The Nineteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time, August 7, 2021

John 6:41–51

The Jews murmured about Jesus because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven,” and they said, “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph? Do we not know his father and mother? Then how can he say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” Jesus answered and said to them, “Stop murmuring among yourselves. 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 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.”

The Bread of Life narrative is continued from last Sunday’s Gospel reading.  

“The Jews murmured about Jesus because he said, ‘I am the bread that came down from heaven.’ ” As we saw last Sunday, the Lord Jesus revealed himself to the crowd as the true Bread that came down from heaven, fulfilling the sign of the manna, which nourished only the body.  The response of members of the crowd shows that they do not reject the idea that someone might come down from heaven, but that Jesus certainly could not have done this: “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph? Do we not know his father and mother?”  However, they have not understood how his recent miracle of multiplying the loaves and the fish  signifies and validates his meaning.  But neither do they ask Jesus what he means, a failure seen time and again among his hearers when the Lord teaches: “Stop murmuring among yourselves.”  The Greek word St. John uses to translate “murmuring” is the root of the word the Septuagint uses to translate verses such as Deuteronomy 1, 27: “You murmured in your tents, and said: The Lord hates us, and therefore he has brought us out of the land of Egypt, that he might deliver us into the hand of the Amorrites and destroy us.”  The Greek word is used throughout the Septuagint translation of the Pentateuch when the Hebrews groaned or complained against Moses and God.  That John uses the word here in his Gospel shows his awareness that the Chosen People, in the wilderness with their God, are continuing to murmur against him.  This becomes even more clear when we consider Numbers 22, 5 in this context: “And the people spoke against God and against Moses, ‘Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we loathe this worthless food.’ ”  The people are rejecting the manna which has kept them alive in the years of their wandering in the wilderness.  So will their descendants reject the true Manna the Lord will offer them.

“No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him, and I will raise him on the last day.”  The Lord Jesus next elucidates his saying that he is the true Bread that has come down from heaven: the Father sent him.  And just as the Father sent him to the people, only those drawn by the Father can come to him.  That is, only those who answer the Father’s invitation to come to his Son.  Then Jesus adds that not only will he feed those who come but he will raise them “on the last day”, the Day of Judgment, a subject of intense interest among the Jews of the time, as we see from apocryphal writings.  The Lord makes a tremendous claim in saying this, but if he is the One sent by the Father, the True Bread, a statement he backs with his miracle, then that stands to reason.  Still, we can sense and appreciate the wonder of those who gazed upon him as they spoke among themselves in the wilderness.  This man who so much resembled them and yet performed stunning miracles, was making a solid claim to be divine.  He stuns them again when he says, “Everyone who listens to my Father and learns from him comes to me.”  He is not saying, He who listens to me comes to the Father, as the Prophets might have said.  He is saying that those who listen to the Father come to him.  That is, those who listen to the Father through the writings of the Law and the Prophets come to him, for the Father spoke of him there (cf. Luke 24, 27).

“Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father.”  Now the Lord makes clear that he is equal to the Father.  He is not only “from” him, but he “has seen” him, in the sense of “known” him.  Only God can see God, in this sense.  

“Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life.”  This sentence seems incomplete: Whoever believes what?  The Lord completes the sentence a few lines later in the parallel, “Whoever eats this bread will live forever.”  To “believe” is to “eat this bread”, which he himself is.  For Jesus, believing, then, does not simply mean an intellectual operation.  It is a visceral action.  That is, he is not demanding a mere assent to certain propositions which he has outlined, but to share intimately in his 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.”  The Lord sums up his argument here and lays it plainly before the people.

“I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever.”  Now the Lord declares himself to be “the living bread”, not just the “true bread”.  Or, rather, he reveals that this true bread is “living bread”.  But what does he mean by this “living bread”?  It is an odd term.  To understand his meaning we must recall that everything we humans eat is dead.  It has been killed prior to our eating it.  This applies to plants as well as to animals.  The meat we eat is dead flesh.  Likewise, the bread we eat is made from grain that has been uprooted from the ground and crushed by a miller.  The bread we eat is made of dead things.  But the Lord reveals himself to be “living bread”.  The dead things we eat provide us with nourishment for our bodies.  The living bread that is the Lord Jesus remains in us because it is true, and nourishes us for eternal life.  Only living bread can do this.

“And the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.”  The Greek may also be translated as, “And the bread which I will offer is my flesh on behalf of the life of the world.”  The “living bread” which the people are to eat for their salvation is a share of that which has been sacrificed for “the life of the world”.  That is, a portion of certain sacrifices was allotted to the one who provided the sacrifice, with the priest taking a portion as well.  This enabled a certain communion with God in that the substance of the sacrifice had been offered to and received by him.  Eating the “living bread” that is Jesus — sacrificed to the Father on behalf of the salvation of all — puts the one who eats it in a very intimate Communion with God.  The very life of God courses within the believer who takes and eats this Bread.

When we who have heard these readings at Mass throughout our lives and have received Holy Communion since we were little, read carefully what the Lord is saying here, we ought to be as dumbfounded as the people to whom he originally spoke these words.