Get up and eat, else the journey will be too long for you!
We too need food to strengthen us for the journey of our own lives. The world cannot offer us this food. It is a spiritual desert filled with mirage after mirage in the shapes of oases and food, but with nothing into which we can truly sink our teeth, nothing that can give us life or strength.
We need the bread from heaven spiritually every bit as much as the ancient Israelites needed the manna to sate their physical hunger. Jesus himself spoke of his Paschal mystery as an "exodus that he was going to accomplish in Jerusalem" (see Luke 9:31). If we are to take up our own crosses and follow him on this exodus we too will need this bread that Jesus promised.
The manna sustained the Israelites for forty years in the desert, precisely until they crossed into the promised land. The bread from the angel gave Elijah the strength for his own forty day journey on foot to the mountain of God, Horeb.
The Jews murmured about Jesus because he said,
“I am the bread that came down from heaven, ”
The Jews were of course familiar with these stories of miraculous bread from the Scriptures. What they couldn't accept right away, even having seen the multiplication of the loaves, was that Jesus somehow had a centrality that was pointed toward by the past occurrences, and by which alone they could be fully understand.
Then how can he say,
‘I have come down from heaven’?”
It seemed that the crowd was ready to receive bread from Jesus, saying, "Sir, give us this bread always" (see John 6:34), but not ready to accept that Jesus himself was this bread. What would it mean for him to have come down from heaven? It would be something greater than merely inviting or being open to the Father sending bread through his mediation, but in what way? What would it mean that he himself, by his own flesh, would give life to the world? And what, exactly, would it mean to eat bread of this kind?
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.
In order to receive the true bread from heaven they would have to allow themselves to be moved beyond appearances, drawn by the Father to faith in the Son. According to appearance Jesus might seem to be just one man among many, with a father and a mother, just like everyone else. But that appearance concealed a deeper truth. So too the Eucharist might appear to be mere bread, but that conceals a much deeper truth. It is a truth inaccessible to the senses, unattainable by reason, only available to those willing to be taught by God and drawn by the Father into faith.
Everyone who listens to my Father and learns from him comes to me.
If we don't immediately recognize that Jesus is the Son of the Father, or that the Eucharist is his flesh and blood, Jesus himself is the one through whom the Father desires to reveal that truth to us. It is not as though we should go off and wait for our own revelation, specially for us, apart from the revelation of Jesus. Even though we may not understand his words immediately, it is precisely through Jesus and his words that the Father draws us into the mystery. Understanding will come, but faith must come first. It can be, as for Anselm "faith seeking understanding". But what it cannot and can never be is faith demanding understanding.
Faith for all defects supplying,Where the feeble senses fail.- St Thomas Aquinas, Tantum Ergo
Jesus himself is the bread from heaven because he alone came from heaven to reveal the Father to us. He alone, by his cross and resurrection, has become the source of true and eternal life for us. The way he gives us this life is amazingly abundantly available to those who are childlike enough to take him at his word. It is here in the Eucharist that he scatters the proud in their conceit and lifts up the lowly. It is here that he himself does not simply pass life onto us from source external to himself, but rather is himself the very life we receive.
Do we take this promise of Jesus seriously? Are we really open enough to taste and see just how good he is? If so, we too will be transformed by what he gives us. We will become more and more what we receive.
So be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love,
as Christ loved us and handed himself over for us
as a sacrificial offering to God for a fragrant aroma.
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