Jesus the Word and the Bread of Life

08-22-2021Weekly ReflectionFr. Bing Colasito

Today is the last Sunday of Jn. 6 that speaks of Jesus as the Bread of life. The people following Jesus and many disciples left scandalized by His claims that He is the bread that comes from heaven much more when He tells them that this bread is His flesh, and they should eat it. The bread He offers is the bread that comes down from heaven. The bread of life is the bread for eternal life. Among His disciples, only the 12 Apostles took a stand and did not leave Jesus, “Master to who shall we go, you have the words of eternal life.” (Jn. 6:68) In a way, the Israelites at Shechem took the stand for Yahweh and the covenant. (1st reading)

Jesus is the Bread of life: 1. Because of His revelation event, His coming into flesh and His teachings, 2. Because of His salvationevent, His death on the cross, and His resurrection, 3. Because He is the Bread of Life, the Eucharist He is the lifegiving bread by His death and resurrection, without which there is no life, without which we cannot live. He is the bread of life in the Word and the Holy Eucharist. “If you do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood you have no life in you. He who feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has life eternal, and I will raise him on the last day.” (Jn. 6:5354) These verses mean that the Eucharist is a sacrifice. The bread transformed into the sacrifice of Christ, and we who participate experience transformation into something better and higher, where we become what we eat.

The transfigured body of Christ raised by the Holy Spirit now becomes present in the Holy Eucharist. It simply means that Christ cannot become the lifegiving bread unless he dies and rises for us. Amen, amen, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit. The Lord Jesus Christ had to offer himself on the cross and then rises back so that He can become the lifegiving bread in the Eucharist. The Holy Spirit makes all these things happen. So that, in the Eucharistic Prayer II and III, we pray to the Holy Spirit to come down on the ordinary bread and wine so that they become the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Many disciples of Jesus cannot accept His teaching, “This saying is hard; who can accept it?” There are moments in life when we are like the many disciples of Jesus we cannot understand what is happening. It is our faith that enables us to say: Lord, I don’t understand, but I believe in You, and I trust in You, and I will not leave You. Lord, give me the grace to read and listen to what you are saying to me, most especially in difficult moments of our journey. I pray that one day, when we are face to face with God, we may be able to say, “Lord, there were many things we could not understand in our life, but still, we held on to you and just trusted in You.” What a joy for us if we could say something like that to the Lord somehow. In the end, II hope that we will never have regrets that we did not trust, or hardly trusted, Him. Now, it is up to us to believe or to doubt, to stay with the Lord, or to leave.