Opinion: Thoughts from readers

John 6 tells the story of Jesus feeding people with bread and calling himself the Bread of Life. As a large crowd gathers around Jesus because of the healings they have seen, Jesus asks his disciples where they can buy bread to feed the people.

Philip, overwhelmed by this question, realizes there is no place to go to buy so much bread. What they find within the crowd is one boy’s lunch, and Jesus is able to feed the multitude with it, with some left over.

In Mennonite Church USA, we gather around Jesus, hungry for nourishment. How will we be able to satiate our appetites when there seems to be not enough grace, not enough holiness, not enough healing, not enough bread to go around?

It’s overwhelming to meet so many differing needs at once, so we divide ourselves into smaller groups based on doctrine, ethnicity, social standing, financial resources, our degree of attachment to tradition and common ministry goals, which can skew our understanding of the bigger picture.

Unlike Philip, who recognized that the problem of caring for the multitude was too overwhelming to be solved, we try desperately to find the right ingredients for bread.

We gather our intelligence, our logic, our knowledge, our beliefs and our favorite way to interpret Scripture to try to meet differing needs ourselves, resulting in numerous, conflicting recipes, as we wrestle with these questions:

What kind of church do we want?
Who is in and who is out?
What do we believe?
What is our mission?
What are our responsibilities to one another?
How do we determine what sin looks like today?
What should be our response to sin?
Who is in charge here?

No matter how often we revise our Confession of Faith from a Mennonite Perspective, our hymnbooks and our polities, before long they need revision. Yet we keep trying to find a formula, a recipe that works.

Let’s face it. It’s hopeless. We’ll never get it right.

Jesus didn’t ask us to create the recipe or make the bread. He reminds us that we are not in charge of the church or anyone else. He is in charge, so why are we arguing about what he wants? He has not given our leaders a limited supply of bread to disseminate to those who deserve it. The bread we receive from the church may be good, but it’s always a day or more old and a little stale.

Jesus gives bread (himself) to each person each day—just what we need for that day or that meal. He wants us to learn from him, directly, and incrementally. His bread won’t taste the same to everyone, and it won’t taste the same at different times in our lives.

We can learn from one another’s wisdom and journeys, but we need to recognize that we’re all a bit skewed in our understanding. We don’t all start our journey with God in the same place, and we’re not all in the same place in our journey with God. Jesus gives himself to each of us and gives us what we need to live abundant, eternal lives. Since each of us is unique, we won’t all have the same perspective, ever, unless we reduce faith to whatever recipe we think we understand in our heads and can convince others is truth.

God intends much more for us. We don’t have to create a recipe. We don’t have to follow a recipe. He gives us the real bread, Jesus. All we have to do, once we have a relationship with Jesus, is to listen to him in order to understand what we need for the day and to run to him when we realize we’re being tempted. He will transform us from the inside out in his own time so that we will desire something better for ourselves. This is good news. Creating, handing out and following recipes is a lot of work and distracts us from our responsibility to share the good news that Jesus is the Bread.

If we are truly submitted to God, we won’t need to argue to prove we are right and others are wrong. We can trust God; we can have faith in God’s love for each person and in God’s ability to transform hearts in God’s own way, which might be different from how we would choose to do it.

Transformation of others is neither our responsibility nor our right. We don’t have to make a recipe for bread and knead it with our own hands. We’d only mess it up.

Jesus himself is a limitless supply of bread and the only bread we will ever need. Let’s give him room to work.

Diane I. Bleam is a member of Bally (Pa.) Menno­nite Church.