Broken and Given

 

I say to you, “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

—John 12:24

And when he [Jesus] had given thanks, he broke it [bread] and said, “This is my body, which is broken for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”

—1 Corinthians 11:24

By growing accustomed to our modern supermarkets and the plastic-packaged-machine-sliced loaves of bread we buy in abundance, we forget the raw materials and the deadly process that goes into such food. Of course, in Bible times, everyone understood what Jesus meant when He referred to broken bread. These people saw daily the practice of bread-making.

The wheat goes through a wounding process in which each grain gets ground down to the flour with which we make bread. In Jesus’ day, large mill stones crushed the grain and ground it. Using the image of broken bread, Jesus demonstrated the breaking of His own body by which the Father made Him food for us.

Even if we understand Jesus’ brokenness when we partake of the Sacrament of Holy Communion—the Lord’s Supper—we must realize that not only should we celebrate and remember Christ’s giving for us, He also wants us to give ourselves away in the same manner.

Here’s how author Ann Voskamp describes it:¹

Live Eucharist. Practice communion… Feel abundant life. All I can think is this: this is how you make the ever-present Christ fully present. This is the beginning of becoming the gift. Allow Christ in you to give away the gift of Himself right through your brokenness. God gives God so we can be the givers. The gift-ers. (emphasis mine.)¹

If we have felt the crushing of our hearts—most all of us have had such an experience—we must understand that Christ wants more from us than our single ripened grain of beautiful wheat. The way of the cross, on which His body was broken, has become a demonstration of God’s sacrifice for us. Now, He wants us to give our broken lives to others as bread, nourishment, and healing for them.

We can praise our risen Lord for the crushed body He gave for us. And, we can praise Him for the honor He gives us to demonstrate the same brokenness and sacrifice to a needy world in which we live.

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1 Voskamp, Ann. Be the Gift. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing Company, 2017. p. 57.