Satiety

Okay, brief sidebar before I continue.

I've been losing weight recently, and so a lot of the discussion from Jesus about bread, never being hungry again, it resonates particularly hard.  For you see, here in 21st Century North America, we have a quite different issue from that of the people of Jesus' time and place.  They lived each day working very hard to get enough food to survive the day.  There was no convenience store, there were no convenience foods, there was no industry set up to make sure that corn was plentifully produced and went into everything, there was just food.  And most of what food was, was bread.  Every day you would bake it, and it wasn't as though you could just toss the ingredients into a breadmaker and walk away.  You would have to build and tend a fire, grind the wheat into flour, knead and fashion the dough, and bake it on hot coals until it was done.  The reason that bread was so vital (and still is today) was that it was cheap, the ingredients could be stored essentially indefinitely, and it was versatile enough and filling enough to go with everything.

But now, we have a problem not with eating too little, but with eating too much.  Our world is awash in cheap food, laden with salt, sugar and fat, and then at the other end of it, purported ways to extract yourself from the effects of that cheap food.  And it brings us to a problem, which is that food, all food, is not created equal.  If you're trying to lose weight, one of the first things to wrap your head around is that a calorie is a calorie.  It doesn't matter where it comes from as far as weight loss goes, if you eat more calories than you burn, you will gain weight, and if you do the opposite, you will lose it.  And the source of those calories doesn't matter.  Your body neither knows nor cares if you eat a bucket of celery or two tablespoons of peanut butter, it will process that energy the same way. 

These are all 200 calories

What does this mean?  It means that the system of calories is inherently unfair.  You  can tell it's unfair from the word go, because two slices of wonderbread (63 grams) are a lot less filling than 50 grams of raw lentils, even though they're the same calorically.  In other words, part of your job as a human who eats food is to eat the right things.  That is, choose food that is filling and satisfying.

Ah, yes.  Satiety.  It's a bugbear, and is the reason that low carb diets work.  Not that I'm on one.  The basic tenet states that high fat high protein foods have a higher satiety rating, and will keep you satisfied for longer than simple carbs which are rapidly broken down.  In other words, the more simple carbs you have, in theory, the quicker you'll be hungry again.  Why do I mention all this?  Because this information is important towards understanding what Jesus is talking about when he talks about satisfaction.  Eternal satisfaction. 

When Jesus speaks of himself as the bread of life, the promise that he makes is that if you eat of this bread, you will never be hungry again.  You will be fully  and completely satisfied.  And the people who heard this were excited, as food acquisition and preparation were enormous time hogs, demanding a lot of people, and making their lives a bit of a drudge.  What Jesus was promising (in semi-parable form) was that they would experience, for perhaps the first time in their entire lives, satisfaction.  They would be filled and satisfied, and they wouldn't go hungry anymore.  Their lives would no longer be a succession of moments in which they desperately seek after the next meal, but rather, that they would be filled, satisfied, and comforted, freed from the need to be on that rollercoaster of filled then empty.

For us, though, it's a little bit different.  Very few of us here in this great nation have been what anyone could call genuinely hungry.  Oh, sure, we get a little bit peckish, but food is never too far away, it's as close as the phone, the pantry, the fridge, and if you get desperate, you could eat fruit.  It's not hard to get food, in fact in many cases it's too easy.  And so we as North Americans tend to overindulge in empty calories, which wind up making us feel worse.  It's the mirror of the issue faced by the New Testament listeners to Jesus' words, that they were seeking after food and it occupied all their time.  In our case, we seek food, but find that what we eat is dangerously unsatisfying for us.  We consume, and are still hungry at the end of it.

When Jesus talks about never being hungry again, his words echo what we hear in Isaiah chapter 55, where it asks us why we spend our money on that which does not satisfy, and our effort on that which does not fill us.  We are essentially, for the most part, consuming spiritual junk food.  The same epidemic of food choices that lead to us all being stuffed yet still hungry physically is the parallel to how we are spiritually, filling up on that which does not satisfy, and leaving ourselves constantly famished.  We are ravenous, starving hungry, and yet always filling up.  Why is that?  Why is it in an age in which we have all sorts of spiritual outlets, in which self help and associated issues are at an all time high, an age in which we have access to all the spiritual learnings since the dawn of time, are we still hungry?  Because we are filling up on the wrong stuff.  As usual, St. Augustine of Hippo says it best when he says 'You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in You.' 

All that other stuff we fill up on doesn't do the job.  It will make us bloated, sure, as it tend to do.  As the scriptures say, knowledge puffs up, and lots of us are very puffy these days spiritually.  We are full, but still seeking, taken but still looking.  Our hearts are so prone to wanderlust, and we find that everything we are consuming, everything we are taking in, leaves us unsatisfied, wanting more all the time.  We seek more, and though we take more in, we are unfulfilled.

What Jesus promises, though, is satisfaction.  Imagine, if you will, a world in which you are satisfied.  You are no longer hungry or thirsty.  You neither marry nor are given in marriage.  Every tear is wiped away from your eyes, there is no more want, you are free from that treadmill that has been governing your life from the moment that you were born, wresting yourself from sleep with your infant cries of hunger.  Imagine a world in which you are no longer a slave to those needs, but can do what you want.  That notion of satisfaction is what Jesus promises, giving to us in semi-parable form, an image of paradise.  One in which we are free from those needs, one in which the questions we ask have answers, and one in which our wandering souls, prone to seek after things that do not satisfy, will be made whole and satiated. 

