The Bread of Life
We have been meditating on John chapter 6 for our Sunday liturgy. This chapter is about Jesus’ famous discourse on The Bread of Life. So far, we have heard Jesus explaining, how he has become our nourishment, through our faith in him and by listening and accepting him as “the word come down from heaven”.
Our first reading is taken from the Book of Proverbs. Here we see ‘Wisdom’ has prepared a great banquet. Wisdom was personified as a beautiful royal lady, who allures everyone to her charm (wisdom). Wisdom was given the highest esteem in ancient civilization. For the Jewish community, wisdom was closely connected with God. It was a gift of God.
Wisdom has prepared a great banquet with all sorts of rich food, and she invites everyone to come and dine with her. Everyone who is ignorant, unhappy in life, and the poor who need wisdom to change their lives, is invited for the banquet. The only qualification to accept the invitation is that they must be hungry for wisdom. Hunger for wisdom is hunger for God.
In the Gospel, Jesus presents himself as a wisdom of God (Divine Word) to the world. He systematically prepares his listeners to understand him as the true bread of our lives. He is giving us a new banquet for our nourishment with his own body and blood – “The bread that I shall give is my flesh for the life of the world.” (Jn 6: 51)
Like Wisdom, Jesus invites his listeners to his banquet. His invitation comes with a reward. But to those who reject it, the very act of rejection will become their condemnation. For Jesus there is no middle ground, either you are with him, or against him. Jesus presents first the condemnation “if you do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you will not have life in you.” (Jn 6 53) The reward that Jesus promises is for life into eternity – “anyone who does eat my flesh and drink my blood has eternal life and I shall raise him on the last day.” (Jn 6:54)
To come to the banquet table of Jesus, first we need to have faith in Him. Secondly, we must hear His word and allow it to translate into concrete attitudes of life. And finally, hunger and thirst for true life that comes only through Christ, presented to us in the Eucharist. By partaking in the Eucharist, we are proclaiming our deepest desire to be totally identified with Jesus and become the living witnesses of the eternal kingdom to come.
–Fr. Ranjan D’Sa OCD