My Flesh for the Life of the World

Context

In the three-year cycle of readings, we are now in Year B when our Gospel readings are generally from Mark’s Gospel during Trinity-tide/Ordinary Time. However, every year at this time the Church moves us over to John’s Gospel for five Sundays to permit us to go deeper into the matter of the Eucharist than we find in Mark. These five weeks are drawn from chapter 6. John’s Gospel doesn’t have the Institution Narrative at the last supper. Scholars find that John places this teaching on the Eucharist in events from what they call his Book of Signs. There are seven signs that show Who Jesus is and what He has come to accomplish. How Providential this gift is for us as we reach the final months of the last year of our National Eucharistic Revival.

In the first week of these five Gospel passages from John, we saw that Jesus multiplied loaves for the five thousand with 12 baskets left over, a sign (the fourth in the Book of Signs) that points to His provision of the Eucharist which nourishes the Church (signified by the 12) throughout all time. The People saw this and were convinced He was the Messiah (when they wanted to make Him King), but Jesus departed from them because they did not understand what kind of Messiah-King He really is. That night He took His disciples to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, and while on the sea reveals to them that His authority extends not just over men but over all creation, in his fifth sign when He walked on the water and calmed the storm. The next morning the People did not find Him, and so they departed for Capernaum and caught up to Him in the synagogue there. 

Last week we read that after seeing Jesus’ sign the day before and being convinced that He was the Messiah, the people are now allowing doubts to creep in. When they encounter Jesus, they ask Him for a sign. Since Jesus filled their bellies without any labor on their part (something we all can be attracted to), they offer Him a suggestion that He perpetually multiply loaves so their bellies would always be full as Moses had done when he gave Israel Manna during the forty years of wandering. Jesus corrects them and redirects their focus. He tells them that the Manna came from God, but what they really need is not bread for the perishable body but life everlasting. Ultimately, He is showing them the Manna was a sign pointing to Him, He is the Bread of Life. With that, Jesus transitions from the “multiplication of loaves” passage to the Bread of Life discourse, which is where we pick up with our present reading.

Today, we see the Jewish leaders murmuring at Jesus’ claim that He is the Bread which came down from heaven. At this point, the obstacle for them is His declaration that He came down from heaven (wait until they hear they must eat His flesh). After all, they know His parents & family; they know He comes from Nazareth. Perhaps we can sympathize with these people and their doubts but then again, they have just seen a great sign. They were sure He was the Messiah, and now they are finding reasons to doubt Him. This is an important lesson for us; we must see ourselves in not only the protagonists in the lessons of Scripture but also in the antagonists. Voluntary doubt about what God has revealed to us is not healthy, it is a sin. When we have seen and chosen the truth, subsequent doubts come from temptation and following them is to choose to follow Satan rather than God. Choosing to doubt can lead us no place good. Such doubt may be common, but it is not natural; it is not authentically human.

Jesus responds that belief in Him is necessary for eternal life and He goes on to explain this belief includes eating His flesh because It alone is the Bread of Life. He will soon give Himself as Bread for the Life of the World. There is too much here in this short passage to discuss in a short homily, so let’s look at one point. What exactly does Jesus mean by His being The Bread of Life. The answer to this is found when He explains that His Flesh is this Bread and that it will be given for the Life of the World. So let us take a look at these three points in turn.

Significance for Us

Bread of Life: “Bread” in the Greek of the New Testament is artos, which can mean food in general. However, in our context in which Jesus has just fed the 5000 with wheat bread and the Jews relate this to the Manna of the wilderness wanderings all mean that John wants us to be assured artos means wheat bread here. It is important to know that the Church has always seen this Bread of Life discourse together with the feeding of the five thousand as foreshadowing the Eucharist. Understanding the Eucharist begins with Jesus’ declaration that our access to eternal life begins with faith in Him. But the Eucharist demonstrates to us that faith means much more than simple assent to a truth. It includes assent, but it is not saving faith until it becomes complete entrustment, complete surrender of ourselves to Him…even when things sound difficult, especially when they are difficult.

In Jesus’ time, bread is essential nourishment for bodily life. Jesus explains to the people that the Manna God gave also only provided sustenance for the body, but it was also a sign which was pointing ultimately to Him. After eating the Manna, man still dies. But Jesus is reminding the people that man wasn’t meant to die. It was the calamity brought about by Adam and Eve’s rebellion against the Source of all life that led to man’s death. Only the Bread of Life can remedy this catastrophe in which we all now live. Jesus is showing the Jews of His time and people of all time that it is only a complete, living, active faith in Him that will permit us to accept this Bread of Life.

