in

12-8-05

Thought For The Week

Is bread part of your daily diet? A bacon roll on a cold morning, a sandwich snatched at your desk or packed in your lunchbox, beans on toast for a cheap but nourishing tea or bread and butter pudding – you can’t get away from it. Add in naan and pitta, crispbread and pizza – it takes a serious effort not to eat bread.

It is easy for us. If we had to grow, reap and thresh the corn, grind the grain and find fuel for the baking oven, we might take it seriously and show more compassion for our brothers and sisters in desperately poor or famine-stricken countries.

We don’t worry about the harvest failing, just if our favourite loaf is sold out.

But, whether we get our bread from the supermarket, the local baker, or bake it ourselves, we know that it will only satisfy our hunger for a little while.

Jesus spoke about a different type of bread, the bread from heaven. He said that those who ate this bread would never go hungry. Of course, he knew all about bread made from flour; when the occasion demanded he miraculously fed a crowd of over five thousand; when he dined for the last time with his closest followers, he broke a loaf and shared it with them.

What then, is the bread from heaven? Nothing less than Jesus himself. To have the bread from heaven, which will always spiritually satisfy and never go stale, all we have to do is recognise that Jesus was God. He lived on earth for a few short years, died and rose again, for you, me and all humanity.

Have you got enough bread?

By Paul Goulden, a Steward at the Westborough Methodist Church.

For and on behalf of the Churches Together in Dewsbury.