Bread

 I was listening to the radio yesterday - a sort of documentary style thing about the history of bread. ( I know, its amazing what Radio 4 offers you whilst you are driving ) and it made me think about Jesus calling Himself the bread of heaven.   As with so many things, we filter these words through our own modern understanding of what bread is.   We recognise that it symbolises a staple , fundamentally essential part of our diet.  And that He was saying that we need Him even more than we need food for our bodies.   But listening to the radio yesterday I began to wonder if He was saying more than that.

The guy on the radio was trying to make his own bread from scratch.  And by that I mean he was planting wheat, harvesting it, threshing it, milling it, then working his flour into bread and baking it to eat.  The part I caught was all about the threshing process.  Mechanical threshing machines were only invented in the late 1700s , mechanical harvesters even later than that.  So for most of history, and certainly in Bible times, people were planting, harvesting and threshing by hand.   It was massively time and labour consuming and I have to confess I did wonder why on earth anyone bothered.  Surely there were less labour intensive ways of eating?  It must have been easier and cheaper to catch a rabbit or a fish than to make a loaf of bread.  

The time it takes to make a loaf of bread from planting the wheat/rye/barley seed to baking the loaf is  huge.  The planting is back breaking, the harvesting is hot and heavy work and the threshing is messy, dusty, exhausting and time consuming.  So why did people spend so much of their lives making bread? Maybe because it was a reliable source of calories?  Wheat stays in one place.  Once you have seen it through any bad weather and insect attack you are pretty much assured a constant supply.   Bread can be eaten with anything and making it was cheap - some flour and a little oil was pretty much all that was needed to make a flatbread.   We head off down to the shops and pick up a loaf.  They built the making of bread into the fabric of their everyday lives.  It was probably a whole family enterprise.

So when Jesus said He was the Bread of Life........  

When Jesus said that man can not live by bread alone......

I suspect that when He said those things people understood something which we maybe don't quite get in our Hovis/Kingsmill/granary/sliced white world. He was saying ' Come to me and you won't need to work and toil any more for your very subsistence . You won't have to worry and fret about how you are going to survive.  You wont have to spend half your life supplying your own needs.  In me life is free, nourishing and always available. I am the Bread of Life'