2131AFC072821 – Bread on the water
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Ecclesiastes 11:1 – 1 Send out your bread upon the waters, for after many days you will get it back.
Deuteronomy 8:3 – 3 He humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna, with which neither you nor your ancestors were acquainted, in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord*. (*or by anything that the Lord decrees)
John 6:35 – 35 Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.
Matthew 5:6 – 6 Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
Aloha nui loa, ʻŌmea! Grace and Peace to each of you from God our Father and our Lord, Jesus the Christ, in the Power of the Holy Spirit. Well, once again we have a passel of verses in our Key Verse section, so let’s see what the Lord has in mind for this coming Sunday.
We are going to be tooling around in the Gospel of John for awhile, specifically in John 6:22-59. This section of the Gospel of John is referred to as The Bread of Life Discourse and is part of Jesus’ teachings at the Synagogue in Capernaum. That discourse is a key factor in God’s plan for Salvation. Let’s begin by backing up a bit and looking into the reason bread is important to the Lord.
Bread is so common that we easily take it for granted. We somehow got the idea that ancient earthlings domesticated grains and then started making bread. Actually the chances are much better that it was the other way around sometime during the “winding down” of the Stone age 10,000 to 20,000 years ago during what is referred to as the Epipaleolithic time. In 2018, crumbs of leftover toasted bread were discovered in a 14,000-year-old archeological dig in Shubayqa 1, a Natufian hunter-gatherer site located in northeastern Jordan. The bread was made from crushed wild grains and roots of tuberous plants. It most likely looked like what we now call tortillas – flat, flexible, and nutritious – and other flatbreads commonly used around the world even today. Some archeological discoveries in the Fertile Crescent Tigris-Euphrates Valley, Egypt, and even Mesopotamia date as far back as 22,000 years ago – about 10,000 years before domestication of grains into cereals that could be farmed. It is a staple part of human food intake that affects every part of the world where cereal grains can be raised.
Those grains – like wheat, spelt, corn, barley, millet, rice, and even the pseudocereals like quinoa, amaranth, buckwheat, and chia – are crushed into flour after removing the indigestible fibrous husks and stems. When God created these cereal grains – all of which are forms of grass – he had big, immensely-long plans in mind. It is assumed that grass is God’s favorite creation in the Plant Kingdom because he made so much of it in so many wonderful forms. He even designed the animals that could benefit the most from this versatile and plenteous food – including us. After Jesus fed 5,000+ people with bread and fish, then walked across the water on the Sea of Galilee to the shock of his Disciples (See John 6:1-21), the people who met him there wanted to see more miracles and get more bread. The early Church would have understood these accounts as pointing toward Jesus being a “new Moses” leading his followers out of The World and into the Promised Kingdom of God, and – as in the manna in the wilderness – giving them the “bread come down from Heaven – himself. The people heard him say “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” They understood this in a literal, worldly sense and wanted free-and-easy bread like they had just received – even if it was barley loaves, the bread of the poor. But, wait! There’s more (of course)!
Let’s pick up on Matthew 5:6 – 6 Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. Eating bread and fish – if that’s all you had – could be life-sustaining, but a little boring, too. Jesus was always teaching his Disciples and other listeners that God will supply all that they need, but first they need to give God what he requires – their love and obedience, their contrition and repentance, their lives and their faith. He constantly points them toward the greater blessings – the blessing of giving rather than receiving, the blessing of Peace rather than fear, the blessings of God rather than the praises of earthlings. What is the food that Jesus brings into the world? It is to do God’s will as in John 4:34 – 34 Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work.” We are fed when we do as he told us in Matthew 6:33 – 33 But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. What is the bread we should be seeking, the drink we should request? It is the righteousness of God’s presence in every moment of every day. God is always lavishly extravagant when we keep our priorities straight. We receive Grace upon Grace, Blessing upon Blessing, and the Joy of Peace that surpasses all understanding when we rely on him rather than on anyone or anything else. And yet, Belovéd, how easily we forget!
Let’s pull in another Key Verse from today – Deuteronomy 8:3 – 3 He humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna, with which neither you nor your ancestors were acquainted, in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord*. (*or by anything that the Lord decrees) Even then, even now, even forever it seems, we just never learn. It really is very simple. Love God, love neighbor, love self, repent and believe the Gospel, Trust and Obey. What God says is sufficient, what God does is awesome, what God expects is planned to the minutest detail: BE LIKE ME BECAUSE I AM. We are to be righteous, to be perfect, to be godly but not godlike, to be who and what God made us to be. If we are hungering for bread that does not satisfy our hunger, for water that does not slake our thirst, it is because these are not what Jesus is asking us to pursue. Again, Matthew 5:6 – 6 Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. Where do we find that righteousness which alone satisfies our deepest hunger and thirst?
It is found in God. It is found in always being lavishly extravagant with our bread and our Bread. We share our material lives with others so that they will see the spiritual lives that sustain us. We share our Spiritual lives powered by the Bread of Life so we can sustain others in good stewardship of all of God’s greatest stuff. And that is why we have that Key Verse from Ecclesiastes. Who would be foolish enough to just go throw bread out into the stream or the lake? Well, unless we’ve gone to the Park to feed the ducks, that’s kind of a silly and wasteful way to use bread. Now, that verse says that the bread will return to us (certainly not after the ducks have gotten it!), so what’s the deal here?
Some interpret that verse as an admonition to be practical in our business dealings. Taken in context, that make some sense – increase your profits by sending your material goods out for trade beyond your closest circle of customers – and if you do that in a responsible and timely manner, your profits will benefit from that risk. I believe there is more to it than that. God never stops inviting us to try to be like him. Think of that bread on the water as your material gifts given with his lavish generosity without any thought of being paid back. Remember the measure by which we give is the measure by which we receive? I see that verse in Ecclesiastes as telling us to be more generous than we believe possible and, when we do that, the return on that “investment” will supersede all our expectations.
Belovéd, let’s give it a try; let’s go ahead and put our bread upon the waters and see if God will send it back to us 10-, 30-, 60-, or 100-fold. Let us hunger and thirst for righteousness and be fed with the True Bread because, as it says in John 6:50-51, – 50 This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. 51 I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the 
bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh. Compared to that 14,000-year-old bread, the Bread of Eternal Life sounds like something that we should much prefer – the bread and water of Righteousness. He became our righteousness so that through him we can become God’s righteousness. This entire immensely-long plan was set in place to do one simple thing: Reunite us with God and restore us to original innocence by removing original sin and all its consequences – including hungering and thirsting for righteousness. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. Come on, Belovéd, let’s go to the Water and share the Bread of Life (↔ Music Link).
Whatever, whenever, wherever, whoever, however, if ever, forever —
at your service, Belovéd!
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Unless otherwise indicated, all scripture passages are from the New Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition (NRSVCE) New Revised Standard Version Bible: Catholic Edition, copyright © 1989, 1993 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Aloha Friday Messages by Charles O. Todd, III is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
