The 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time, August 18, 2024

John 6, 51-58

Jesus said to the crowds: “I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.”  The Jews quarreled among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his Flesh to eat?” Jesus said to them, “Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the Flesh of the Son of Man and drink his Blood, you do not have life within you. Whoever eats my Flesh and drinks my Blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day. For my Flesh is true food, and my Blood is true drink. Whoever eats my Flesh and drinks my Blood remains in me and I in him. Just as the living Father sent me and I have life because of the Father, so also the one who feeds on me will have life because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Unlike your ancestors who ate and still died, whoever eats this bread will live forever.”

The Gospel reading for today’s Mass carries on from the readings of the last few Sundays.  The Lord is speaking to the crowd in Capernaum about himself as the Bread of Life, and the necessity of eating this Bread for eternal life.  This crowd is made up largely of the five thousand people whom he had miraculously fed the day before.

“I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.”  The Lord identifies the manna that fed the Hebrews in the Sinai desert so that they might enter the Promised Land as a sign that was fulfilled in himself: those who feed on him will live so as to enter the true Promised Land of heaven.  The manna was precisely the food that God wanted them to eat, for he created it for them and sent it down from heaven to them.  And so the Incarnate Son of God has been prepared and sent for the descendants of those Hebrews to feed upon.  “The bread that I will give is my flesh.”  The Greek word translated here as the very general word “give” also has the more specific meaning of “offer”, as in, “to offer as sacrifice”, so: “The bread that I will offer is my flesh.”  This conforms to the prophesies of Isaiah: “He was offered because it was his own will” (Isaiah 53, 7).  He did this for the “life of the world”: but not everyone will be saved, just as most of the Hebrews who left Egypt under Moses died in their sins before entering the Promised Land (cf. Numbers 14, 22-23)

“The Jews quarreled among themselves, saying, ‘How can this man give us his Flesh to eat?’ ”  While this is a perfectly legitimate question, the Jews go about answering it only by asking it of themselves.  This is a way of avoiding the answer that the Lord would give them.  Here, we see the terrible predicament of fallen man: unable to help himself to rise above his state, he turns to his fellow, who, in the same situation, cannot provide any but illusory aid.  This is shown graphically in the attempt to build the Tower of Babel: unable to look beyond the physical world, people attempt to attain a spiritual heaven through physical means.  Only God can help us, and yet we ignore him or fear to ask him or our pride forbids us to ask him.

The Lord watches them and listens to them struggle with each other as he also watches the struggle going on in their hearts.  He would help, but he is not asked.  After a time, he speaks again very loudly so that the crowd might hear him above their bickering.  “Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the Flesh of the Son of Man and drink his Blood, you do not have life within you.”  Notice what he says here: “Unless you eat . . . you do not have.”  He does not say, You will not have.  He speaks in the present tense.  While he makes it clear that eating his Flesh and drinking his Blood will lead them to eternal life, there is no life within them in the present without this.  He is speaking of grace.  Grace makes us truly alive, especially in regards to the soul.  The person who has received grace is a very different kind of person from one who has not.  This person can think, understand, and act and live in ways an ungraced person cannot.  

“For my Flesh is true food, and my Blood is true drink.”  The Lord insists on what he has already taught them, but he still does not answer their question because they have not asked him.  These words, then, are for those whose faith is already strong enough that they will accept them as true even though they do not fully understand what they mean.  They do this on the basis of their own experience of the Lord’s works.  Now, when the Lord says that his Flesh is “true food” and his Blood is “true drink”, he is not saying, My Flesh is truly food, and my Blood truly drink.  The latter statement simply means that his Flesh is edible and his Blood drinkable.  In fact, what he is saying is that his Flesh is the Food, that is, the model  or form for any other kind of food.  An apple, say, shares in some of the properties of the Lord’s Flesh: it is edible, it provides a certain nourishment, it leads to a certain level of health, and so on.  To the extent that it shares in the properties of the True Food of the Flesh of the Lord, we can call it food.  But it is not True Food because it only provides temporary benefits to the human body.  The True Food of the Fresh of Jesus Christ provides eternal benefits to both the human body and soul.  Nourished with this Bread from heaven, the human body becomes capable of rising on the last day, and of becoming spiritualized — capable of heaven.  In creating things that could be used as food by humans, God used the Flesh and Blood he knew his Son would possess as his model.  Everything that we eat and drink is in some way like this divine reality.  Just as the Father is the Father and all other fatherhood is based upon him, and all those who are fathers are to a certain degree like him, so the Flesh and Blood of the Lord is the Food and Drink, and all other foods and drinks are merely like them to some degree.

“Whoever eats my Flesh and drinks my Blood remains in me and I in him.”  We consume him so that we might be consumed by him.  We receive him so that we might be received by him.  “Just as the living Father sent me and I have life because of the Father, so also the one who feeds on me will have life because of me.”  All life, human and divine, originates from the Father.  By consuming the Flesh and Blood of the Lord, we become like him and so we receive a share in the divine life the Father gives his Son.  “Unlike your ancestors who ate and still died, whoever eats this Bread will live forever.”  Now, in speaking in this way, the Lord minimizes the death that all in this world must undergo.  For the one who has eaten his Flesh and drunk his Blood, the death of the body is merely a means to an end, that end being eternal life in the ecstatic bliss of heaven.  The knowledge of this is what provides strength of will to those suffering martyrdom, it is what fuels the zeal of the missionary, what fires the love of priests and religious, and what makes life in a fracturing world within a bitter and despairing society possible for all who believe.