His Flesh is Bread: Jesus says the Bread of Life is His Flesh. This phrase ties the sacrificial nature of the Eucharist to its life-giving fruits. The Early Church saw this connection. Just as bread is made through the passion of its kernels, through their being crushed and broken, so it is with Bread of Life. The Bread of Life, the Eucharist is brought about through His Passion. Later Jesus will say that a grain of wheat must fall into the earth and die if it is to bear great fruit (see John 12:24). Yet, this is not simply a metaphor. Rather, it continues the teaching about His Eucharistic Sacrifice. It is not simply the happenstance of His death that bears fruit. 

In fact, He says that His life is not being taken, but He willingly lays it down in obedient love for the Father and in sacrificial love for us. He will soon do in time, what He does eternally. Eternally, as Son, He receives Himself from the Father and in loving Thanksgiving, eternally returns Himself. In the dimension of time, He returns to the Father by means of the Cross His humanity, the Body and Soul that the Father Has given Him. This Eucharistic love for the Father He gives as a gift for us. It is His perpetual offering of Himself in the Mass so we may have regular access to the Bread of Life, Jesus Christ, Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity in Holy Communion. The Bread without which, the world has no access to eternal life.

For the Life of the World: The word for “world” in Greek is kosmos. Here it could simply refer to all men, but the Church understands Jesus gives His life for each of us, for all of us, and for the reconciliation of all of creation. The Bread of Life restores all of creation to communion with the Father; salvation is truly cosmic. Jesus does so through His Eucharistic Love which is manifested through His crushed Body, which is restored to life in His Resurrection and in the Church. Many Catholics have lost this cosmic and missionary sense of Eucharist. Like Jesus Christ, the Head of the Body, every member, every Christian must fall into the earth and die. This means we must become zealous collaborators with Him in saving not simply ourselves but saving the world. We begin this transformation in Christ with our baptisms. However, it must continue and bear great fruit.

Our Transformation in Christ

The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that the Eucharist makes the Church (CCC 1396). We are the Mystical Body of Christ beginning with our baptisms, but we are so because of the Eucharist. The Bread of Life is the perpetual Sacrifice of Jesus Christ, and it is offered continually in His Church through in the Mass where it nourishes members of the Body who partake of it in Holy Communion. But it also transforms the world through His continually crushed Body, the members of the Church thru their suffering. This is what we mean when we say to a person suffering to “offer it up.” St. Paul explains it this way. In a strange passage in which he first sounds like a masochist and then like a blasphemer he says, “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the Church” (Colossians 1:24). 

Most of us must admit that “rejoicing” is not the first thought that comes to mind in the midst of our suffering. However, does St. Paul go too far when he says that his sufferings complete the missing sufferings of Christ or that his sufferings could be for the sake of the Church? Notice that Paul does not say Jesus’s, but Christ’s sufferings. Paul in several places talks about the Church as a multi-person organism in which Jesus is the Head and every human person who is baptized is a member. This is the Body of Christ, what St. Augustine calls the whole Christ. Body is not a metaphor, but a true theological analogy. The same organic unity that constitutes a creaturely body, constitutes the Body of the Church. In this way, the sufferings of Jesus 2000 years ago become the same sufferings as those every Christian suffers throughout time. 

Jesus suffered all that was necessary, what was lacking was only the sufferings of its members throughout time. These become the instruments by which the grace of the Cross radiates into and throughout all time. This is what the Catechism means when it says the Eucharist makes the Church, and it also makes our sufferings the self-same sufferings of Christ’s during His Passion. The Church, the Whole Body of Christ, is the instrument by which He saves not just individuals, but the whole world. Each Christian is called to be an enthusiastic, active collaborator in this project of infinite love. 

To do so, we must recall we are all called to be transformed in Christ, to make ourselves Christ’s pure bread, ground pure through the trials of our lives, by the teeth of the lions which we confront when we attempt to live our faith authentically. This transformation comes through the Sacraments, especially the Eucharist. We must also cooperate with this Sacramental grace through living a life of virtue, a life of service in love, and a life of prayer. Let us spend these last few months of the Eucharistic Revival dedicated to this transformation in Christ. Perhaps we might begin by looking at ourselves during prayer, especially praying in adoration before the Blessed Sacrament and asking Jesus to show us where in our lives we have yet to allow to fall to the ground and die, to put to death those things that keep us from giving ourselves totally to Him and which prevent us from authentically loving one another and being compelling witnesses of His Good News to the world.