Thursday in the Third Week of Easter, April 22, 2021

John 6:44-51

Jesus said to the crowds: “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him, and I will raise him on the last day. It is written in the prophets: “They shall all be taught by God.”  Everyone who listens to my Father and learns from him comes to me. Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father. Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever believes in me has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the desert, but they died; this is the bread that comes down from heaven so that one may eat it and not die. 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.”

It is hard to imagine the Lord speaking these words quickly.  They require so much thought to understand and such willpower to believe that he must have paused between the statements he was making.  This is indicated by the change in approach, rewording, and repetition he employs in delivering his basic message.  This occasion marks a milestone in the history of the human race.  No body of people had ever been asked to believe what the Lord was here asking these folks to believe.  The results would be mixed.  Those with weak faith left him, and those whose faith was already strong were made stronger in it.

“No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him, and I will raise him on the last day.”  This sentence sets the stage for what comes next: “It is written in the prophets: ‘They shall all be taught by God.’ ”  It seems that the Lord is quoting Isaiah 54,13: “All your children shall be taught by the Lord: and great shall be the peace of your children.”  The “they” in the verse would be the children of Israel, the Jews. The implication is that God would teach his people directly and not through any human intermediaries.  That would be fulfilled at this time, outside of Capernaum.  The Son of God delivers the teachings of the Father.  “Everyone who listens to my Father and learns from him comes to me.”  This teaching brings to mind the words of the Father at the time of the Transfiguration, which was still to come at that point: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased: hear ye him” (Matthew 17, 5).  In this case, the Father speaks himself.  Parenthetically, the Lord confirms, “Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father.”  Jesus, who has made his claim that he is “from the Father” now claims to have “seen” the Father, which word both in Greek and in Hebrew could also have been understood as “known”.  

“Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever believes in me has eternal life.”  We have to picture this scene for ourselves in order to begin to grasp the nearly impossible thing the Lord is saying here.  Putting aside the recent miracle of the loaves and fishes, which many members of the crowd may not have fully been aware of, and the Lord’s walking on the sea, which they could only have surmised since they did not see it, what they saw was a man of ordinary height, perhaps thin from his fasting, with the hardened muscles of a working man.  His clothes would have hung on him with a certain raggedness.  His face would have shown his intelligence and his eyes would have blazed with his zeal. His posture would have displayed his assuredness.  For all that, he was one who ate and drank with them, one whose voice betrayed his Galilean origins.  He may have acted and spoken powerfully, but he also looked every inch a mortal man.  He was not even of the priestly class and was rejected by the authorities in Jerusalem.  How could this man say this?  Or, to quote his own Nazarene brethren, “Where does this man get all this?” (Matthew 13, 56).  

Jesus reiterates: “I am the bread of life.”  No prophet — no human — had ever spoken like this.  Since John does the tell us that the crowd interrupted him, we have to suppose that they were simply staggered and were waiting for him to unwrap this mystery that he had set before them.  “Your ancestors ate the manna in the desert, but they died; this is the bread that comes down from heaven so that one may eat it and not die.”  He says “your ancestors”, not “our”, distinguishing his divine heritage from their purely human lineage.  Now, their ancestors had the privilege of eating the manna sent by God from heaven to feed them in the wilderness.  Even so, they died.  The man from Nazareth now dares to say that those who eat the Bread of which he was speaking would not die, and he seems to indicate that he is somehow that very Bread.  “I am the living bread that came down from heaven.”  Some murmuring must have commenced by this time.  People would have asked each other what he meant.  Others would have shaken their heads in an effort to clear them so they could make sense of what he was saying.  “And the bread that I will give is my Flesh for the life of the world.”  The verb here translated as “give” can also mean “offer”: The bread that I will offer is my Flesh for the redemption of the world.  With that, the Jews assembled before him began to respond in volume.  

The Masses which are offered so hastily and which are attended so casually, often accompanied by the blandest music, hide rather than reveal the stunning wonder of the Holy Eucharist.  It is almost as though it is too great to think about and so we look away at that which makes no demands on us, which leaves us alone.  But the Bread will only save us if we eat of it.  And we can only eat it if we believe in it: only if we can approach it and say, Amen.