Reflection: Daily Bread, the bread of life 

By Rev Dr Fei Taule’ale’ausumai  

18 August 2024 

I’m sure many of you will remember that during the first Covid19 lock down you couldn’t buy bread on the shelves or even flour, everyone went into panic mode and the basic necessities of life became scarce.  Our daily bread was no longer available. Even yeast disappeared, everything to do with bread became scarce, there was nothing on the shelves in any of the supermarkets for a number of weeks.  There was no bread of life during the pandemic.  It felt a bit like a recession.   

Ninety odd years ago the world experienced not a recession but The Great Depression.  I’m not an economist and I don’t really know what the difference is between the depression and the recession.  I googled this question and every answer I read was too confusing for me for me to understand I could not find a simple explanation that summed it up in lay persons terms. There was one definition that was simple to understand, he said: A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose your job.  So, in some ways only some people suffer during a recession whereas everyone shares in the same suffering during a depression.   

It is amazing how our thinking changes when we are forced to rationalize our use of petrol, we try and downsize our cars and use more public transport.  When the price of a particular food resource becomes unaffordable, we start to find other ways around the food chain and become more creative and resourceful.   

Most of you who have shared in a Pacific Island feast will know what the root crop “taro” is.  It is the staple carbohydrate for many Pacific nations.  Some Pacific athletes call it their daily steroid.  In my family we only ate taro on Sunday’s if we were lucky because it was considered a luxury, potatoes on the other hand were a normal part of our daily meal as it was readily available and affordable.  Rice too came into the same category.   

Not only is the coconut the bread of life in the Pacific but also the taro plant.  When Samoa was hit by a taro blight it wiped out the entire taro crop in Samoa in the early 1990’s.  People had to resort to green banana’s which is equivalent to potatoes here in New Zealand, but there was another root crop which was much more inferior to the taro that all of sudden thrived during this taro famine, the “taamu” which is a much bigger and longer tuber root from the same family.  I remember my dad saying that you had to fisi it or peel it a certain way because if you did it incorrectly it would make your throat itch and gave you an uncomfortable pallet.  For me as a New Zealand born Samoan, if you presented boiled taamu and taro smothered in coconut cream which is called “faalifu” on the dinner table, I could not tell you the difference by looking and sometimes even by tasting.  All of a sudden taamu became a yummy crop, it tasted great.  The inferior cousin had risen to fame in the absence of its tastier relative.  At the end of the day “we are what we eat” …say no more! 

That’s what happens when people are forced to review their basic living conditions and situations.  Things, food, even relationships that we once took for granted get a second look in.  Recessions, hard times like today the rising cost of living call us to look out for our neighbor if we still have a job, recessions invite us to remember those who are struggling.  It also challenges us to rethink our grocery budgets and our spending, not because we want to but because we have to.  I had my mortgage on a floating mortgage recently and it was costing me an extra $1000 a month.  I’ve since fixed but it is costing me much more that my 5.35%, I had over the last 2 years.   

Have you ever been really hungry?  Hunger for many of us is a slight grumble and then a charge for the fridge to see what one can do to satisfy that hunger.  When we think of “bread of life” we have quite a selection of breads to choose from, Freya’s for the selective pallet, tip top for a nice soft sandwich, vogels for a bit of crunch and so on.  Remember that television ad of the young women who is standing at the checkout counter waiting for her eftpos card to go through and she is thinking “please go through, please go through.”  I wonder how many of us can relate to that.  Have you ever gone to an ATM machine and wanted to take out your last $20 only to be told that this machine only dispenses $20 notes, and your bank balance is $19.99cents?  Bread of life, can we really understand other people’s realities?  How extreme are our economic realities here in this church service this morning?   

What is our daily bread, what is our “bread of life?”.  These are not just rhetorical questions these are real questions for us to consider.  How useful are the words that Jesus is our bread of life to starving families around the world?  Jesus is the bread of life; you will never hunger.  What does this mean?  How come I’m still hungry?  Can Jesus take away my hunger and my malnutrition?   

In the face of millions of people dying of hunger, no one can say: I am not responsible; this problem does not concern me; I cannot do anything. Hunger is actually the number one problem in the world.  Two out of three persons living on this planet suffer from hunger or malnutrition of some kind.  I want life before death Jesus not just after!  How can we do this?   

Even the churches food banks are running empty.  That’s one way that people can recognize Jesus as the Bread of life, by the work that we do, by the little things that we are able to do each day to contribute to the wholeness of life of another.  (tell the story of Robert whose fridge broke down and the food went off and he hadn’t eaten since Friday and when he rang around the churches no one answered until David Douglas and myself were returning from Presbytery…Special dietry requirements so restricted in what he could eat.  So it was Milk run have you heard of it?  They delivered his pork chops, steak and weetbix within an hour of our phone call.  Robert rang SAOTT and I happened to answer the phone, we were Roberts daily bread yesterday and today.  Monday he gets a new fridge delivered.   

We are the face of Christ in our families and in our workplace and community.  When we celebrate communion, you may well ask, what is this all about, how can this little piece of bread and this little glass of grape juice change me?  What does my partaking in this celebration do for me?  I used to ponder these sorts of questions myself growing up.  I used to say to myself as a prayer before I partook of communion these words: “may this bread and this wine make me a little bit like Jesus in the way I live, until next time…”  Even if that means just a little bit, that is enough for me.    

In our Gospel reading “The Jews” (i.e. those Jews who opposed the Jew, Jesus, and did not join with the Jews who were his disciples) argue among themselves about how it could be possible that Jesus gives us his flesh to eat (6:52). For the audience, who are hearing the drama of John’s gospel unfold, the answer is obvious, and the irony enjoyed. They eat Christ’s flesh and drink his blood in their holy meal of bread and wine. This meal will have had a special place in the community as a means of communing with Christ. For those in the drama who think at the level of Nicodemus, such an idea is preposterously cannibalistic. 

I grew up with communion representing the Atonement of Christ and was seen as an opportunity for me to atone of my sins.  Many of us here have been there, done that but have moved on.    

What were you taught (explicitly and implicitly) about (the means of) salvation when you were growing up? How (if at all) have you revised your thinking on that theme? What role (if any) has the idea of Jesus’s death as a necessary sacrifice played in your beliefs about salvation? How would you characterize the view of God reflected in your salvation theology? What connection would you make between one’s view of salvation and how life is lived out as a follower? 

The word “atonement” was coined in English, perhaps very early in the 16th century, as a way to talk about Christian salvation. It was actually created by simply joining together the phrase at-one-ment. It was meant to be used as a way of talking about how human beings are to be reconciled with God. So, “atonement” does not directly translate any Hebrew, Greek, or Latin word; it is something new. It has been called perhaps the only theological term with an English origin. 

Catholics believe in transubstantiation – that the bread and wine are physically changed into the body and blood of Christ.  

In most Protestant churches, communion is seen as a memorial of Christ’s death. The bread and wine do not change at all because they are symbols. Jesus said, I have come that you might have life and life in all its fullness, may we be the fullness of someone else’s hope and possibility during these challenging times.  

May we be the face of Christ wherever we go, sharing the bread of life where it is needed, seeking justice, loving mercy and walking humbly with our God.  Amen. 

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