Many of the disciples of Jesus who were listening said,
“This saying is hard; who can accept it?”
They grumbled like the Israelites in the desert at the time of the exodus. Like them, they were unsatisfied with the heavenly food God desired to give them. Their desires were so entrenched that, although they desired something inferior to what Jesus wanted them to receive, they could not conceive of the possibility of something better. They preferred food that the eating of which would again leave them hungry. Jesus wanted to give them food that would truly give life, eternal life, leading to the resurrection. But they were stuck at the level of the flesh, the earthly, and the transient. That is why they interpreted the teaching of Jesus on the Eucharist in a carnal way, as though what he proposed was, as it seemed to be superficially, some kind of cannibalism.
Since Jesus knew that his disciples were murmuring about this,
he said to them, “Does this shock you?
What if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before?
What Jesus said was shocking to them especially because they did not recognize his divinity. If a mere man, even if he were a prophet like Elijah or Moses, proposed to do what Jesus did, such flesh could not avail. Only the Son, filled with the Spirit, had flesh that was truly life giving. It was human flesh, but after the resurrection, it was not flesh such as any human then living possessed. It did not cease to be physical, but did become spiritual. What this meant was that it was able to be divided without being diminished and given without being exhausted. People were always meant to discover meaning in their lives by making of those lives a a gift of love to others. The spiritualization of the physical body that the resurrection entailed seemed to make the flesh, empowered by the Spirit, more able to give of itself without limits. In Jesus this was true to an extreme degree, in which he himself became bread for the life of the world. Those whom Jesus raised to life would not give themselves in precisely this way because it was proper for Jesus to be the one who gives life to the world. But they would be called, and we even now are called, to give of ourselves after this pattern, living lives of loving service.
The Eucharist only seems like far fetched concept, or an innovation of medieval Catholicism, for one of two reasons. The first is that Jesus could not do this. Yet as the one who came from heaven and would again ascend to heaven, the Son of Man, we are meant to understand that he could do it. And as one who desired to be, himself, the source of the life of the world, we are meant to understand that he would do it, and did in fact give himself in just this way.
But there are some of you who do not believe.
When tested by a difficult teaching there were some who resisted, who did not wish to allow the Father to draw them to faith in Jesus. It even seemed to be the case that the better and greater and more beneficial the teaching, the easier it was to reject. The reason was that such teaching scandalized human reason, was beyond what unaided intelligence could grasp. They wanted to understand Jesus in terms of appearances, as one man among many. And as such their comprehension of his teachings were limited to what any man might say. It would have been crazy for one of them to say what Jesus said, so they assumed it was crazy for him as well. But there was also a different paradigm for dealing with divine revelation when it was a hard teaching.
Simon Peter answered him, “Master, to whom shall we go?
You have the words of eternal life.
We have come to believe
and are convinced that you are the Holy One of God.”
Peter didn't know exactly why Jesus said what he said, what it meant, or how it would eventually play out. But he did believe that Jesus was who he claimed to be. And because of this he knew there were no limits to what Jesus could do, and that Jesus knew better than anyone else what he should do, what his Father willed for him to do. Peter did not need to grasp the why or details of the specific means. He knew better than to suspect a deficiency in something Jesus taught. All of his words were words of eternal life, even when he wasn't quite sure how or why. This is a vital model for our own development as disciples because, according to Aquinas, "believing comes before knowing. And therefore, if we wanted to know before believing, we would neither know nor be able to believe".
The Father is even now trying to draw us more deeply into the mystery of the gift of his Son, the gift of his flesh for the life of the world. The more we allow ourselves, as a Church, to be drawn, the more we will become like the Church described in our reading from Acts:
The Church throughout all Judea, Galilee, and Samaria
was at peace.
She was being built up and walked in the fear of the Lord,
and with the consolation of the Holy Spirit she grew in numbers.
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