Last Sunday we celebrated the Solemnity of the Blessed Trinity. In today’s Sunday Gospel our Lord Jesus Christ tells the Jewish people and his disciples that he is the Living Bread. It is the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ. You can read this in your Bible in John 6:51-58.
[Jesus said to the Jewish crowds] 51 “I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give you is my flesh for the life of the world.” 52 The Jews quarreled among themselves saying, “How can this man give us [his] flesh to eat?”
53 Jesus said to them, “Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you. 54 Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day. 55 For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink.
56 Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him. 57 Just as the living Father sent me and I have life because of the Father, so also the one who feeds on me will have life because of me. 58 This is the bread that came down from heaven. Unlike your ancestors who ate and still died, whoever eats this bread will live forever.”
First of all, let me point out clearly what our Lord Jesus Christ said about himself in a later chapter in John 14: 1-14 when he said, “I am the way, and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.” This statement teaches one truth about the Son of Man, that he is in the Father and the Father is in him. Most important of all, he tells us only the truth for he is the truth personified.
So when our Lord Jesus told the Jews in front of his disciples “I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give you is my flesh for the life of the world.” This was no figure of speech nor is it a symbol, which some Christian sects would insist that it is. But the Jews didn’t understand what he was saying and questioned his words… and they could not accept this teaching and left him… even if they have seen our Lord perform miracles for them to see.
If you continued reading this Bible passage into the next verse, you will see that some of the disciples of our Lord left him together with the Jews. But the Lord did not run after them, not did he tell them he did not really mean that they should be cannibals and eat his body or that this was all a symbol. No sir, the Lord instead confronted Peter and asked him, “What about you, are you going to go with them also?” But Peter replied, “But where will we go Lord? You speak the words of eternal life?”
Today, the major division between the Catholic Church and the other Christian churches stems from this very teaching of the Holy Eucharist, where Catholics are encourage to hear the mass everyday and take Holy Communion as it was instituted during the Last Supper in the Upper room; while the other Christian sects are merely contended with hearing the Word of God. But physically eating our Lord’s flesh was unacceptable to them, which is why they believe that this is a mere symbol. But then the word symbol doesn’t appear in this very important passage in the Bible.
The reason why the Jews and other Christian sects don’t believe in the Holy Eucharist, which is the real presence of our Lord Jesus Christ is due to the fact that they missed out on the church doctrine that our Lord Jesus Christ had to die for our sins in order to save us. This is why the Last Supper was the fulfillment of the Passover rite found in the Old Testament, where God ordered Moses to have an unblemished lamb slain and roasted and eaten so that the Angel of Death would pass over the people of Israel.
In the new covenant that our Lord Jesus Christ instituted in the Last Supper that we call the Holy Eucharist, Jesus is now takes on the role of the unblemished lamb whose body or flesh is eaten by the faithful and whose blood we drink in memory of his sacrifice… a sacrifice that is fully pleasing to God. Any man who would have been sacrificed to God for the repatriation of our sins would not be pleasing to God unless that man is sinless. But only our Lord Jesus Christ was sinless, hence he represented the sinful human race as a sacrifice to the Father taking on our sins to cleanse us so we can gain eternal salvation.
He is the Bread of Life who was born in Bethlehem (which in Hebrew means House of Bread) as it fulfills the prophesy in Isaiah that God will be with us. What better way for God to be with us by eating him in the Holy Host, which looks like bread, feels like bread, but is in reality the body, blood soul and divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ, through the act called Transubstantiation. We can only know this through an act of faith that God gives us.
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