Bread

"Jesus said to them, 'I am the bread of life; he who comes to me will not hunger, and he who believes in me will never thirst.'"
-John 6: 35
      My bible teacher and I have been studying the book of John, and we just had a bible study on John chapter six. In the beginning of the passage, a crowd is following Jesus because of His miracles. When they arrive at the other end of the sea, Jesus decides to feed the crowd. Jesus feeds more than five thousand people with only a couple loaves of bread and a few fish. This is an amazing miracle, but my bible teacher asked me this question and it stuck with me; why did Jesus feed them?
      After feeding the crowd, Jesus and His disciples cross the sea again. The crowd realizes that He is no longer with them, so they go out and search for Him. They eventually find Jesus and His disciples, and they question why He went away. Jesus then talks about bread for a while, which begins to confuse the crowd. They ask Him for a sign to prove Himself to the crowd, reminding Jesus that Moses gave the Israelite people manna as a sign. While Jesus fed about five thousand people one time, Moses fed an entire nation for 40 years. The people must have been disappointed in Jesus by this point, especially since what He was saying did not seem to make sense.
      Jesus then talks to the crowd about the bread of life. He claims that He Himself is the bread of life which the Father is giving to anyone who receives it. Anyone that goes to Jesus will never hunger or thirst. Bread is used throughout the Bible as an analogy for food that is required to have life. The Israelites ate manna in order to survive physically, but Jesus reminds the people that the Israelites perished. Jesus said that He is the bread that leads to eternal life, and without Him we will perish.
      It is interesting that the crowd brings up the manna that the Israelites ate, because it allows Jesus to use it as a metaphor. Manna would fall down from heaven everyday, and the Israelites went and collected it to eat. Without the bread, they most certainly would have died. In order to get the manna, they had to go out, collect it, and eat it. In other words, they had to accept it. The manna was a gift from God for them to live, and all they had to do was accept it. Jesus is telling us that we must accept Him. Jesus gave us His body as a gift, and all we have to do is accept it. His body leads not only to physical life, but life eternal. Without Jesus, we do not have life. People often view eternal life as being far away and only after our physical lives. Think about this though; people do not eat bread so that they can live sometime in the future, but so they can live now. We do not accept Jesus so that we can eventually have eternal life, but so that we can experience that life now.
-Smart