THE BREAD THAT I WILL GIVE IS MY FLESH

1 Kings 19,4-8; Ps 33; Eph 4,30-5,2; Jn 6,41-51
12 AUGUST
What Jesus announces to the Jews is an absolute novelty, humanly unthinkable and unimaginable for a son of Abraham. Jesus reveals himself as the true bread that descends from heaven. Understanding his Word in a metaphorical or allegorical, spiritual sense, it can also be accepted. In this sense it would be a question of welcoming Jesus as the Word that nourishes or nurtures man in his journey towards God, a journey to be carried out always in the greatest listening to the Word. Basically it would be a matter of listening to the Lord that speaks through his prophet and of putting his Word into practice in order to have life. Thus, understood the Word of Jesus, we would remain in the line traced by Deuteronomy.

“Be careful to observe all the commandments I enjoin on you today, that you may live and increase, and may enter in and possess the land which the Lord promised on oath to your fathers. Remember how for forty years now the Lord, your God, has directed all your journeying in the desert, so as to test you by affliction and find out whether or not it was your intention to keep his commandments. He therefore let you be afflicted with hunger, and then fed you with manna, a food unknown to you and your fathers, in order to show you that not by bread alone does man live, but by every word that comes forth from the mouth of the Lord. The clothing did not fall from you in tatters, nor did your feet swell these forty years. So you must realize that the Lord, your God, disciplines you even as a man disciplines his son (Dt 8,1-6).

Jesus uses this Word of his Father to reject the first temptation.

Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil. He fasted for forty days and forty nights, and afterwards he was hungry. The tempter approached and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become loaves of bread.” He said in reply, “It is written: ‘One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes forth from the mouth of God'” (Mt 4,1-4).

Jesus is true bread of the Word. He is the eternal Word of the Father that resounds in all purity in the world. But he is not only true bread of the Word, it is also true bread of flesh. Real, true and substantial flesh. Whoever does not want to die forever must eat his flesh. The flesh of Jesus is neither symbolic nor allegorical nor figurative. Eating is true eating. It is eating just as one eats bread. The flesh is real. It is as real as any other meat that man eats. The difference is that from the flesh of the soul we pass to the flesh of man. This is inconceivable for the sons of Abraham.

The Jews murmured about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven,” and they said, “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph? Do we not know his father and mother? Then how can he say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” Jesus answered and said to them, “Stop murmuring among yourselves. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him, and I will raise him on the last day. It is written in the prophets: ‘They shall all be taught by God.’ Everyone who listens to my Father and learns from him comes to me. Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father. Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the desert, but they died; this is the bread that comes down from heaven so that one may eat it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.”

Another truth that must be brought to light wants the flesh of Christ to be the only flesh of the sacrifice of expiation and communion to be offered to the Father. His body is offered to the Father in a sacrifice of communion and holocaust for the remission of sins. Just as the sacrifice is consumed on the altar of the cross, so it must be consumed on the altar of the life of the disciple of Jesus. All this happens because every disciple that approaches Christ’s SACRIFICE also becomes a sacrifice in Christ for the remission of sins. Real is the sacrifice. Real is the flesh. Real is the communion and  real is the consumption.

Faithful Virgin, Angels and Saints ensure that we approach the Eucharist in fullness of faith.