We’ve just heard the second in our sequence of four Sunday Gospels taken from John Chapter 6: the Bread of Life Discourse.
There’s something entirely special about the sixth Chapter of St. John’s Gospel. I’ve heard it said that if you took away all the rest of the New Testament, but left this, you’d have enough. Our Christian faith is here, set out, and condensed, in all its mystery. Similarly, in the Holy Eucharist, the faith and life of the Church is condensed, and set forth, in all its mystery. This Chapter is so familiar - presumably many of us know it virtually by heart - yet it ever retains its capacity to touch us, to move us, and to astonish, perplex, even baffle us. The more we ponder it, and try to enter into it, the more we realise it speaks of mysteries that are beyond our full understanding. Not that its central message is at all in doubt. It’s about the offer of God’s life made to us through Jesus; and it’s about the Holy Eucharist through which that life is transmitted to us.
When we read or listen to this discourse, we find ourselves being invited, challenged, drawn to deepen our understanding of Jesus: who he is; what he does for us; what he gives us. And as our understanding deepens, so does our attachment to Jesus; and our union with Him. And all the time we grow in our appreciation of what it means to be a Christian, and what it means to eat and drink at the Eucharistic table.
The movement of thought in this discourse follows the conventions of contemporary Rabbinical argument. That is, it progresses not in a straight line but in a spiral. An idea is proposed, then repeated in a slightly different form, with some advance or refinement of content. We find the same technique constantly at work in the poetry of the Psalms.
In last week’s passage we heard the Jews propose a text from Exodus for Jesus to comment on. The text is: He gave them Bread from heaven to eat (cf. Exodus 16:4,15. Ps 77/78:24). Already for the Rabbis of New Testament times, the gift of manna at the Exodus was above all a sign. It was a sign of God’s active love for his people, without which they must necessarily die of hunger and thirst in the wilderness. Beyond that, it was a sign of his greater gift: his Word and his Wisdom; his self revelation and his covenant through the law of Moses. Now Jesus is claiming to be Himself that gift, that saving food; that sign of love and of revelation; that Word and Wisdom of God. Jesus is saying that ultimately what the manna - and indeed the whole Old Testament - signified was Himself.
The Jews in that Capernaum synagogue here represent unbelief: the rejection of everything Jesus says and does and is. In today’s passage they begin by pointing to the origins of Jesus, which they think they know. The scandal for them is his ordinariness. His father is Joseph. In the same way in the next Chapter (7:27,42) they will reject his claim to be the Son of David because they know he was not born in Bethlehem. St. John, savouring the delicious irony here, clearly assumes that his readers know the traditions about Jesus’ birth recorded in the other Gospels. But even more so, he assumes we have read his Prologue, where he set out Jesus’ origins in God before time began.
Who then is Jesus, and where does he come from? Seven times in this discourse he uses the phrase come down from heaven. Jesus is from heaven because he’s the divine and eternal Word of God made flesh. And the paradox of the Incarnation is that flesh, or what is precisely not spirit, becomes in him the vehicle for spiritual life and truth. We come to the divinity of Jesus through his humanity; to his majesty and glory through his humility and self-abasement; to his life through his death.
The question posed by the Jews re-echoes in our own time, and in our own hearts. Is it true? Can we believe it? The reply of Jesus to that question is clear. If He is God’s gift, then faith in Him is also God’s gift. What Jesus says here comes as something of a surprise inversion of our normal perceptions. We are very used to thinking, rightly, that we can’t come to God the Father except through Jesus. But now we hear: we can’t come to faith in Jesus without being drawn to him by the Father.
How then will God draw us to Jesus? Entirely in line with the Rabbinic tradition, Jesus now cites a text from the Prophets: They will all be taught by God (cf. Isaiah 54:13; Jer 31:33-34). What will they be taught? Ultimately, that Jesus Christ is God’s only Son (cf. e.g. 1 Jn 4:14; 5:5,10,11). And we ask: are these the ravings of a blasphemer, or a deluded megalomaniac? The Jews in that synagogue certainly thought so. But we cannot. No: we believe the words of Jesus: we decide simply to accept all his claims as true. We understand that He is not seeking honours or power. He only wants us to accept the gift that is himself, his total self gift, sealed on the Cross, and conveyed in the Holy Eucharist. And he wants us to accept it in order that we might have life in him.
Eating the bread of life then is a metaphor for having faith in Jesus. It’s the reversal of the curse of Eden, when Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the forbidden Tree and so incurred the punishment of death. Yet Jesus goes on in language that is the opposite of metaphor: language that insists precisely on the concrete - on flesh.
The Bread that I shall give, says Jesus, is my flesh, for the life of the world. These words are almost identical to the words the Priest pronounces over the bread at every Mass: this bread is my Body that will be given up for you. Is Jesus here then speaking of the Eucharist? Yes of course: but not narrowly so. Or we could put it the other way around, and say that the Eucharist speaks about, contains, symbolises all that Jesus here says. To participate in the holy Eucharist, then, is to come to Jesus: to believe in him, to be fed by him, to be led by him to the Father: to be given the fullness of eternal life in him.