All Saints’, Dorval
October 12, 2025
Blurry 2006 digital camera photo of me and my fellow travelers in our compartment on the train to Kyiv.
What does it mean to “eat your fill”?
Twenty years ago, when I was living in Germany, the university chorus that I was a member of did an exchange with our counterparts at a university in Kyiv. In December, they came to sing a concert with us – and they did it by traveling across half of Europe by bus, because plane or even train tickets were not in the budget.
So in May, when we traveled to Ukraine for the second concert, we also didn’t fly – we took the train. Thirty-six hours each way, from Konstanz on the Swiss border to Kyiv in north central Ukraine, via Berlin and Warsaw, with a long stop in the middle of the night on the Polish-Ukrainian border to swap all the wheels on the train cars over from the western European railway configuration to the wider Russian gauge. At least we had bunks to sleep in, unlike the Ukrainian choristers trying to sleep sitting up in coach seats.
And there was no dining service of any kind on the train. Every bite we ate during the day and a half in transit each way, we had to pack and bring along.
I certainly packed plenty to eat, in strictly caloric terms. Crackers and cheese and dried fruit and nuts and granola bars and cured meat and cookies and so forth. But especially on the way home, my system refused to accept being fed this way. It wanted meals. It wanted hot, fresh, flavourful, cooked food, served together on a plate and eaten with a fork, not yet another cracker or dried apricot. I got hungrier and hungrier while being simply unable to force down enough of what I had on hand to fill my stomach. When we stopped for half an hour in the brand-new Berlin Hauptbahnhof on the way home, I was among the first of the mob of German students that jumped off the train and sprinted into the station in search of a freshWürst with mustard on a hot Brötchen. And when we finally reached the last hour or so of our journey, I called my then-husband from the train and made it clear that I expected a hot meal involving a large quantity of cooked vegetables to be waiting on the table when I arrived at the door of our apartment.
I frequently recall this experience when the Bible mentions manna. Jesus’ conversation partners talk to him about manna in today’s gospel: “Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, ‘he gave them bread from heaven to eat.’” But they are romanticizing this historical memory more than a little bit: what they conveniently omit is that the people hated the manna. They found it tasteless and boring and got tired of it after about thirty-six hours. I suspect they felt very similar to the way I did while sitting on that train wishing desperately for something I actually wanted to eat.
And they whined constantly to Moses about it. Eventually they got so annoying in their demands for meat that God gave them quails, but God was mad enough that the meat came with an over-the-top rant about how God would give them so much that it would start coming out their nostrils. (Never let anyone tell you the Bible is boring.)
Our passage from Deuteronomy, in fact, recounts a ritual that is supposed to take place just as the people have entered the Promised Land – the land that is known for “flowing with milk and honey”, in contrast to the forty years in the wilderness when they got so utterly sick and tired of manna. On the cusp of finally enjoying a harvest of real, fresh, flavourful produce for the first time in their lives, they are commanded to offer the very first of that produce to God, in thanksgiving for being brought out of slavery in Egypt. The chance to finally eat their fill must wait just a little while longer, while they make suitable offerings to the One from whom all good things come.
In the conversation recorded in the Gospel passage, many different kinds of food and bread are mentioned. “The loaves” that Jesus has just multiplied to feed five thousand people; the “food that perishes,” in contrast to the “food that endures for eternal life”; the manna in the wilderness, the bread from heaven; the true bread from heaven, which may or may not be the same thing; the bread of God that comes down from heaven, ditto; and the bread of life, which also seems to be distinct from the other kinds of bread.
I don’t think there’s much point in trying to parse, in detail, exactly what each kind means and stands for. But what we can conclude from this passage is that there are definitely different kinds of nourishment, and some of them are more satisfying than others. And while that’s true on a literal level, it’s also true on a spiritual level.
The people Jesus is talking to did, in fact, eat their fill of the loaves (and the fishes, which for some reason aren’t mentioned). Their stomachs are comfortably full; if they weren’t, Jesus talking to them at length about spiritual bread would be cruel as well as insulting.
But now that they have been physically fed, Jesus invites and challenges them to think about their spiritual hungers. And maybe to think a little bit beyond the notoriously dull and monotonous manna, and envision a kind of heavenly bread that would genuinely satisfy hunger.
The world provides us with a lot of spiritual junk food these days. Artificially generated videos, vacuous memes, “influencers” whose only job is to sell things, grifters exploiting ancient traditions for their personal gain, books churned out in bulk without a single original idea, reality TV that glorifies the basest human impulses – and that’s before we get into the literal spiritual poison being peddled by those who have twisted the gospel to mean the exact opposite of what it clearly says.
We cannot sustain ourselves on the spiritual equivalent of the crackers and nuts and raisins I packed on that train in 2006, let alone the out-and-out artificial junk that is out there. We need real food. We need – in the words of the Apostle Paul – “whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise”. We need books that faithfully interpret scripture and explain the life of discipleship. We need teachers who wrestle honestly with God and with the reality of human experience. We need art that offers beauty and transcendence, not just cheap escapism.
In other words, we need Jesus, the true Son of God and Son of Man, who gives the bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world. We need to nourish ourselves with prayer, worship, fellowship with others, and the kind of spiritual food that really is food – a square meal, not a dry, unsatisfying snack. We need to give thanks to the One who gives us, forever, the bread that, if we eat it, we will never be hungry.
Amen.
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