Justin Appel

Dear Friends,

Today’s Gospel lesson (John 6:52-59) fall within a string of pericopes dealing with food.

Chapter 6 begins with Jesus feeding five thousand people with “five barley loaves and two small fish.” Jesus fed this crowd as the Passover, “a feast of the Jews” was approaching.

In the Johannine Gospel, the context for Jesus’ passion and death is that of the Passover, and of Jesus as the “Lamb of God,” so chapter 6 also takes on this larger theme of food/bread/eating as the Passover approaches. Later, as Jesus speaks to people by the sea, they discuss Moses and the giving of manna in the desert. It is in this context that Jesus says “I am the bread of life” and that everyone who eats of this bread “will live forever.”

Given this theological reality, it seems amazing that Christians have argued historically about whether the bread and wine really become Christ’s body and blood. The Gospel story suggests that we've gotten it wrong about bread. Christ is the real bread, the living bread, that to which any human creation, any yeasty or flat handiwork must inevitably point. Bread is a creature after all! Even mana revealed the true Bread of Heaven. Can the God who made all things “visible and invisible,” give himself to us in humble hosts, in bread that has been blessed (by the Holy Spirit, no less) and offered back in thanksgiving?

“the bread that I shall give is My flesh, which I shall give for the life of the world” (verse 51).

To focus our minds on the splendor of this Truth, what can top the Eucharistic chant from the Liturgy of St. James, which we often sing as a hymn in church, or dress up with floating descants?

Yours in Christ,

—Justin