REFLECTION
THE BREAD OF LIFE DISCOURSE (I)
Martí Colom
Food that endures forever
In the Sunday Masses of these last few weeks we have heard portions of the “bread of life discourse,” in which Jesus insists over and over again that he is food for all. It is a long section of John’s Gospel, one that begins after the scene in which Jesus feeds a crowd with five loaves of bread and two fish (Jn 6:1-15) and then covers the rest of chapter six until its ending (6:71).
I would like to reflect a bit upon two moments of this chapter. The first is Jn 6:27, when on the day after the multiplication of the loaves Jesus talks to the same crowd he has fed and tells them: “Do not work for food that perishes but for the food that endures for eternal life”.
Beyond the more spiritual (and certainly appropriate) interpretation, according to which with these words Jesus wants to underline the importance of living with our eyes fixed on horizons that go beyond the present world, it seems to me that the text also allows for a more practical or “earthly” interpretation.
Jesus sees the crowd: they have gone after for him because they had been given to eat. He immediately understands that a relationship of dependency has been created between the crowd and himself. They are, let us remember, the same men and women from whom he moved away because “they were going to come and carry him off to make him king” (6:15). Jesus knows that no dependency is good, that the Father wants us to be free, autonomous. That is why he encourages them to work for the bread that endures forever. “The food that perishes” is the nourishment that others have to give you, for you do not know how to generate it. Someone offers it to you, you eat it and right away you need to extend your hand again asking for more. The food that endures forever is the nourishment that one knows how to produce, which therefore allows someone to be autonomous. The food that never ends is analogous to the interior spring of living water that Jesus promised to the Samaritan woman (Jn 4:14), which will free her from having to go to the well day after day. Jesus is inviting those around him to discover their own dignity, to experience God’s presence in themselves, and thus to understand that they have no need of any king, chief or charismatic leader with answers to every question, since they have in themselves the potential to move on, in their own right. To make this discovery is to find the bread that endures forever.
This passage can thus shed light over the way in which we live our faith and carry out our ministry. It can help us to understand that every time that we, as priests, religious or committed lay people create dependencies from those whom we serve towards us, then we are using criteria that are very different from those of the Gospel. Our mission is the same mission that moved Jesus: to help those we serve so that they can discover their own capacities to grow and evolve (as difficult as this may be). To proclaim the Gospel is, above anything else, to help individuals become aware of their own worth as loved sons and daughters of the Father. That is why our message is a liberating one: because it implies the realization of God’s presence in oneself –the living bread that endures and the spring of water that never ends.
Obviously, it will then be desirable that from a situation of healthy autonomy we may be willing to link our lives to the lives of others, forming community with them. It would indeed be very sad if we were to use our newly obtained autonomy to lead selfish and individualistic lives, with an air of “since I am capable to provide for my own needs, then I am interested in no one else.” But this is a risk that we must run, because what is undeniable is that only free persons, working for the bread that endures forever, will be able to create a Christian community worthy of this name. Individuals who are dependent on the bread that perishes may form tribes, clans, gangs, sects or caricatures of family, but never authentic communities living the Gospel of Jesus.
In a later reflection we will meditate on the other moment of the bread of life discourse that we wanted to comment.
