By Fr. Mark Mary, M.F.V.A.
“Lord, give us this bread always” (Jn. 6:34). What is special about this “bread” that Jesus is promising them? It is the bread of life. The fullness of life is what Jesus is giving them. This fullness is what our hearts crave. It is what we are made for, and it is the only thing that can satisfy us. This Bread of Life, this Living Bread, is the means for us to share in His life. Jesus uses some term or phrase about life in this chapter eighteen times. In verses 54-58, He speaks of “abiding” within us through giving us His flesh and blood to eat and drink. He promises us eternal life and invites us to share in the relationship Jesus has with the Father. And as the Father gives Him life, Jesus wants to give us that same life.
If we look in the Old Testament, we see God preparing His people to receive and believe in His Son as the Messiah. All of God’s interventions in the history of His people are meaningful and serve to bring them to the fullness of the revelation of who He is. Twelve hundred and fifty years before Christ, the ancient Israelites were enslaved in Egypt. Moses was tending the flocks of his father-in-law when God spoke to him from the burning bush. He called to him and sent him back to Egypt to convince Pharaoh to let Israel go and offer sacrifice in the desert. It took ten plagues pounding Egypt before Pharaoh let the people go.
The tenth plague was the death of all the firstborn children and animals in Egypt. Even the Israelites would suffer the death of their firstborn if they did not sacrifice and eat the Passover lamb. The Lord gave the Hebrew people a Passover ritual they were to celebrate in order to be spared from this last plague. They were to take a year-old lamb without blemish and slaughter it, apply the blood to the doorposts and lintels of their houses. If God “saw” the blood then He would “pass over” the home and not kill the firstborn. Through the Passover celebration, God was forming and protecting His people. Every year they were to celebrate the Passover and remember what God had done for them.
One crucial aspect of the Passover ritual was that you had to eat the lamb. It was not enough to sacrifice the lamb and apply its blood to the doorposts and lintels. The lamb had to be eaten. In John 1:29, John the Baptist cries out that Jesus is the “Lamb of God.” Jesus is the lamb to be sacrificed to save us from a much deeper bondage than the slavery of Egypt. He saves us from the “Egypt” of sin and death.
We are told early in John chapter six that it was Passover time for the Jews. The feast was celebrated with nationalistic undertones as they struggled under Roman occupation. In the first part of John chapter six, Jesus performs the spectacular miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and the fish to feed the great crowd (five thousand men were present).
He then withdraws from the crowd because they wanted to make Him a king. They were looking for a worldly king who would free them from Roman rule. If Jesus could multiply the loaves and fish, He certainly could raise up a great army to overthrow Rome. But that is not the kind of kingdom that Jesus came to inaugurate. His was to be a kingdom of truth that would exist “within us” and reach its consummation at the end of time with the second coming of Jesus. The kingdom is mysteriously present now and when the Lord comes it will enter into its perfection. (Cf. Lumen Gentium, #39) We prepare the way for the final bestowal of the kingdom, the new heavens and earth, by all of our works of charity and efforts for a better ordering of society.
The next day Jesus performs another spectacular miracle: He walks on water. He uses the divine name “I AM” to identify Himself to the apostles, gripped by fear, in the boat. He then calms the storm and they miraculously arrive at shore. He is demonstrating to them that He is much more than an earthly king; He is the Son of God.
He is also more than a prophet. The people catch up to Him on the other side of the lake. It is time for breakfast, and they seek Him out because they are hungry again. They are not following the signs they have seen. They are not looking at Him with the eyes of faith. Jesus is trying to lead the people into having a deeper faith in Him, “…to believe in the one [sent by God]” (Jn. 6:29).
The Jews then asked for a sign like Moses performed in the desert. According to the rabbinic teaching at the time, the expected Messiah was to perform a Moses-like miracle. “Moses gave us manna in the desert, what sign do you perform?” they asked Jesus. He tells them that it was not Moses who rained down manna from heaven but the Father who fed and sustained them. “Amen, amen, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave the bread from heaven; my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world” (Jn. 6:33).
Jesus is much greater than Moses. The Father sends the Son as the true bread from heaven. The manna did not give the people eternal life. Jesus is cultivating a greater faith in the people. They respond, “Lord, give us this bread always” (Jn. 6:34). We need to have this same faith cultivated within us as we approach the Eucharist. We should hunger for it because it is the “Bread of Life.” Without it we have no life within us.
Jesus continues on in the chapter to tell the people that the “bread” he will give them is His flesh. He is teaching them about the Real Presence (His body, blood, soul and divinity) under the sacramental forms of bread and wine in the Eucharist. Many of the Jews murmured at this teaching. They then quarreled, and finally left Him. Each time Jesus repeated His teaching in even stronger terms. He even changes the verb form in verses 54-58 to a more graphic term depicting actual chewing or munching. He did not reduce the teaching to a simple metaphor. How could He, cannibalism could never be interpreted as a pleasant metaphor for believing in God by Jews. “…[M]any of his disciples returned to their former way of life and no longer accompanied him” (Jn. 6:66).
Jesus does not call them back. No, they understood the realism of His sayings. They did not walk away because of His use of a shocking metaphor of eating flesh and drinking blood; they walked away because they knew He wasn’t speaking metaphorically. He even turns to the twelve and asks them if they too want to leave. Peter replies, “Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and are convinced that you are the Holy One of God” (Jn. 6:68-69). Peter responds in faith. He cannot possibly fully understand how Jesus will give them His flesh and blood to eat, but he believes, and as prince of the Apostles, he speaks for all of us.
“The Church draws her life from the Eucharist,” wrote John Paul II in his encyclical on the Eucharist in 2003. The Eucharist is at the heart of the mystery of what the Church is: the communion of God with man. The very instrument of our salvation, the sacred humanity of Jesus Christ, is given to us to eat so that we may experience the fullness of life that He came to offer to us, an actual sharing in the divine nature.
Taken from www.franciscanmissionaries.com. Used by permission.
