The Bread That Keeps You Forever

The morning after the supper on the hillside, the crowd woke up hungry again.

So they went looking for Jesus. They searched the grass where the baskets had been. They checked the beach. His friends had rowed away the evening before without him, and now he was nowhere on that side of the lake. When some boats came in from the town of Tiberias, people piled in and crossed the water to Capernaum, and there he was.

"Teacher!" they said. "When did you get here?"

Jesus did not answer that. He knew why they had come. "You are looking for me because I filled your stomachs," he said. "Don't work so hard for food that goes bad. Work for the food that lasts forever, the food the Son of Man will give you. God the Father has put his seal on him."

(A seal was a mark pressed into soft wax. It told everyone who had sent a thing and that it was the real one. Jesus meant that God had marked him as the one God sent.)

"What work does God want us to do?" they asked.

"Believe in the one he has sent," said Jesus.

The crowd looked at one another. "Then show us a sign, so we can believe you! Our fathers ate manna in the desert. The Scriptures say God gave them bread from heaven to eat."

(These people had watched five loaves feed thousands the day before. Some of them probably still had crumbs in their beards, and they were asking for proof.)

"It was not Moses who gave you bread from heaven," said Jesus. "My Father is giving you the true bread from heaven. God's bread is the one who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world."

That sounded wonderful. "Sir," they said, "give us this bread every day!"

(They were still thinking about breakfast.)

Then Jesus said it plainly. "I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty."

He looked at the faces around him. "But you have seen me, and still you do not believe. Everyone the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never send away. I came down from heaven to do what my Father wants, and this is what he wants: that I lose not one of the people he has given me, and that I raise them up on the last day."

By evening that crowd would be hungry again, because bread does not last. The hillside loaves were eaten. The twelve baskets of leftovers would be hard as rocks by the end of the week. Even manna, sent by God himself, had to be gathered fresh every morning, and it fed God's people for one day at a time.

The people in Capernaum wanted a man who could make bread whenever they asked. Jesus was offering them himself. In Moses' day, God sent bread down from heaven for his people to pick up off the ground; now Jesus had come down from heaven to be the bread. Manna kept a body going until supper. Jesus promised to raise up everyone who comes to him, alive, on the last day.

Stale bread gets thrown out for the birds. Jesus said he would never throw out anyone who comes to him, and he will not lose a single one the Father has given him.