Tuesday third week of Easter

Gospel of Saint John 6, 30-35

Today in the Gospel, simple people ask Jesus for «signs». And almost as if provoking him, they tell him that Moses had done signs: the manna that he provided to his people in the desert crossing. This is how the evangelist built the scene in literary terms to give rise to Jesus’ discourse on the true bread.

The whole following discourse will be like a homily on the theme of bread: the bread that Jesus multiplied the day before, the manna that God gave to the people in the desert, and the Bread that Jesus wants to announce. The crucial phrase is a quote from Psalm 77, 24: «You gave them bread from heaven.»

The parallelism is established between Moses and Jesus, between the bread that does not satisfy and the bread that gives eternal life, between the bread with a small letter and the Bread with a capital letter. Starting from the experience of multiplication and the historical memory of manna, Jesus leads his listeners to a deeper understanding of the Bread that God wants to give them, which is himself, Jesus. If in the desert manna was the proof of God’s closeness to his people, now God himself wants to give humanity the true Bread, Jesus, in which we must believe. The path is always similar: from the anecdote of a miracle, one must pass to the category of «I am». Here, to «I am the bread of life.»

Reflection:

We have the luck of faith. And we clearly interpret Jesus as the Bread of life, the one who gives us strength to live. The Lord, now Glorious and Risen, gives himself to us as the food of life. Those people of the gospel, without knowing it well, have given us the slogan for our prayer. We can say like them, in our own name and that of all humanity: «always give us this Bread.» And not only in the immediate sense of human bread, but of the true Bread that is Christ himself.

But Christians should not be content with filling ourselves with that Bread. We should «distribute» it to others: we should announce Christ as the one who satisfies all the hunger that humans can feel. We should lead everyone we can, by our example and witness, to faith in Christ and the Eucharist. The bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the whole world.

Fr. Antony Majeesh George Kallely, OFM