The Lord of the Bread
“Jesus said to them, ‘I am the bread of life; he who comes to me shall not hunger, and he who believes in me shall never thirst.’”
John 6:35
During this last year of the COVID-19 pandemic when we were unable to gather in St. Martin’s Church for worship, I, like many of you, suffered the longest separation from Holy Communion I have ever experienced since I was confirmed in 1953. It was a spiritually difficult time and made me appreciate the importance of that bit of bread and all it represents.
Our English word “lord” derives from old Anglo-Saxon word “loafward,” which means “keeper of the bread.” (Webster’s New World Dictionary) The lord of the manor kept the bread and thus had great power and authority over his dependents. The meal at the center of the Christian faith, where bread is freely shared, is a dramatic witness to a world where some people will not eat together and where many go hungry because no one will feed them; a world where the powerful “lord” it over those less fortunate; a world where, as the Rev. Dr. Tom Bagby often said, “Your checkbook gives ample evidence of the lord you serve.”
John 6:51 reveals a different kind of Lord, a Keeper of the Bread who does not keep it for Himself. This Lord shares the staff of life with hungry people freely and sometimes miraculously! “Come to me,” Jesus says, “and I will give you the ‘bread of life.’”
“Come to me,” Christ calls over and over to us, but we are too good at making lords of our own to listen to His voice. The great Christian theologian Rheinhold Niebuhr said a generation ago that “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.” How hard it is for us to get down off our own thrones and come to Christ! Yet, when we do, the Lord meets us with open hands. The Keeper of the Bread is gracious and generous, willing and able to give us all we need for abundant life. All we truly need to do is to come to Christ with open hands and hearts, and we will receive “the Bread of Life.”
