (and indeed others) by earthly values and perceptions, rather than seeing in one another fellow sinners for whom Christ’s body’s was broken.

Do this is remembrance of me. Did we understand Christ right? Did he just mean that we should gather in churches and engage in rituals with bread and wine? As I have already indicated, I think there is a real power in doing just that, particularly if we allow Christ to use that action to draw us into what we dare to call ‘The Body of Christ’, a body defined not by agreement with one another, but by a shared experience of being drawn into the saving action of God in Christ. Yet surely Jesus meant more than that. ‘Do this in remembrance of me’ also means that we are invited to take up our cross and follow Jesus in self-giving love for a broken world. To be the Body of Christ is to accept a vocation to be as bread, broken to feed a hungry world. At the Last Supper, Jesus also stooped to wash his disciples’ feet. What it means to give ourselves in service for a broken world must be reflected in how we represent Christ, as broken bread, as we too stoop in service and engage in the real lives of all to whom we are a neighbour.

Bread smells delicious and appetising. That might lead us to ask how we smell as a church. Does our common life have the enticing smell of something that is delicious, satisfying and life-giving? Recently I was talking in these terms to one person and he replied that what he smelled in the church today is decay. For many, in our present age, what is smelled in the church is corruption and moral decadence, as more and more examples of abuse surface. Many churches seem to define themselves in terms of what others deem to be misogyny or homophobia, which produces a smell that is more than unpleasant. It is deeply revolting. Whenever a church splits off by defining itself in terms of this belief or that, it no longer lives as a Church in which its members are defined by a shared vocation, to lose one’s life in self-giving service of others - in remembrance of Christ - for the sake of Christ - with the face of Christ - as the very bread of Christ, broken open to feed a hungry world. So the Church festers and decays, as we ignore the invitation to be the very bread of life that he came to give to the world. Yet there is hope. All over the world, in so many places and situation, whenever anyone gives of themselves, for the sake of Christ, and with the costliness of that same Divine love, then something of the Kingdom of God is revealed at that moment and smell of the Living Bread of Life fills the air.