The Bread That Keeps You Forever

John 6:25-40

Have you ever eaten until your tummy was full, and felt happy and warm and glad? And then, not so long after, felt that little tug again, the hungry feeling already creeping back?

It happens with everything.

You wait and wait for the day you have looked forward to. It comes, and it is good, and then it is over, and you are waiting again. You get the toy you wanted so badly, and you love it, and then, somehow, you start wanting another.

It is a strange thing about being a person. There is a kind of hungry that bread cannot fill. A hungry down deep, in the part of you that no sandwich ever reaches. You can have everything and still feel it, hungry inside no matter how much you have.

Now. There was a great crowd of people who followed Jesus around the edge of a lake. Only the day before, he had taken a boy's five little loaves and fed thousands of them, until every single one was full. So they came looking for more. More bread. More of the full, happy feeling.

They even remembered how, long ago, in the days when Moses led God's people through the desert, God had sent bread down from the sky. Bread for the morning, and hunger again by night.

Jesus looked at them with such tenderness, because he knew. He knew the deeper hungry underneath the first one. He knew what they were really aching for, even when they did not know it themselves.

"You are looking for bread that runs out," he told them gently. "Bread you eat, and then need again tomorrow. But I have come to give you a different kind. A bread that keeps you forever."

They did not understand. "What food is that?" they asked. "Where do we get it?"

And then Jesus said the most astonishing thing.

"I am the bread of life," he said. "Whoever comes to me will never be hungry again, not even down in the deep place that aches. I am the One your whole heart has been looking for, all along."

All that hungry inside you, the tug that never quite goes away, the wanting that the best day and the best toy cannot fill up. It was never really for those things at all. It was for him. He made you with a hollow only he could fill, so that one day you would come to him and finally, finally be full.

And he promised he would not lose a single one who came to him. Not one. He gathers them up like a father at the door counting his children home, and he will not lose you. He holds you so close that nothing can ever pull you away.

That is the bread that keeps you forever.

You can taste it now, just a little, the way you smell supper cooking before it is ready. The full feast is still on its way. But the One you were hungry for has already come, and once you have found him, you will keep finding more of him, deeper and sweeter, with no end and no goodbye.

He is the meal that never runs out.