A Twilight Musing by Elton Higgs

“Do not labor for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life, which the Son of man will give to you; for on him has God the Father set his seal!"...Jesus said to them, 'I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst" (John 6:27, 35).

In partaking of this bread, we reaffirm our commitment to the true Bread of Life, rather than to the bread which perishes. Our labors for the daily bread which sustains our physical bodies are set aside, and we allow ourselves to be drawn into the realm of eternal satisfaction with Jesus. The repeated supplying and partaking of our daily bread is necessary as a means to an end, which is learning to eat and drink of God Himself, so that we may be completely filled and satisfied. Jesus is making this point in John 6, when He contrasts the temporal manna in the wilderness, miraculous though it was, with the true bread--Jesus Himself—which sustains spiritual life, not merely physical life.

However, in our present form, we need both the bread of earth and the Bread of Heaven. The bread of earth prolongs our days on earth long enough for God's purposes for us here to be fulfilled; by the grace of God we are sustained so that we may be His instruments in the world. But the fulfillment of that instrumentality is accomplished only by our taking within us the nature of the perfectly obedient Son of God. The Bread of Heaven sustains us as reborn beings who are delivered from the captivity of the first Adam into the freedom of the Second Adam, Jesus our Savior. Thus the Bread of Life nourishes the eternal part of us, not just our doomed bodies. But just as Jesus manifested the Divine Nature in a physical and perishable body, so we carry out His ministry by a temporary reflection of the Incarnation, merging the mortal and the immortal in an uneasy union to carry out God's purposes.

Jesus calls us to be like Himself in the world, experiencing the tension between the first and the second birth. He sustains both natures by His provision of bread, which is profoundly symbolized in its double sense in the Lord's Supper. He calls upon us to embrace and ingest it with thankfulness for both the physical and the spiritual sustenance which are embodied in what is at once the bread of earth and the Bread of Heaven. We walk thus, suspended with Him, until He calls us home to feast imperishably at His table.

Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife in Jackson, MI. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. Recently, Dr. Higgs has self-published a collection of his poetry called Probing Eyes: Poems of a Lifetime, 1959-2019, as well as a book inspired by The Screwtape Letters, called The Ichabod Letters, available as an e-book from Moral Apologetics. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable.