Batman, bread and Jesus

"Follow me -- I'm Batman!" you yell, climbing all over the furniture in your house. Your friends pretend along with you for a while. Then they get bored. "You're not really Batman," they say. "Play something else or we're going home."

Jesus' followers sometimes thought He was playing, too. They put up with His saying He was God for a while, but then they got bored with it. In this week's Gospel (John 6:41-51), Jesus tells them He's not pretending!

"I am the bread that came down from heaven," Jesus said. The people answered, "You're a person, and you're from this town, not heaven!" But Jesus said, "I am the bread of life. People who believe me will follow my Father, and live forever with God in heaven."

It's fun to pretend you're Batman. You can say your bike is a Batmobile and your friends are Robin and Catwoman, and they'll pretend to believe you. When Jesus said He was bread from heaven, lots of people thought He was pretending, too. It was fun to listen to His "crazy" stories about God, but they thought it was all a game.

After you've spent a while playing Batman, your friends are ready for something else. If you don't want to stop, everyone gets angry and leaves. When Jesus kept saying He was the "bread of life," people got tired of it. They remembered growing up with Him, and they wouldn't believe that Jesus could be God and a human being, too.

Even when you're pretending, you know you're not Batman. But Jesus really was the bread of life -- not a piece of bread you eat, but a teacher God sent to fill us up with God's love, just like we fill our stomachs with bread.

When people believed Jesus and followed Him, they could go to heaven and live forever there with God. Jesus couldn't stop pretending He was God -- because He wasn't pretending!

PRAYER FOR THE WEEK: Jesus, help me remember that you always tell me the truth about God. Amen!

(08-07-97)

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