I am the bread that came down
from heaven
Which do you find more difficult to embrace: that
Jesus is human or that Jesus is divine?
If you were in church yesterday, the second Sunday
of Lent, you may have heard Nicodemus - a member of the Jewish ruling council
in Jerusalem – grappling with difficult questions about the identity of Jesus
and trying to reconcile Jewish orthodoxy with the teaching of Jesus (John 3.1-17).
The lectionary that we are using for our Lenten
readings offers no respite. Today, it hits us with similar questions – again
from John’s gospel - about who Jesus is and where he comes from.
The Jews question Jesus’s assertion that he has come
down from heaven – they know his earthly parentage. Jesus plays with the image
of the bread that God provided when the Israelites were following Moses in the
wilderness (Exodus 16) – an image very familiar to the Jews (John 6:31), though
apparently they cannot grasp how the new and living bread is different from the
old.
It is tempting to dwell on the comforting, familiar
image of the bread (“give us that food always”) and to skate quickly over the
implications of the accompanying label “of heaven” – an unusual geographical
indicator. The divinity of Jesus is awe-inspiring, and perhaps also disturbing,
even terrifying, as we glimpse the magnitude of the claim that: “He is the
reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being” (from
today’s epistle reading – the opening chapter of the Letter to the Hebrews).
But isn’t it just as awe-inspiring, just as mind-blowing, that Jesus was fully
human, that he came down from heaven to save us and feed us?
“Blessed are they, says Christ, that hunger and
thirst, for they shall be satisfied. And Christ is best able so to say, being
himself the bread.” - Austin Farrer, ‘The Crown of the Year’
Christ
Sermonizing on the Bread from Heaven, c. 1520
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