Bread of Life: How Does It Taste?

Suppose you are delivering a meal to a man who hasn't eaten in three days. When you go to the Chef to pick up the meal he has it in a special container and asks you not to open it. He tells you that this is the best meal he has ever prepared, and it is designed perfectly to satisfy the taste and hunger of the starving man. Now you know the Chef personally and trust him with your life, so you agree to deliver the unseen meal to the starving man. How do you suppose that you should convince the starving man to eat the meal once you reach him? To some this may seem like a strange question. The man will not have to be convinced. Obviously the aroma of the meal will cause him to go into a frenzy and tackle you in order to get to the food. However, as you are on your way you realize that you don't even notice the aroma of the meal. Perhaps the container is blocking the smell. Or maybe on your journey you have just become used to the aroma and do not notice it anymore. In any case, you begin to ask yourself some questions. Surely the Chef wouldn't mislead you, but what if the meal isn't as great as it's supposed to be? What if the starving man isn't as impressed with the Chef's cooking as you are? You look down and notice that you have a Snickers bar setting in the cup holder of your vehicle. So you begin to reason with yourself. You think, "This meal may not be very appealing to the starving man, so I will offer him this Snickers bar and tell him that he can have the Snickers bar if he will just take the meal."

This seems like a crazy scenario, and granted that no metaphor is perfect, but does it not sound familiar to you? Jesus said, "I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst."(John 5:35 ESV) I don't think it is by accident that Jesus associates Himself with a substance that we not only need to survive, but we also have a deep longing for. It is true that if we do not eat and drink we will die. But no one eats and drinks because he thinks, "If I don't eat and drink I will die of starvation." Instead, when we eat and drink we do so because we are hungry and we are thirsty. We eat and drink not just because we need to do so to survive. We eat and drink because we want to. So it is with the Bread of Life. We shouldn't partake of this Bread just because we think to ourselves, "If I don't eat I will die." Rather, we should partake because we are hungry and we want to eat.

But so often, like the previous story, when we are hungry we fear that the meal that has been prepared perfectly to satisfy our hunger and sustain our life will not really do what it has been promised to do. So we begin to look elsewhere thinking that something else might satisfy our hunger. And the things we choose to fill ourselves with, though they seem admirable, noble, and even religious, are like eating garbage compared to the Bread that is offered to us. And now, since we are full, when the Bread is brought to us we don't desire it as we were meant to desire it. I wonder how many times I have opened the Word of God with apathy. And I wonder how many times my ears have heard the Gospel and I have not savored it because I was already full on admirable, noble, religious garbage. It baffles me that Paul could say "For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain." (Phil. 1:21) and "For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us." (Romans 8:18). I think Paul was able to say this because he hungered for the Bread, he feasted on the Bread. It fulfilled him, and it tasted good.