Bread

Digest this if you can:

“I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.”

These “bread of life” sayings of Jesus leave many bewildered. You will only begin to make sense of them or of Jesus himself when you learn to:

(a) discern the different layers of language, and (b) plumb the varying depths of hunger.

In other words, the only way perhaps to grasp these difficult “ontological” (or identity-laden “I am”) words of Jesus is to have a sapin-sapin (or layered, 3-D) sense of language and human longing.

For (a), try chewing on the words of a poem or song or any refrain or mantra you keep rewinding in your soul. When you honestly try to make sense of the shadows and the light, the mysteries of sorrow or joy or glory, monochromatic prose inevitably fails you.

This is not to say that language about God and life is hopeless. This is just to accept that God is bigger than our words, so that we need not worry if we don’t get “it” the first few times. After all, language about big stuff like God and truth can only be, in the words of mathematicians, asymptotic or tangential.

Those who are inclined to literal definitions, i.e. one-dimensional, fundamentalist and therefore false clarities, are likely to find themselves in good company with that first audience who heard these words of the Lord with furrowed foreheads. They could not swallow (or stomach) the whole thing.

Someone once gave me feedback that my homilies were not chicken soup for the soul. They were more like bistek (na maraming litid) [beefsteak (with many ligaments)]. What can I say? Next time, I will work harder in the kitchen of my mind to marinate and tenderize the sentences.

In the seventies, if Bread was not a band, it was another word for money. Sori pare, wala akong bread ngayon [Sorry brother, I have no bread today]. A somewhat easy metaphor I must admit to signify currency. Well, at least, whether bread was rice or bread was money, we knew that bread was something we could not do without.

In the Gospel story today, we see Jesus drawing parallels between himself and the manna that graciously came down from heaven to feed Israel in the desert. Either they had forgotten about the desert or they were not feeling hungry. In any case, they who heard him did not get it.

Which brings us to (b), the other premise we need to make sense of these “bread of life” words of Jesus. That condition is hunger.

If you wish to “get” what Jesus gives or means to give when he says that he is the bread of life, go to the places and times that leave you hungry.

Where do you go to get hungry? You can go to a place of plenty or a space that’s empty. You go to the desert. And if you are sincere with yourself, you do not have to go far to get hungry.

One suggestion is to go to a place of prodigal abundance and opulence. This is not to say that the rich and the powerful are generally empty. The contrast is just all the starker when you find hunger stalking such a place.

Whether it was true or not, when I read in the news about our leaders dining at posh Le Cirque and those exotic french-sounding words on the menu, I grew hungry. But not hungry as in salivating hungry. Hungry as in desert empty. Hungry as in hyper-acidified and ulcerated hungry.

When I went to the funeral of Cory, I felt pangs of hunger. We all took to the desert, mourning her loss. She who said yes to leading us out of those terrible egyptian years of martial rule, she left us hollowed out, purified, longing to believe again in ourselves, in the power of good over evil, and in the benevolence of our God.

“This is the bread that came down from heaven. Unlike your ancestors who ate and still died, whoever eats this bread will live forever.”

Eating, yet still dying. Sated, yet still empty. Fulfilling, yet still longing.

There at the Last Supper Jesus told his friends that the bread that was his body was about to be taken and broken and given. Something new was about to happen: a different Passover, a new exodus from Egypt, through the desert, to the Promised Land.

Today in the Eucharist, we shall stand in line to receive the bread of life, the body of Christ, the lamb of God. May we line up out of hunger. Even with broken words, may we have the courage to name our longing, and beg to take him in deep into our lives.

He is the bread of life. The one who eats of his body shall live forever. I hope and pray to God someday we get it.

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