{"id":5646,"date":"2026-08-13T08:54:38","date_gmt":"2026-08-13T12:54:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/?p=5646"},"modified":"2026-08-13T08:54:38","modified_gmt":"2026-08-13T12:54:38","slug":"bread-of-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2026\/08\/13\/bread-of-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Bread of Life"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n


Each day this month of August we\u2019ll be looking at one of the extraordinary metaphors that the Bible uses to illustrate the nature of our relationship with God.<\/em>


\u201cThen Jesus declared,\u00a0\u2018I am\u00a0the bread of life.\u00a0Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes\u00a0in me will never be thirsty\u2019\u201d <\/em>(John 6:35).

People have been baking bread for thousands of years.

But it sure hasn\u2019t looked, felt, or tasted like Wonder Bread, the loaf that so many Americans grew up eating.

About 500 years ago, European bread-making began to reflect class distinctions.\u00a0Peasants and laborers ate dark, coarse bread.\u00a0High class people (that is, \u201cthe upper crust\u201d) typically ate loaves made with finely textured, highly refined wheat flour.\u00a0

Such processed flour produced a lighter-colored loaf.\u00a0White bread therefore became known as rich people\u2019s bread.\u00a0Only wealthy people could afford to buy it. Think of Billy Joel singing that his \u201cUptown Girl\u201d was \u201cliving in her white-bread world.\u201d

All that changed in 1921.\u00a0

The Taggart Baking Company of Indianapolis introduced a loaf made with batter, not dough.\u00a0It was spongy, inexpensive, and light in color.\u00a0Best of all, since it was factory-baked, it was untouched by human hands \u2013 a big selling point at the time.\u00a0

One of the company execs named it Wonder Bread.\u00a0The package featured multi-colored balloons, since he had recently felt a sense of wonder when watching a balloon race staged at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

According to Libby O\u2019Connell\u2019s book The American Plate<\/em>, people from all classes and ethnicities could now feel as if they were privileged.\u00a0Everyone could afford to buy the lightest-colored bread anyone had ever seen.

Not only that, Wonder Bread was one of the first national brands to be pre-sliced.\u00a0

As homemakers gradually entered the American workforce at mid-century, few had time to bake their own bread, let alone slice it.\u00a0Wonder Bread seemed like a wonderful idea.

Gradually, however, it became clear that this new invention and its light-colored cousins that had also hit the market were missing something important \u2013 like virtually all the nutrients that make bread such a crucial staple of the human diet.\u00a0

\u201cMen [and women] shall not live by bread alone,\u201d Scripture says.\u00a0Or at least Wonder Bread. If you tried to do so, you would place yourself in danger of significant vitamin deficiencies.\u00a0

Factories \u2013 which were bleaching their flour in order to make it super-white \u2013 were unwittingly removing critical nutrients.\u00a0When American young men began to register for military duty in World War II, an alarming number of them were found to be nutritionally impoverished.

By the 1960s, Wonder Bread began adding a dozen vital nutrients back into the factory formula.\u00a0Thus was born the marketing slogan so many of us experienced as kids:\u00a0\u201cWonder Bread builds strong bodies 12 ways.\u201d

Of course, you could always just eat delicious, dark, whole grain bread with all the natural ingredients intact \u2013 which is exactly what American consumers have begun to do in recent decades, along with increasing numbers of pitas, wraps, and tortillas. As a consequence, Wonder Bread\u2019s share of the market has pretty much become toast.\u00a0\u00a0

Or maybe you should just skip eating bread altogether:\u00a0\u201cNo, thanks, I\u2019m trying to cut down on carbs.\u201d

That option would have been unthinkable in the ancient world.\u00a0Bread was the central component of every meal. It was literally the staff and the stuff of life.\u00a0When Jesus taught his disciples to pray, \u201cGive us today our daily bread,\u201d he was talking to people who were sometimes only one day away from starvation.\u00a0Bread made all the difference.

All of that provides the background to Jesus\u2019 outrageous claim in John 6:35:\u00a0\u201cI am the Bread of Life.\u201d\u00a0

He was essentially saying, \u201cI\u2019m the one thing you need to get from here to tomorrow. Don\u2019t even think about trying to do life without me.\u201d

When Israel had spent 40 years journeying from slavery in Egypt to freedom in the Promised Land, God had provided a daily gift of manna \u2013 a bread-like substance that supernaturally appeared on the ground. But Jesus was offering something different \u2013 not just 24 hours of nourishment but a feeding that promised spiritual wholeness in this world and the next.

He was offering, in other words, the only meal that can satisfy the longings of the human soul.

It\u2019s a metaphor, of course. So are his other celebrated \u201cI am\u201d statements in the Gospel of John. He is the Light of the World (8:12), the Door (10:7), the Good Shepherd (10:11), the Resurrection and the Life (11:25), the Way, the Truth, and the Life (14:6), and the True Vine (15:5).

Jesus wasn\u2019t saying that he was literally a burning candle, a dusty trail, a wooden plank on hinges, an empty tomb, or a loaf of baked wheat.

But knowing him was the only way to experience what all those things promised: illumination, direction, spiritual nourishment, access to the Father, and hope.

If Jesus is bread \u2013 but not really bread \u2013 how in the world do we take him in?

There\u2019s the Lord\u2019s Supper, of course, where we literally \u201cbreak bread\u201d with fellow disciples in the presence of the Lord. Then we invest our lives in studying his words, praying in his name, and relying on the power of his Spirit to love God and love others. \u00a0

It is, he assured us, the real and only Life.

Which makes it a whole lot better than sliced bread.
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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here Each day this month of August we\u2019ll be looking at one of the extraordinary metaphors that the Bible uses to illustrate the nature of our relationship with God. \u201cThen Jesus declared,\u00a0\u2018I am\u00a0the bread of life.\u00a0Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes\u00a0in me will never be thirsty\u2019\u201d (John… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5647,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1097,1167,1159],"class_list":["post-5646","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bread","tag-i-am-statements","tag-metaphors"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5646","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5646"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5646\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5648,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5646\/revisions\/5648"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5647"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5646"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5646"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5646"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}