“I am the bread of life”
Powerful and yet familiar words. They speak profoundly to the special meaning and purpose of Thanksgiving. Ultimately, thanksgiving is a spiritual activity. To push it even further, I would argue that there is no true thanksgiving which is not a thanksgiving to God.
We are rather good about the idea of thanksgiving for something or other. We get that because we like to be on the receiving end. The idea of thanksgiving makes some kind of sense if we have been given something, especially if it is something which appeals to our appetites and desires. Where we fall down on the thanksgiving front is on the radical idea of thanksgiving to God for all and everything that exists. For that requires reflection and awareness, an aspect of self-consciousness. The deeper and more explicitly spiritual aspects of the act of thanksgiving reveal to us what runs completely counter to our culture of entitlement. You may like to have turkey, squash, potatoes, pumpkins, even zucchini, and so forth – certainly I do – but no, none of us deserves any of it. Even if we have raised and slaughtered the turkey, grown and harvested the various fruits and vegetables of creation, all of those things and our labour included depends radically and completely upon God and upon the good order of his creation.
We create nothing of ourselves. We are only secondary creators, acting in accord with the good order of God’s world and out of the idea of having been made in the image of God. God is the Creator. Thanksgiving reminds us of our human limitations and recalls us to God’s “bountiful goodness” as this Sunday’s Collect so wonderfully puts it. There can only be life and there can only be a bountiful harvest of edibles and delectables as well as a harvest of rational and spiritual pleasures and principles because of God’s great “bountiful goodness”.
That is the central spiritual insight of thanksgiving. It is less about thanksgiving for and more about thanksgiving to. Why? Because there can be no harvest whether of material or spiritual goods without God.
All this is mere prologue to the real thrust of our thanksgiving service. It is captured in the Gospel reading and in our text. Jesus says he is “the bread of life.” It is a rich and potent Scriptural image that reaches back to the themes of Israel’s desert wanderings and takes us into the heart of God. Jesus recalls the desert wanderings when Israel was fed with “manna from on high,” all their grumbling about preferring surf’n’turf back in Egypt notwithstanding! But even more, Jesus is making a statement of identity as well as providing a metaphor for our abiding in him. The passage is one of the seven so-called “I am” sayings of Jesus from John’s Gospel. They are a series of passages where Jesus offers a metaphor for our life in him but by way of identifying himself as God. In a way, it conflates the idea of God in himself and God as he is for us. The so-called “I am” sayings identify Jesus with the definitive revelation of God to Moses in the Burning Bush as “I am who I am,” the God who is “the beginning and the end of all creatures, especially of rational creatures” (Thomas Aquinas). The image of “the bread of life” focuses our minds on the simple but profound spiritual truth that all of our needs are found in Christ, in our life in him and his life in us.
“Food first, then ethics,” Bertold Brecht famously said. Bread first, then teaching and religion? It might seem so but there is the sad paradox of the human condition. As the philosopher Simon Critchley trenchantly observes, “the curious fact about human beings is that when you give them food, even more food than they can eat, when you shower them with every earthly blessing, then they will concoct new miseries for themselves, new neuroses and pathologies, and even a new ‘science’ to deal with those new neuroses and pathologies, psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, aromatherapy, reflexology, or whatever.” All available here in Windsor, I might add, and more. It is the malaise of our time. A prosperous time, at least for some, and yet a spiritually impoverished age, too, I fear. There is the ominous and growing gap between those that have and those that don’t. There are the anxieties and fears about old age and about the future for our children; very real fears and anxieties, to be sure. But the deeper question is about something entirely spiritual and theological. It is about what has meaning. It is about thanksgiving. It is about “the bread of life.”
“The bread of life.” Such a rich phrase. It gathers the harvest of things physical and material and things rational and spiritual into one cogent phrase. Bread does not grow on trees any more than things political and spiritual arise out of the ground full blown. They have to be nurtured and cultivated. There is the hard, hard necessity of work and prayer. Wheat tended and harvested from a thousand fields has to be turned into bread; grapes from a thousand vineyards have to be cultivated and harvested and turned into wine through the vintner’s art. These symbols of civilized life – bread and wine drawn by way of human labour from the goodness of the created order – now become the means of our spiritual life with God in Christ. And all by the Word of God by which all things are created and known in the love of God himself.
Perhaps it is best captured by that great woman theologian, Queen Elizabeth the First, who expresses the essential connection between Word and Bread so simply and beautifully, reminding us that our thanksgivings find their meaning in the great thanksgiving of the Son to the Father.
He was the
Word
That spake it;
He took the bread
And brake it;
And what that
Word
Did make it,
I do believe
And take it.
Only so shall we enter into the spirit of thanksgiving through the Word of him who says “I am the bread of life”.
“I am the bread of life”
Fr. David Curry
Harvest Thanksgiving/Trinity XX
October 13th, 2013