There is the powerful connection between the the Bible and bread in the scriptures. If, as the psalm declares, "Bread is to strenthen our hearts," Jesus Himself believed that the strength we need is first of all spiritual not merely physiological. Jesus, quoting Deuteronomy 8:3, argued against Satan's temptation to turn stones into bread by saying that "Man does not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God ." Later in his ministry, He commands us to pray to the Father, "Give us this day our daily bread." When teaching us to trust the Father in our prayer, He explains, "Which of you, if he asks for bread, would give his son a stone ?"
By quoting the Scriptures, the Lord was showing us that to combat temptation we too need the strength that comes from reading and knowing the Bible. As wonderful as Scripture scholarship is for the service of the Church, it would be reductionistic to believe his own knowledge was simply academic. Looking at his sayings, he holds the Bible not only in his memory but also in his heart. His example encourages us not only to understand the literal meaning of the Bible, but also its spiritual meaning, and all the ways that it connects together in itself and in our life.
In particular, Jesus dwells in our hearts to teach us wisdom. Because He dwells in us, the command of the Holy Bible that He held in his heart is offered to our own heart. His understanding of the Scriptures becomes the language of our souls. We "feel" the psalms as He did. We understand the promises of God as He did. We embody the way of the Lord as He pondered and embodied it in his own life. This means that when we prayerfully read the Scriptures, pondering them with our hearts, we are not alone.
Indeed, we are never alone. Our innermost being is a being in communion, defined by the most personal and intimate of relationships: where in He offers us everything He is and has, and invites us to do the same in return. This is the relationship that He knows in the heart of the Trinity and now He has sewn the possibility of it into humanity by entering into our world and sharing our flesh and making it his own.
In this relationship, we become what we eat. The Word of the Father feeds us with His words, and we can recieve and welcome what He longs for us to know if we chew on the Bible the way He did with HIs own human heart. With His Biblically informed heart, He is constantly communicating to us, constantly pouring into our hearts new meaning, truth so powerful that it heals, transforms and sanctifies everything it touches. Knowing the Bible tunes us into the language He speaks. If we share this Biblical horizon with Him, we constantly see how the diabolical is dethroned before the sheer power of this truth, always losing its footing in our hearts before His glory. This is a wisdom of orthodoxy, orthopraxis, orthopathos: believing, living and also 'feeling' rightly, that is, in truth. This means we see the Lord for who He really is and our neighbor for who he is too, and when we see the truth, our hearts are moved to a love we had no idea we were capable of.
Because He dwells in us, the command of the Holy Bible that He held in his heart is offered to our own heart. But we must attend to Him in the silence of our prayer and in the words of the Word. This Word feeds us with finest wheat - for He himself is the Living Bread. This is why St. Paul explains, "Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God."
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