I AM

I AM : M. M. Ninan
Here Jesus is presenting himself
as the sustainer of life and not as
the giver of life. In the Bible the
life giver is the Spirit of God.
So, in defining himself as the
bread, he implies his function in
the Trinity. Food doesn’t give
life to the body; it only maintains it to be a healthy body so that it
may function perfectly. The body - and I refer to the physical body
- cannot function normally unless a man has Jesus within him.
Without Jesus, the body decays and death will come. This is simply
because without the power of the risen Jesus it is impossible to live
a righteous life here and now. Our ability to live a normal healthy
life is dependent on Jesus in our life. As James points out, “Then
desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin; and sin when it is fully
grown brings death.” (Ja. 1.15) Jesus is now talking about death. It is
commonly told that death is to be understood as spiritual death or
separation from God. Such an understanding has come from the
western interpretation. But in the Semitic and Asiatic thought, this
distinction does not arise.
The bread is the staff of life or the
food that sustains life and helps it
grow.
Life is both spiritual and material and
death is same in both cases. In both cases, it is a splitting or
destruction of man. Death is the result of sin. It is not antecedent
to sin, but consequence of sin. So, if death is to be conquered, sin
must be defeated. Sin can be defeated only through Jesus. The
ultimate salvation of mankind lies in Jesus, the bread of life.
3.1 OLD TESTAMENT IMPLICATIONS
To understand what Jesus meant by the “Bread of life” we need to
look into the Old Testament concept of bread. The symbolic
representation of bread in the Old Testament arises in the context
of the Shew bread, or the bread of Presence.
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