I once read the story of a man named Kevin, who had an interesting encounter with the meal delivery service Grubhub. When an order showed up at his doorstep that he didn’t order, he got excited and thought, “This is amazing! Someone accidentally ordered their food and had it sent here.” But several orders later, Kevin began to get nervous.
That’s when he remembered that his six-year-old son, Mason, had been wandering around the house with his phone. Whoops.
Apparently, Mason had gotten onto the Grubhub app and started ordering whatever looked good to him. Kevin found him a few minutes later, hiding under the bed, and asked, “Son, what have you done?” Mason replied with six-year-old candor: “I was hungry.”
All told, Mason had ordered $1,500 worth of food.
Hunger can drive us to make all kinds of bad decisions. Hunger is one of the worst feelings a human can experience. When we’re hungry, one of the first things that happens is our mood changes. (Anyone else get hangry?) After a few days without food, we lose our ability to concentrate. Eventually, we have trouble sleeping, and then our muscles start breaking down and our immune system becomes compromised. At a certain point, our bodies just stop working.
There’s no more primal feeling of need than hunger, and no more universal satisfaction for hunger than bread. The same thing is true, though few of us think about it, when it comes to our spiritual lives. Without spiritual nourishment, our souls wither and die. The question is, where does that spiritual bread come from?
Answer: a relationship with God through Jesus Christ.
John records Jesus’ seven “I AM” statements in his Gospel, each of them with a different application to our areas of brokenness and need. In John 6, Jesus claims to be the “bread of life.” Seems straightforward enough: Jesus feeds hungry souls. But to understand Jesus’ full meaning, we have to go back to Moses’ encounter with the burning bush in Exodus 3.
It was then that God told Moses that he was to lead Israel out of captivity, and Moses responded, “And who should I tell Israel is coming to deliver them? What is your name?” In that day, names carried tremendous weight. They revealed where someone came from and what kind of resources they had available to them. So when Moses asks God’s name, he’s not just being polite. He’s making sure that God is the one who can come through.
God says in verse 14, “I AM who I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you’” (NIV). Normally, after saying “I am” to someone, you expect some kind of adjective to follow. But God leaves it at “I AM,” reminding Moses that he has neither beginning nor end and is self-sufficient. Whatever Moses needs or lacks, “I AM.”
From that point onward, whenever Israel had a need, God would invoke the name “I AM” and then attach to it whatever attribute met Israel’s need. When Israel was hungry and afraid, they called God “Jehovah Jireh,” meaning “I AM your provider.” In Exodus 14, when the Israelites were sick because they’d drunk from a poisoned well, God called himself “Jehovah Rapha,” meaning, “I AM your healer.” When afraid, “Jehovah Shammah,” “I AM the God present with you.”
And that brings us to the Gospel of John. Make no mistake about it—in using this “I AM” name, Jesus is claiming to be God. But it’s bigger than that: Jesus is claiming to be the God that meets us at the place of our deepest need.
Jesus made this audacious claim right after performing one of his most famous miracles, the feeding of the 5,000 (With, what else? Bread). In fact, the miracle was the setup for the claim. John says that “when the people saw the sign that he had done, they said, ‘This is indeed the Prophet who is to come into the world!’” (John 6:14).
The crowd recognizes this as a “sign” and calls Jesus “the” prophet, and this too goes back to the Exodus. When God delivered Israel from Egypt, as they were passing through the wilderness they found themselves in a place without food. So, six mornings a week, God covered the ground with a little bread-like substance. The children of Israel didn’t know what to call it, so they called it “manna,” which in Hebrew literally meant, “What is it?” And this is what they ate every day as they passed through the wilderness.
Several thousand years later in John 6, Israel is under the thumb of another oppressor, the Romans. They’re looking for another deliverer, like Moses, to rescue them from their distress. And Jesus displays the same kind of miraculous power with bread that Moses showed. To top it all off, Jesus did this during the Passover, the feast that marked the Jews’ freedom from Egypt.
Jesus proved himself to be the prophet who provided a new manna and instituted a new Passover meal. The same God who fed bread to his people in the wilderness says in John 6, “I AM the bread of life.”
Yet even with this clarity, the people still misinterpreted the sign.
Some thought the point was that Jesus had come to lead a revolt against Rome, but it wasn’t. Some just wanted more literal bread to fill their literal bellies. But that wasn’t the extent of Jesus’ ministry either. Jesus had come to reveal the starving state of their souls, a state not fixed by deliverance from oppression or eating food. What they craved—what we crave—is a relationship with him. What we need most isn’t the miracle itself but the Maker of miracles.
