Posted on 04/28/2020 6:55:36 AM PDT by MurphsLaw
Tuesday of the Third Week of Easter
John 6:30-35
Friends, in today’s Gospel a crowd whom Jesus fed among the five thousand challenges him. As is often the case in the John, a skeptical question opens toward deeper understanding: "So they said to him, ‘What sign are you going to give us then, so that we may see it and believe you? . . . Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness.’"
They were appealing to the miracle by which Yahweh fed the children of Israel during their forty years in the desert. But Jesus wants them to understand that he is offering a food that will nourish them in a more abiding way: "Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven so that one may eat of it and not die."
"Heavenly bread" catches much of the paradox of the orthodox teaching concerning the Eucharist: though it remains, as far as the eye can see, ordinary bread, the Eucharist in fact participates in a properly transcendent mode of existence and possesses, consequently, the power to produce eternal life.
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