This coming Sunday, we will find ourselves right in the middle of a five-week journey through the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel. The first sentence in the passage from John 6 assigned for this Sunday serves as a kind of thesis statement for the whole chapter: “I am the Bread of Life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

Because the Episcopal Church follows the three-year cycle of the Revised Common Lectionary, we travel through John 6 once every triennium. Like the Israelites’ journey in the wilderness to which the chapter refers, John 6 can be quite a long slog! Even the best preachers struggle to find enough material in the so-called “Bread of Life discourse” to fill five whole sermons.

I’m fortunate at St. Bart’s to share their burden of explicating John 6 with tremendous colleagues. But it’s not lost on me that, because of everyone else’s vacation schedules, I’m the only one this summer who has the responsibility to preach on John 6 multiple times. As a result, I’ve been spending a lot of time reflecting on this chapter and the wisdom it offers us.

In meditating on Jesus as the Bread of Life, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about our modern ambivalence towards bread. For Jesus and his compatriots, bread was a staple: cheap, ubiquitous, nutritious, and universally appealing. It was almost synonymous with nourishment itself. By calling himself Bread, Jesus was suggesting that his purpose was to nourish others.

However, in our overfed, extra health-conscious society, many of us have been conditioned to see bread as danger. We have learned to count our carbs and our calories and keep them as low as they possibly can be. In the process, we have exiled bread and its fellow starches from the “staple” column of our diets and moved them to the column saved for occasional indulgences. Though bread enjoyed a short period of resurgence in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is still something many of us do our best to avoid.  

Given this context, how should we modern-day carb-skeptics think about Jesus as the Bread of Life? Perhaps we need to do a little translating and acknowledge differences between Jesus’ dietary environment and our own. Perhaps we might benefit from more deeply reckoning with our own privilege—with the fact that, while we struggle to cut bread from our diets, millions around the world are desperate for more bread to eat.

But maybe Jesus as the Bread of Life could also help us become more comfortable with the sheer pleasure of eating. Historically, religious people have not been great about affirming the benefits of pleasure. Yet Jesus tells us that he wants for us joy and abundant life. Scripture speaks over and over about the heavenly feast full of rich food. If Jesus himself is Bread, would it really be wise to avoid bread and similar carb-laden foods altogether? Is any calorie truly “empty” if it brings us joy?

This week, our Faith and Film class discussed the 1987 Danish film Babette’s Feast, in which a small religious group, itself skeptical about partaking in anything too “earthly,” is transformed by a sumptuous, extravagant, calorie-rich feast. The meal they enjoyed was not carb-free. Neither is the meal through which you and I are transformed Sunday by Sunday. Christ, after all, was the Bread of Life. He was a carbohydrate.