“I am the bread of life,”1 says Jesus to those who ask for “the bread of God… which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”2 Keep in mind, the crowd followed Jesus across the Sea of Galilee was seeking another free meal, not eternal life. Imagine their surprise!
It is easy for the provocativeness of Jesus’ answer to be lost on us as 21st Catholics. We are well-versed in understanding Jesus’ “Real Presence” in the consecrated bread and wine. Considering the Eucharistic Revival, we must face squarely our loss of a sense of wonder and awe at the deep mystery we participate in so regularly.
For example, how often have you participated in the Eucharist, received Holy Communion, and then, when life throws you a curve, asked, “Where is God? Where is Jesus?” This is like those in today’s Gospel who ask Jesus to perform a sign “that we may see and believe in you.”3 Is Jesus giving himself to us, as we like to repeat (a bit ad nauseum), body, blood, soul and divinity, that is, wholly and completely, not enough? It is important to bear always bear in mind what the Lord went through to make hmself present to us on this altar.
Just what is the point of his complete self-giving, anyway?
“This is the work of God,” Jesus says, “that you believe in the one he sent.”4 When we gather, by the power of the Holy Spirit, God indeed sends his Son in a unique and powerful way. In the Eucharist, Christ is sent and becomes present in four distinct and integrally related ways.
First, Christ is present in the assembly, in the gathering of the baptized. Christ is also present in the person of the priest. He is really present in the proclamation of the scriptures, which are to be made flesh in our lives through our participation at the one table of his word and body. Finally, he is really present in the bread and the wine, which we eat and drink.5 What this all builds toward is not the moment of consecration. It builds toward the moment of communion!
Having sent his Son to us, God then sends us to perform his works, which flow from believing in Jesus Christ, “the one he sent.”6 Each of us, whether intentionally or not, lives what we believe. Because of the demands of discipleship, a Christian must live intentionally. Believing in Jesus Christ inspires one to live in a particular and, in our time, an increasingly peculiar, way. It has been observed- though not by Flannery O’Connor- “You shall know the truth, and it will make you odd.”7
Preaching is not entertainment. Taking a cue from our reading from Ephesians, preaching is for telling others about Christ and teaching Christ. It is aimed at conversion, the renewal of minds, so those who hear can live “God’s way in righteousness and holiness of truth.”8 To enable those who hear, as well as the preacher, to incarnate God’s word.
La multiplication des pains, by James Tissot, 1886-1896
You have not only heard of Christ, but you have also “learned Christ,” and more than learning Christ, you have received him who is the Bread of Life. This should change you, convert you, renew your mind to the point of making you over time, through experience, what our second reading calls as a “new self.”9
Something Flannery O’Connor did write is relevant to this. In a letter to her fellow writer Cecil Dawkins, O’Connor stated: “All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.”10 Put simply, what the Lord asks of those who consider themselves his followers is what is not possible without him. But he gives you the means to do what you cannot do without him. He gives you grace.
Grace is God sharing divine life with us. Hence, grace is nothing other than God sharing himself with us, which is precisely what happens in such an astonishingly concrete way through the Eucharist. Yet, as O’Connor, in her brutally honest way, went on to observe in the same letter: “Human nature is so faulty that it can resist any amount of grace and most of the time it does.”11
Often, like the ancient Israelites, instead of being recreated in the image of Christ, we look back at our former way of life longingly, despite knowing its futility, despite knowing it leads to death. We are often content to work for and eat the food that perishes. The Bread of Life, Jesus Christ, is the antidote to being toward death, the cure for what Walker Percy (another great Catholic writer of the last century) called in the title of his last novel, The Thanatos Syndrome.
In the verse immediately following the last verse of today’s Gospel in John 6, which is part of a six-verse interlude that is not picked up next week, Jesus tells this same crowd that “although you have seen me, you do not believe.”12 What a damning indictment!
“The Holy Spirit,” O’Connor wrote, “very rarely shows Himself on the surface of anything.”13 This includes the Eucharist. It is not intuitively obvious to the casual observer that the bread and wine are transformed into Christ’s body and blood. What happens on the altar is not a magic trick. It is not hocus pocus, which, incidentally, was derived from the Latin words of consecration: Hoc est enim corpus meum- This is my body.
You and I, along with everyone who partakes of Christ’s body and blood, are the only convincing proof of this transformation. But only if, not resisting the painful change grace seeks to bring about, you are transformed.
1 John 6:35.↩
2 John 6:33.↩
3 John 6:30.↩
4 John 6:29.↩
5 Second Vatican Council. Dogmatic Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy [Sacrosanctum Concilium], sec. 7.↩
6 John 6:29.↩
7 Mike A. Shapiro Blog. “A source for the quotation ‘You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd.’” 21 January 2021. Accessed 3 August 2024.↩
8 Ephesians 4:20-21.24.↩
9 Ephesians 4:24.↩
10 Flannery O'Connor. The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor, 307. Macmillan, 1988.↩
11 Ibid.↩
12 John 6:36.↩
13 O'Connor. The Habit of Being, 307.↩
