No carb, low carb, gluten free, all that is placed on one side of the scale. The other side of the scale is, happily enough, civilization itself.
I'm not overstating things, either. For a lot of human history, there was a lot of wandering around after your food. In an age of pre-refrigeration, when meat would spoil remarkably quickly, the only reliable way to keep meat fresh was to keep it alive. Essentially, the bison, or goats, or sheep, or what have you, were walking refrigerators, and you pulled the meat out of them when you needed it. But it was all in one shot.
So what that meant is that your life was spent in perpetual meandering after your meat. People tended to settle near the sea because at that point, food was relatively abundant, and you could catch it, net it, gut it and eat it without having to move place to place. But everyone else, your life depended on pastureland, on the roaming of herds, and so on.
What was the big difference, and you can tell this from the story of the Exodus, was the planting and harvesting of grain. Forget all the wheat belly stuff, grain was hugely important for bringing us civilizations. The definition that my mother used for civilization was that a location had written language, organized religion, division of labor, and monumental buildings. Most of those are impossible without grain. For in grain, you have something that stores well, keeps for a long time, and can be turned into food remarkably easily and quickly. It's what allowed the Roman empire to provide its people with 'bread and circuses,' entertaining them and keeping them fed. Essentially, grain allowed farmers to grow far more than they would be able to eat on their own, and provided them with the ability to sustain a much larger population. And that meant that you could have soldiers, an army, a priest class, metalworkers, artists, and so on, without every single job being only to provide for the immediate food needs of the populace.
So when Jesus calls himself the bread that came down from heaven, when he talks about daily bread, he's talking about daily food, that would have been remarkably consistent, but also the stuff of life, essentially. He's talking about the food that makes everything else possible. For the people of the ancient near east, bread was the stuff of life. It was the vital ingredient that made everything else possible, and made all the rest of life function effectively. If you had bread, you could stay alive, could have a job as a cooper or a potter, and could be sure of food for the next day. If you're a hunter/gatherer, you can't depend on any of that. As the bread of heaven, Jesus doesn't just feed you, which he does, but he makes everything else possible, which is far more important.
He hints at as much when he says that the people of Israel, their fathers ate manna in the wilderness and died. Sure, they managed to get by with the food that God provided them, and it got them through their wandering in the wilderness, but it wasn't enough to get them through death itself. When Jesus is the bread of heaven, he is stable, certain, and provides for your needs. And it means that spiritually, we don't have to end up wandering about looking for new things all the time. The bread is the bread.
Our reading from Ephesians is like this, you know, talking about how we need to put away falsehood, to not steal but instead work honestly, to not run around and give opportunities to the devil, all that sort of things. And where do those evils stem from? They stem from our desires not being met, from our needs not being satisfied. We steal because we do not have, and we do not have because we do not ask, and even if we do ask, we ask wrongly, just out of corruption, etc. And if your basic needs aren't met, you can't do anything else. In Christ, as the bread of heaven, the needs are met though. And which needs are those?
Think of the needs that you have met by bread. Food, and the guarantee of more food in the future. Sustenance, life, the ability to do what you want and to go where you need to. The ability to do more than just spend all day every day scrounging and scrabbling for a meager existence in the dust. Think about what life was like, or should be like, for people who are sinful; always existing in repentance, always offering sacrifices, going over through all the rules and sacrifices, all those issues that come up and have to be dealt with, all those things would lead to you being pulled and pushed hither and yon basically forever, as the Old Testament people surely were. You'd spend an entire life worrying about whether you were walking too far, harvesting too much ,or so on. And if you transgressed, when you transgressed, you'd spend a life in sacrifice and contrition.
But the living bread satisfies that need. The living bread takes care of all of that, and frees you up to do what you should, not what you must. And this is what Dr. Martin Luther came across 500 years ago - the realization that the work of Christ is forgiveness, for if God kept a record of sins, who could stand? But with Him there is forgiveness, therefore he is to be feared. When Martin Luther was wrestling through his sins, and agonizing over them, what he forgot is that Jesus is the bread of Heaven. He satisfies hunger, and makes it so you're not always trying to stay one step away from starving. You, instead, can actually get something done, knowing that you're looking at a world where immediate needs are met, freeing you up to do what is right because it's right, not just in order to survive.
