God’s Word is creative and if He says, “Whoever eats this bread will live forever,” we better ask, “What can He mean? How do we eat Him if I want to live forever?”
If we read it in the original Greek, Jesus uses the word “trogain” which means to GNAW, as a lion would eat the meat off the bones of its prey. “Unless you GNAW me, you will not have life within you.” This was very disgusting to the Jews because they were taught from childhood, from the Law and the Prophets, that they should never eat animal flesh with blood. Many followers left His side at this point. Did Jesus tell them, “Come back! I did not mean what you think! I only meant that you eat me symbolically!”? No! He let them go.
The Words of Jesus transforms reality. After all He is the Word became flesh for the life of the world. God made light by saying, “Let there be light.” Jesus says, “I am the bread of life... I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.”
Do we hunger for this living bread just as we hunger for food when we are deprived of it? Saint Augustine writes in his Commentary about the 6th chapter of John: “This bread, indeed, requires the hunger of the inner man...The Lord said that He Himself was the Bread that came down from heaven, exhorting us to believe in Him. For to believe in Him is to eat the living Bread. He that believes eats; he is sated invisibly, because invisibly he is born again.”
Today, we cannot receive the Holy Eucharist because of the pandemic, but one day, we will be able to again. Let us not take it for granted as we usually do. How many of us miss the wonders of God because we are not present to the many graces of the Church and His Word?
Rosalind Moss, a Jew and an evangelical minister who converted to Catholicism after reading the writings of the early Church fathers, wrote: “I remember the night I received the Eucharist. I don’t know how my body contained me because as the Eucharist went on my tongue I thought the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob whose name I couldn’t write or pronounce as a child, before whom no one could stand and live, (as God said to Moses), THAT God had entered history. The God who created time became man for our salvation, the unapproachable God of Mt. Sinai did that. And that God who entered history is now on my tongue!”
In many ways the Old Testament prefigured the Holy Eucharist and the first Jewish Christians believed in the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. They saw the Eucharist as the new Passover, the new manna from heaven and the new Bread of the Presence. Dr. Brant Pitre lectured about Jesus and the Jewish roots of the Eucharist. One of the points he brought out was that the mystery of the Trinity is foreshadowed in the tabernacle of Moses.
The 3 key symbols in the tabernacle, he said, were the Ark of the Covenant (God the Father), the lamp stand or the menorah with tongues of fire (Holy Spirit), and the gold table with the Bread of the Presence (Jesus). In the Jewish Talmud it says that at Passover, the priest would take the table from the holy place of the temple. And in the midst of the people, the priest would lift up the table with the bread and say, "Behold God's love ❤️ for you."
Thank You Lord for the bread that You give, Your flesh which You gave to give us life and love! And thank You for choosing us to be your instruments to spread Your love to others!!!
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