All this week we’ll be listening to the “Bread of Life” discourse from Chapter 6 of St. John. For those of you who received the book our Church gifted us with at Christmas called Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist, I’d invite you to read Chapter 4. It will really help with understanding why the Jewish people were questioning Jesus, why they were referring to the manna in the desert of their ancestors and how they responded to Jesus’ answer that he is the ‘Bread of Life’.
Basically, they wanted to believe Jesus was the Messiah, their ‘new Moses’; they wanted to believe he would provide manna for them, like God did to the earlier Israelites as they crossed the desert into the promised land. They just had lots of questions and wanted Jesus to perform a definitive miracle so they could truly believe.
After declaring that “I am the Bread of Life”, Jesus simply said to them: ‘…whoever comes to me will never hunger.’ He was offering a profound, yet simple, invitation to them…come to me.
The key word we can reflect on today in that statement is ‘come’. It’s something that certainly doesn’t take much physical energy.
- Come, like a little child comes to his mother whose arms are outstretched,
- Come, like a graduate walking up to receive their diploma
- Come, like a beloved dog comes to its human friend.
Christ wants us to accept his invitation to come and believe he is the bread of life. To come and believe means we will be shaped by the Eucharist, shaped by what the Eucharist means, and shaped by how the Eucharist should be lived out in our everyday encounters with others.
It means binding ourselves closely to Jesus and all he reveals to us about loving God and others. It implies much more than just receiving Christ in Communion, as important as that is. To ‘come and believe’ in the Bread of Life is to soak ourselves in the life of Jesus, to penetrate deeply into the Word of God that comes to us in the Scriptures, and, finally, to integrate his Way into our way of living.
We pause today, then, to ask ourselves two questions:
- How deep is my belief and understanding of the Eucharist, this “Bread of Life”?
- When I come to Jesus, do I come with faith and a willingness to follow his way each day?
