I have written in this thread before that many of our contemporary food oddities are little more than thinly disguised manifestations of father hunger. Of course, father hunger manifests itself in other pathological ways than food issues — sexual promiscuity, to name just one — but sure it is no coincidence that this era of ours, bereft of real fathers, has seen a drastic explosion of food weirdness. And bread weirdness is right in the thick of it, right on schedule.
One correspondent pointed something out to me privately that I would like to pursue for just a moment. Fathers give bread. “If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone? or if he ask a fish, will he for a fish give him a serpent?” (Luke 11:11). That is just one of the things that a father is called to do. If your son asks for bread, what is your responsibility as a father? Even sinful men know that giving a stone would be a ridiculous response. But what happens these days when sons ask for bread? They don’t get stones, but they frequently get some form of unbread. And this is just a biblical and typological way of filling out a complete picture — bread from fathers, and unbread from unfathers.
Just as grape juice in the Lord’s Supper is an anemic but fitting picture of the grape juice gospel American evangelicals tend to preach, so also the frantic search for bread substitutes says about as loudly as anything like this can that we are really in the market for father substitutes — which are much harder to come by, as it turns out. But we should drop the search for father substitutes, turn in repentance back to our fathers, and ask for privilege of receiving his bread. “And when he came to himself, he said, How many hired servants of my father’s have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger?” (Luke 15:17).
This ache, this problem, this jagged hole in this generation’s soul, gets into everything. There are many fruitless theological, doctrinal, and political debates that should simply be set aside for a moment so that one of the agitated participants could be asked when was the last time he hugged his father?
Moses, the father of the Jewish nation, was used by God to give the children of Israel bread from heaven. And this bread from heaven was a type and an emblem of the ultimate bread from heaven, our Lord Jesus.
“Our fathers did eat manna in the desert; as it is written, He gave them bread from heaven to eat. Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Moses gave you not that bread from heaven; but my Father giveth you the true bread from heaven.” (John 6:31).
What does God the Father do? He gives us true bread. Rejection of bread, loathing of bread, the frenetic search for something that chews like it was bread but we can’t let it actually be bread, is all, ultimately, at the end of the day, a rejection of the Father’s gift of the Bread.
“This is that bread which came down from heaven: not as your fathers did eat manna, and are dead: he that eateth of this bread shall live for ever” (John 6:58).