Jesus, the Bread of Life

"I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world." 

The Jews began to argue sharply among themselves, "How can this man give us his flesh to eat?" 

Jesus said to them, "I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him. Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your forefathers ate manna and died, but he who feeds on this bread will live forever." He said this while teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum. 

On hearing it, many of his disciples said, "This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?"

When Jesus said these words, people must have thought He was nuts.  Eat His flesh and drink His blood?  Was this some sort of pagan human-sacrifice ritual?  Or was He just babbling something psychotic?  

On the surface, His words don't make sense... but those who heard and believed grasped a truth that is extremely profound...

They knew Him, that there was something different about Him.  He was a pure human being.  He walked through a world full of sinners, and He saw children.  Children who needed a Father's loving care, fallen people who needed strength, help, the inspiration of God's life to become... like Him.  He loved them with the heart of a loving God.  

They recognized Him as pure and holy.  And deep inside, they wanted that.  They wanted a piece of Him, of His character and essence.  When He offered them His flesh to "eat", His blood, the essence of His own life, to imbibe as part of themselves, He was really offering them the opportunity for regeneration.  To partake of the divine nature (II Pet. 1:4).  

"Lord," Peter said to Him, "You have the words of eternal life!"  

This is the Jesus I have come to know.  

A True Believer

When I first met my friend, Becky, I thought she was a little nuts.  She worked as a full-time "missionary" to college students on my campus and loved her life.  She had joy that was above any sense of pleasure or gladness I experienced on a day-to-day basis.  Some would say she was "disgustingly happy."  She was always talking about God-this and God-that, about what God had been "teaching" her and what He had been "doing" in her life.  

Part of me thought that was silly... just too simple and childish for my mind.  

I'd come to intellectualize my faith.  

At that time, sin had me by the throat in a stranglehold.  Perhaps that was the reason I felt so empty, felt the need to compromise my values to gain the support of those around me.  I felt unsupported by God.  In fact, I couldn't remember the last time we'd talked.  All the sermon topics I heard seemed dry and irrelevant, three steps removed from my daily life.  

(If you feel far apart from God, who moved?)  

So another part of me envied her... desperately.  

She had something that I did not have that attracted me.  Something I'd had as a child, and again as a teenager, something I missed.  She had a close relationship with God.  I remembered through talking with her that, as a child, I loved Jesus.  Pure and simple.  There was no power struggle over Your will, versus my will.  There was no guilt and shame looking into His eyes.  I just loved Him.  And I knew that He loved me.  He'd given His life for me, and I would do the same for Him.  

Slipping Away

I used to dream about my life and future as a missionary... about trekking into some remote jungle with a Bible under my arm and preaching the message of Jesus' love to those who hadn't heard the good news yet.  I remember fantasizing about my own martyrdom.  I believed that someday, my faith would be tried at gunpoint, or in prison.  In such a moment, there would be no hesitation.  I would say "yes" to Jesus, fly joyfully into his arms, and pray for my persecutors' salvation.  

But then something came between me and God.  I didn't care so much about being a missionary any more, because... honestly, I didn't care about the gospel any more.  It seemed to me an irrelevant formula for getting into heaven.  A "sinner's prayer" for pardon--cheap words--could never wholly reconcile ME, a sinner, with my Creator.  Maybe in heaven someday.  But not here, not now.   

That "something" standing between us was the sin of Lust.  

It was never my intent to abandon a pure, godly view of relationships.  My dream since I was a child was to fall in love with someone, to keep myself pure for that one person, to commit myself to a Forever with that person, forsaking all others, not daring to even desire, dream, or think about a union with anybody else, either before or apart from that one blessed one.  But somewhere along the line, I began to suspect that my dreams were unattainable.  I was surrounded by young Christians whose attitudes were shaped more by the media and our culture than by the Bible.  The norm seemed to speak against my outdated, restrictive ideas about sex and love.  Premarital sex wasn't the norm, but "sexual immorality" was rampant, as was the idea that anything "up to" and hopefully stopping short of The Act was an acceptable pastime for yourself and your boyfriend.  

Fallen From Grace?

I eventually left college, my body technically pure, but my mind polluted.  My dreams of a godly relationship were dashed--I knew what I wanted, but my thoughts and my behavior seemed to repel any godly man within a 100-yard radius.  Instead, I found myself with someone like me who, languid in faith (and in any recognizable sentiment toward me) at least respected my physical boundaries due to his Mennonite roots.  We dated for six months, and for six months I was was living a lie... unhappy to the core.  

The sad thing was, we both thought this was a godly relationship.  