PJ.

Bread

You know how you feel about bread.  You hate to love it.

Isn't that true?  We are in the age now where gluten is of the devil.  You know it.  You're made to feel like a criminal every time you consume the devil's treat of wheat.  Wheat belly, atkins, gluten free, the catch words and buzz phrases fly fast and furious, falling over each other to eliminate wheat from our world. Gluten is a bit of a villain these days, which is funny, because for most of history, wheat, gluten, have been the engine upon which civilization has run.

We forget about this, because, of course, we have refrigerators, and canned goods, and year round apples, so we forget about the fact that for the majority of history, there were times of abundance and scarcity.  If you were a hunter-gatherer, you spent your time hunting and gathering.  that was it.  And everyone had the same job.  It wasn't as though you could be a dentist and your neighbor could be a nail tech.  No no, if you were alive, then you were a hunter / gatherer.  That was the only job there was. I know, I know, studies have shown that the hunter / gatherer people were happier and worked fewer hours, but here's the kicker - they worked fewer hours, but all at the same job.  They were hunter / gatherers, and that was their job.  Every day, you worked to make sure you didn't starve, and that was that.

But with the advent of grains, of crops that you could harvest, all of a sudden you could develop a surplus.  You could develop more food than anyone would eat that day.  and enough of a surplus

meant that you could have specialized labor.  And specialized labor meant that you could have dedicated construction workers, dedicated priests, dedicated bureaucracy, and dedicated military.  That meant that you could have all the workings, for good or for ill, of a modern working civilization.

Why do I bring this up?  Because in our modern times, we need to remember that Jesus as the bread of life is actually a good thing.  Yes, if you're gluten intolerant, or low carb, you might run shreiking from the room at the mention of bread, but Jesus is identifying himself as the greatest of all staple crops, the thing that keeps civilization going.  You may not like wheat yourself, but you must realize that staple crops have changed everything as we know it.

Now, here's the thing about staple crops.  if you Bing 'staple crops,' it should take you to the wikipedia page on staple crops, which will tell you all about the staple crops around the world, and how they are made into peasant food.  And the staple crops of the world, they're not very exciting on their own.  If there's one thing you should pick up on, you should know that the things you get, they're not going to set your tastebuds ablaze with excellence.  Corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, soybeans, yams, that's what you're looking at with staple crops.  They used to dominate the menu for all the people of a given place, who used to eat overwhelmingly that thing.  Corn or wheat or rice, that used to be the majority of what was consumed.  I mention this, because this is how Jesus presents himself - the bread of life.  and for the people in the ancient near east, bread was the source of life.  This is what you ate. The widow of Narin, she and her son had only enough food left for one last loaf of bread, then they were planning on dying.  When the flour was gone, so were they.

Jesus, as always, knows what he's doing when he does things.  He knows what he's saying, and when he tells his disciples who he is, he tells them that he is the bread of life.  And as the bread of life, he forms the bottom of the food pyramid, the foundation of what the disciples will be building their lives upon.  That's what Jesus was always intended to be - to be the base for everything we do but not the only thing that we experience.  Think about bread.  think about bread in your home, and how you eat it (assuming that you're not gluten free.  If you are, imagine if you ate bread).  You have it alongside meals, in a breadbasket.  You have it under your eggs in the morning, You have it enveloping your meat and lettuce at lunchtime.  You have your peanut butter on it in the middle of the night (don't lie).  You have bread, but you have bread all the time and in conjunction with many many other things.   Rarely do you have a meal of only bread, undoctored and alone.  Usually, you have bread with other things, sometimes a great many other things.  This is who Jesus is.  He is the source and foundation for us spiritually.  He wants to be part of what we do, to be part of our daily experience.  Sometimes, he is the only thing, like he is on Sunday, but frequently, he is involved with the other stuff of our lives.  He is part of everything we do, making us in the world, but not of it.  This is how he is supposed to be, and if he is not, then something has gone wrong.  We are supposed to run on God, he is the source and norm of what we do, and who we are.  In him we live, and move, and have our being (preach it duck brother).  That's what we are for.  We are not supposed to be cloistered away, never seeing the outside world, nor are we supposed to ignore God for the remainder of the time that we are not in the church building.  He is supposed to be in and with everything we do.

The Lutheran understanding of Holy Communion is helpful here.  There are churches that say that the bread and wine just represent the body and blood of Jesus, so there is only bread and wine there.  There are churches that say that the body and blood of Jesus are the only things there, and that the bread and wine are totally gone.  And then there's the Lutheran church, that tells us that the body and blood of Christ, the true body and true blood, are in with and under the bread and wine.  And that's how Jesus is supposed to be in our lives.  Coloring everything, being a part of all our life experiences.  Not the only thing, but having his words, his blessings, his gift of forgiveness and salvation be part of all our experiences, and permeate them all.  The love of God that is in Christ Jesus affects, or should affect everything we do, otherwise our faith is just a hymn and a homily, just so much feel good chat, and nothing that actually moves us or changes us.

But Christ deigns to change us, from the temporal to the eternal.  He desires to have us be not here for a while, but with him forever.  To do that, he gives us himself as the bread of life, the bread of life that will be in, with and under everything that we do.  And surely, he will be with us always, giving us his grace in abundance, to the very end of the age.