Thought for the Day - Bread that Changed the World

Ilya Mashkov Still Life with Loaves of Bread, 1912

A Thought for the Day given during a lunchtime service of St Olave Hart Street given on Tuesday 6th May 2025 based on the text of John 6.30-35

These days we know that the Great Fire of London was caused not by French or Dutch immigrants - as speculation at the time would have it - but by an accident at the bakery of Thomas Farriner, who produced large quantities of double-baked Ships Biskits - what some (perhaps rather too euphemistically) describe as ‘unleavened bread’ for the Royal Navy. 

This church was one of the few buildings to survive, thanks to some quick thinking parishioners, but the fire changed London – and the lives of the people who lived here – forever. As this dude – our friend Samuel Pepys – describes in his diaries.
 
A brief segue into our own history here to remind us of the cause of the Great Fire – and the fact that bread can change the world as we know it.

Our gospel reading describes an encounter between Jesus and a crowd of people the day after the feeding of the five thousand, which is said by some to be the Gospel of John’s equivalent of The Last Supper – the institution of Holy Communion – the sacrament in which we are about to share.

Jesus knows that despite having seen the great miracle of the loaves and fishes at first hand, the crowd don’t understand the meaning of what it is that really happened. How the world has changed. They seem to want more “signs” from Jesus; perhaps an eternal supply of food to fill their bellies. They remember the “manna” from heaven that the Israelites encountered in the wilderness – the name a translation from Hebrew of the question they asked when they first saw it. “What is it?”

Jesus reminds them that it was God who sustained the Israelites with bread from heaven, but the “true bread from heaven” sent by God will give life to the whole world.

“Give us this bread always” the hungry crowd crows – still seemingly unaware of the reality standing right before their eyes. “I am the bread of life” Jesus explains. “Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

No matter what divides Christians in their beliefs about what it is that happens at Holy Communion, what we call it, how often and in what form to receive it and who distributes it - all agree that it is transformational.

Holy Communion helps us to remember the transformation of the passion of Jesus to the resurrection life – from agony and pain to glory; to recall the moment at which God and humanity were reconciled or re-membered; the moment – perhaps the only one in history that really matters – when humanity was saved. Holy Communion is also about the present, the here and now; we bring the death and resurrection of Jesus into our daily lives through our own bodies; asking Him to teach us how to live so that we may do God’s will here on earth as in heaven. The sacrament is also about the future. As we receive communion, what is it that we are longing for? What kind of world to we seek?

As we hold out our hands to receive communion, what is it we see?

May we see bread that changed the world.