In bread we trust

A recording of today's gospel and reflection can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 12: 1-8) shows us a dispute between Jesus and the Pharisees who spot the disciples plucking and eating ears of corn on the Sabbath. Jesus answers their objections by citing the case of King David who ate the Bread of the Presence reserved for the priests. He refers also to the case of Temple priests who were held innocent while profaning the Sabbath by their work. The logic of these suspensions of the law, conceded by the Pharisees, is meant to cast a light on their hypocrisy by which they sought to entrap Jesus. More than that, of course, as He concludes: The Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath.

This gospel is usually approached from the perspective of Jesus’ teaching on epikeia, the jurisprudential principle that enables us to avoid legal literalism by honouring the intentions of the law giver. If my neighbour’s house is burning down, epikeia would allow me to try to get inside to save him, even though on other days of the week, doing that would make me a burglar; the lower law of private property cedes to the higher law of preserving life. It is not that Jesus is a law-destroying revolutionary, but rather that He situates lower laws in the context of higher ones.

But today, let us approach this extract from the gospel of St Matthew by dwelling on the Bread of Presence that David ate. The Bread of Presence consisted of twelve loaves to represent the twelve tribes of Israel, which sat on a golden table inside the Holy Place (not the Holy of Holies), alongside the menorah and the altar of incense. They symbolised God’s care for the twelve tribes and His covenant with them, and at the end of each week they were replaced with new loaves while the priests consumed the old ones. The spiritual significance of each of these details is almost overwhelming.

For first of all, they were bread, that ancient symbol of life, conviviality, and the fruit of labour. Bread tells a human story in its own terms, from the fact it is still made from crushing many individual grains so that they can become one flour, one dough, to the historical accident that bread was once baked in common ovens, as it still is today in poorer parts of the world where families do not have their own stoves. Conviviality means living together in shared joy. Every culture worthy of itself generates such conviviality spontaneously. It is a sign of the morbidity of our contemporary culture that so many of our communities are dead in this regard, for our relations are now almost purely economic, transactional, and the word “community”, a term long honoured more in the breach than the observance, is trotted out only as a comforting lie to cover up the nakedness of our widespread coldness and indifference. Our culture’s departure from this story of bread is a sign there is something humanly awry.

Yet, bread also tells a part of the story of God’s action in the world, from the manna of the desert to the House of Bread – Bethlehem – from where David, the sacred loaf eater himself came, and where Jesus, the Bread of Life, was born. Like Jesus who crafted miracles sometimes literally out of the earth, God speaks to us in all these symbols through which His care for His people is revealed. When Jesus performed His first miracle in Cana, He did not create a public spectacle but, behind the scenes and under the very noses of His hosts and the wedding guests, He saw to their needs, and spared them embarrassment and disappointment, all the while finding in these events a sign of His hour still to come. The Bread of Presence then found itself paralleled again in the feeding of the five thousand where, when the multiplied loaves had done their job, there were still fragments left over to be gathered up (and no doubt later eaten) by those who would become priests of the New Testament. Funny the gospel writers never say what happened to the gathered fragments, but wasn’t it obvious? They were probably shared by the disciples and among the poor over the following days.

The Bread of the Presence, however, symbolised something more profound about the choices Israel made in coming into the obedience of God. The twelve loaves were part of the liturgy of the Temple, an honoured symbol kept in the Holy Place. And thus, they cast in a new light those words of Jesus:

My bread is to do the will of Him who sent me.

The material, physical loaves of the Holy Place had to be replaced with an offering that would not need replacing at the end of the week. When Jesus came, this Bread of Presence, was replaced forever by the bread of His obedience to the Father. Divine obedience is for life, not just for Christmas. Thus, the new bread of the Holy Place is the fiat that Jesus makes to the will of the Father: a fiat at times in joy and a fiat at times in sorrow. When we consume the Bread of Life, we are saying literally that we wish also to eat that bread of obedience to the will of the Father.

This then is the bread that gives life, the bread of eternal conviviality – behold, I come to do your will - not to be confused with the bread that perishes that Jesus denounces in the sixth chapter of St John’s gospel. This bread, which is one with the leavened hypocrisy of the Pharisees, is the bread of self-pursuit, a loaf that is not for sharing, the bread that only resembles bread, like the plasticated loaves we find on the shelves of most supermarkets in our dead towns. And yet, tragedy of tragedies, how we have a taste for such impostor bread, how it pleases our palette even as it rots our gut, the inner self that can only be fed by the bread of the will of the Father.

The lower laws must cede to the higher ones. The law of the Temple ritual ceded to the law preserving David’s life. But since there is a more perfect Temple in the body of the Jesus, the law of sin and wilfulness in our bodies must now cede to the higher law according to which we must choose this new bread, the bread of the Father’s will, the bread of a new Presence by which He is present to us and we through Him are present to each other in His name. Conviviality.

Lord, restore our hunger; revive our appetites that have gorged on the fake bread of disobedience, so that our hearts, like David’s, might sing to you with the new conviviality of the Bread of Life.