Today’s Gospel sees a chasm of understanding between Christ and those who were listening to him. It is a chasm between human and divine perceptions. On the one hand, Christ spoke of himself thus:
I am the living bread which has come down from heaven.
Anyone who eats this bread will live for ever;
and the bread that I shall give is my flesh, for the life of the world.’
His words, whilst mystical and difficult to grasp, go to the heart of the Christian way. Jesus is the nourishment that brings us into the kingdom as children of God. He sustains us, just as bread makes our bodies strong. But the nourishment is more than physical food: it is the lifeblood of our being and the key to our salvation.
On the other hand, we hear those around Jesus who were unable to understand. They said:
‘Surely this is Jesus son of Joseph’… ‘We know his father and mother. How can he now say, “I have come down from heaven” ?’
The saying goes that a prophet is never welcome in his own town. There, in that place of familiarity, he is already known. People find it more difficult to take him seriously when they remember him as a boy growing up. This may be a slight warning to us, not because we too remember Jesus growing up, but because we too can take the word of God for granted. The Gospel message can become too normalised, like bedtime stories, and we risk losing sight of our own part in them.
We, too, can be those who do not understand. It isn’t unhealthy to admit this. After all, we are chosen to hang our entire lives of faith upon truths that remain beyond our comprehension. That is what we call ‘faith’.
Approaching the Altar ourselves, can we sometimes forget about the incomprehensible profundity of what we are about to do? We read that Christ is our living food, but we risk forgetting the extraordinariness of our encounter at Communion. To do so would be to act a little like those others in today’s Gospel, those who couldn’t adapt to a new, God-given mystery. Just as they couldn’t wrap their heads around the reality of Christ the prophet, we may sometimes not be able to understand that Communion is an extraordinary personal encounter with Jesus. We see the wafer, we know the Gospel stories, but we also know the priest: how can he truly be acting in the person of Christ?
We live in the midst of mystery and it is not one to be solved but to embrace and trust. We have the Gospels and Church tradition as our signposts along the way, and the everlasting truth of Christ’s words:
I am the living bread which has come down from heaven.
Anyone who eats this bread will live for ever;
and the bread that I shall give is my flesh, for the life of the world.’
So, let us use today to renew our trust, renew our faith, in Christ which comes to us as our living bread. Let us use the gifts given to us to bridge that chasm of understanding, that bridge we call faith, and pray for our own faith and for that of the world.
GOSPEL
The Lord be with you.
And with your spirit
A reading from the holy Gospel according to John
(6:41-51)
Glory to you, O Lord.
The Jews were complaining to each other about Jesus, because he had said, ‘I am the bread that came down from heaven.‘ ‘Surely this is Jesus son of Joseph’ they said. ‘We know his father and mother. How can he now say, “I have come down from heaven” ?’
Jesus said in reply,
Stop complaining to each other.
‘No one can come to me
unless he is drawn by the Father who sent me,
and I will raise him up at the last day.
It is written in the prophets:
They will all be taught by God,
and to hear the teaching of the Father,
and learn from it, is to come to me.
Not that anybody has seen the Father,
except the one who comes from God:
he has seen the Father.
I tell you most solemnly,
everybody who believes has eternal life.
I am the bread of life.
Your fathers ate the manna in the desert and they are dead; .
but this is the bread that comes down from heaven,
so that a man may eat it and not die.
I am the living bread which has come down from heaven.
Anyone who eats this bread will live for ever;
and the bread that I shall give is my flesh, for the life of the world.’
The Gospel of the Lord Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.