In the middle of this bland Shoo-Fly pie, someone dropped a tantalizing cherry of real attraction.  A guy I'd known for about two years--who'd had a HUGE crush on me for two years--offered to help me out with a Christian social-justice-type project of mine.  I gladly accepted his help, especially since I felt unsupported by my boyfriend, who had a lecture on flies to go to that evening.  We started talking more, and I realized that (horror of horrors), I was "in love" with him, and not the guy I was with.  

I began to rationalize my way into a new scenario.  I was tired of fake romance, I told myself.  I wanted a "love affair."  (Mental warning light going off yet??)  

What I really wanted, deep down, was someone who cared about me.  But neither me, nor my boyfriend, nor the third party, was in a spiritual state capable of sustaining a relationship that based on mutual attraction, but on unselfish love.  It was all wrong from the beginning.  I did the "right thing" on the outside.  I broke up with my boyfriend, and then waited approximately two months to clear his aroma out of my life before letting my friend know that I was single again.  He was thrilled and asked me out on the spot.  

On the night that he asked me out, he also told me that he was an atheist.  

I totally had not seen that coming!  I'd always thought I was pretty good at recognizing my own "kind".  My ex-boyfriend, at least, had led me on for a good while in saying and doing the right things, until I began to realize that his spiritual life was as empty as were his affections for me.  He lived a life in which he and God were good neighbors, and I could never imagine us as a missionary couple.  But someone who openly hated God?  Could I see myself with this person for the rest of my life?  It would, at the very least, dash any hope I had of serving God on the mission field together.  

Perhaps I was ready to abandon that dream after all.  

I spent that night in turmoil, alone with my thoughts.  A door into horrible pit had opened up before me: the thought of life, even eternal life, without God.  That was where I was headed, wasn't it?  I could hang onto my faith and pretend I was happy.  Or I could renounce God and consider myself a "Non-Christian," free to do whatever I pleased.  I couldn't be an unbeliever.  Intellectually, mentally, spiritually, I was unable to deny the truth of Christ's life, death, and resurrection, nor the continual acts of God in my daily life--at least in my past life.  

Where, then, was He when I NEEDED Him?  When my soul was crying out for HELP, real help, right here and right now?  If faith could move mountains, why couldn't He change something as small and as wretched as my own heart?  

I could no longer pretend to be Christian.  My life no longer reflected Christ.  Something my atheist friend had said stuck with me, pounded like the surges of blood in my brain as I sat in church that morning:  

"You tell me that you're living proof that God exists?  Sara, I don't see any evidence in your life that would prove to me that there's a God.  You're just a nice person--there's no magic in that."

All right, God, I prayed.  If You want me, You can have me.  All of me.  But if You want me to live like a Christian, You're going to have to do the work, because I've failed.  I've failed, God, and there is nothing more I can do to make things right.  I've tried and tried, and I can't change... You're going to have to change me.  Please!  Bring me to life.  

Rivers in the Desert

From that moment, my life began to change.  I emailed my new boyfriend with a rare confidence: I would accept his invitation, I told him, but he needed to know that God was first in my life, and that if he dated me, he would come to encounter the true Jesus Christ.  For our first (and only) "date," I dragged him along with me to a picnic sponsored by my youth group, "CrossSeekers," of which my friend Becky and her husband were the leaders.  

And that's when God began to work.  

We were sitting at the table, enjoying a hot lunch of overdone hamburgers and potato salad.  The girl next to me was showing off her German, by naming all the foods on the table (what can I say?  I hang out with nerdy people.)  

"Anya," she said to the girl across from me.  "You speak German, don't you?"  I had never seen this girl before.  She came late to meetings from orchestra practice; I left early.  Our paths rarely crossed.  

"No," said someone else.  "She speaks another language."  

Anya smiled.  "Da," she said.  

My ears pricked.  "Russian?" I exclaimed.  "Ot-kuda ti?" (where are you from?)  

"I'm from Ukraine!"  

"Oh my gosh!  I've been to Ukraine!  I always wanted to be a missionary there!"   

We babbled on in Russian for the next five minutes, much to the consternation of everyone else at the table.  

"Do you know, there's a Ukrainian Baptist church up toward Philly?" she said.  "You should come!  It'd be so nice to have you visit us."  

I had heard about the Baptists in Ukraine (loosely related to American Baptists through German roots).  They were the few believers considered a "threat."  They were the ones who resisted the Communist efforts to keep the churches silent.  They would meet in secret to worship and tell others about Christ even when it meant beatings, imprisonment, or death.  I very much wanted to meet these people.  We exchanged emails, and she sent me the church's address.  

Two Sundays later, a girlfriend and I walked into a clean, quiet foyer in the middle of a corporate prayer.  I tried my broken Russian on the usher, who escorted us to the only loosely-packed pew about three rows from the front.  Upon seeing us, a wrinkled old woman in her nineties jumped up and insisted on giving us her seat.  She moved to a front pew, while my friend and I settled in.  I pulled out a notepad and began to translate the snatches of Ukrainian that I understood from Brother Alex's sermon.  

