Gospel of 30 April 2020
Thursday of the Third Week of Easter
John 6:44-51
I am the living bread which has come down from heaven
Jesus said to the crowd:
‘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.’
Reflexion
Since time immemorial, humanity has been searching for the secret of immortality, the ultimate cure to all ailments and even death. Countless persons from emperors, to conquistadors, to alchemists and even scientists have scored the earth and the pages of human knowledge to discover this secret - the fountain of youth, the philosopher’s stone, the tree of life, the ambrosia of the gods, the holy grail and the elixir of immortality. The sad truth is that none have been successful and the search continues, but perhaps in all the wrong places.
But today, our Lord makes an astounding announcement. The elixir of immortality is no longer a myth or something beyond our reach. We have found it, or rather He has found us. With men from all over the world and across the centuries attempting to find it, our Lord reminds us that this “secret” is now offered to us freely without any effort on our part. God takes the initiative. And without God’s initiative, this secret will never be within our grasp. “No one can come to me unless he is drawn by the Father who sent me.” The secret to immortality is the One whom the Father draws all seekers to - our Lord Jesus Christ.
When our Lord told the Jews that He could give them food from heaven, they thought that He would repeat the miracle of manna which Moses had performed in the desert or something even more spectacular. But when Jesus proclaimed that He was the bread from heaven, some would have been perplexed, others amused but the majority would have been outraged. They had least expected Him to say this. Perhaps they were expecting some kind of magical food that could finally cure all illnesses if not death but they were not expecting that the food which the Lord was speaking of would be a person, Jesus Himself.
Humanity’s quest for the fountain of youth and the elixir of life ended when Jesus offered Himself as the Bread of Life. Humanity’s quest for immortality had been found: “Anyone who eats this bread will live forever.” And then to cap this monumental claim, our Lord makes an unthinkable association that would have sounded like cannibalism to His hearers: “and the bread that I shall give is my flesh, for the life of the world.” It’s one thing to speak of oneself as “bread,” that could be treated as purely metaphorical; but when our Lord spoke of that “bread” as His own flesh, that would have made them conclude that Jesus was really mad.
We know Jesus was not mad, neither was He speaking metaphorically. This is one place where He meant every single word He said. The bread which we receive at every mass, is not just bread, it isn’t even just symbolically his body. “This is my body.... this is my blood.” Our Lord meant every single word He said. What we consume is the Bread of Life, our Lord’s own body, His own “flesh” given “for the life of the world.”
At this very moment, thousands of scientists around the world are still busy searching for a vaccine to this pandemic, a cure to this Coronavirus and in fact a cure to every sickness known to man. Thanks to their labour, our lives may become a lot easier and even longer - but nothing can extend our lives beyond the definitive time of our allocated existence. There is no cure to death. Well, none until our Lord gave Himself to us in the Eucharist. Here, we have finally found the antidote to death and the real elixir of immortality. “Anyone who eats this bread will live forever.”