He was preaching from I John chapter 1:  "If we claim to have fellowship with Him, and yet walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth.... If we confess our sin, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sin and to cleanse us of all unrighteousness."  

"We cannot live a life without sin on our own strength," he said.  "The Holy Spirit gives us the power to live a new life."  

What?  The Holy Spirit?  I knew about the Holy Spirit in theory--the [slightly off-centered] church where I was brought up taught that the Spirit was present at our meetings, that He gave us power to perform miracles (sometimes), and sometimes people fell down "in the Spirit" or prayed in tongues.  It was all nice, but useless information to me.  But I had no idea that the Spirit of God would actually help me to stop sinning and change my heart.  Yes, I believed God would "cleanse" us of guilt in His eyes--cleanse us in theory.  But to actually change ME?  

Could He do it?  Would He choose to?  Please choose to! I prayed, as we knelt in response to the sermon.  A few others poured out similar heartfelt prayers aloud before the congregation.  

Then they passed the bread, and the cup, after a kindly exhortation from the aging pastor to "Examine yourselves, brothers and sisters," and confess our sin to Christ, accepting His righteousness.  I took a sip of red juice from the same cup shared by the preacher, the pastor, the old woman in the front row who had given her seat for us, and her granddaughter, Anya, who smiled delightedly at me from the choir.  Something was different about the women up there.  A lot of them had fluffy bangs, or white headscarfs (from the "old country), but that wasn't it.  They were dressed modestly.  There were no low-plunging necklines, no clingy sweaters or spaghetti straps... no Victorian-lace collars or frumpy dresses, either.  I saw about a dozen girls my age, beautiful young girls, dressed... modestly!  

That was a new concept for me.  I'd honestly gotten used to seeing a bit of everyone's cleavage when they bent over, Christian or not.  Suddenly self-conscious, I pulled the edges of my jacket up over my exposed shoulders.  The sleeveless blouse that had been such a great fashion pick that morning suddenly felt like a terrible idea compared to the sisters around me.  

Something else became apparent as I talked with these girls after the service... and in the evening service... and in the youth-gathering that followed the evening service.  (I spent almost all of that first day in church).  These girls weren't out for the kill.  They were like lambs in a world full of wolves.  No one was preoccupied in impressing the guys, whom they treated as brothers and equals.  They approached me with kindness, total acceptance, and generosity.  They invited me to participate in all the youth activities.  They welcomed me... as a sister!  When I am around other women, there is normally an underlying sense of competition, of eye-scanning bodies and outfits, of social comparison, cliques, jealousy, or at the very least, timidity toward a stranger one's own age.  None of that here.  

It took me a while to comprehend why I immediately saw in these girls the highest standard of Christian purity.  I only knew that looking at them and talking to them made me want to run home and take a cold shower, figuratively.  I felt deeply convicted as I realized the depth of my impurity of thought and attitude in comparison to theirs.  

Slowly, my world began to unravel in a good way.  I had hope.  I was beginning to realize that change was possible, that if others could live in such a Christlike way, I could too.  

Jesus changed me, but He did not do so in a vacuum.  I didn't wake up one day a new creature, because change for free-will humans still involves motivation, desire, and obedience.  He provided me with the inspiration of life, the desire to change, and good role models.  He used the hands and lives of other people who loved Him, to love me and to help shape me into His image.  

Today as I take communion with other believers, I thank God that I can "partake in the divine nature" by His grace.  I don't count myself worthy by virtue of anything I've done.  Because when I fell on my knees that day and begged Him for help, it was with a heightened sense of my own inadequacy to keep His word.  

Today I know why Jesus called Himself the "Bread of Life."  It is because He is more than a formula, more than a technical way of justifying God's pardon of us.  He is Himself sinless and holy.  We cannot be anything like Him, without Him.  If we were only justified, we would sin again and again and again--all the while bearing tremendous shame despite the hope that His blood will cover our sins in the final judgment.  But Jesus does more than that.  His blood cleanses us of sin, transforms our minds, makes us talk and act and think like He does.  His flesh is true bread, and His blood true drink.  Only He has in Himself the life that quickens our mortal bodies and changes us.  

Each time that I take the bread and the cup, I am reminded of God's grace more and more.  I don't believe that the elements themselves save you; they're a ritual to remind our hearts of a spiritual truth.  When we "eat His flesh and drink His blood," we are really accepting His power into our inadequacy, His holiness to wash away our corruption.  It is we who sin, and are unworthy of His grace.  But God came down that we might no longer be slaves to sin, but free in regard to righteousness.  It is He who changes us into the image of His Son, an ongoing miracle that will continue from this moment unto eternity.