Can the Ordinary Become Extraordinary?

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When I read gospel passages like the following from the Gospel of John - the whole of which was read in Catholic and other churches a few weeks ago - I empathize with people who see the Bible as gibberish. It’s no wonder Jesus’ listeners “grumbled about him.”

“So, the Jews grumbled about him, because he said, ‘I am the bread that came down from heaven.’ They said, ‘Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How does he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?”

“Jesus answered them, ‘Do not grumble among yourselves. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day. …This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die.  I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.’”

Say What?

He’s bread? He came down from heaven? If the Father draws a person to Jesus, he will raise him on the last day? Believers have eternal life? If you eat this bread you won’t die? And this bread is his human flesh?

It’s more than a little baffling.

It’s hard to know the context of this passage, but the gospel writer sets it around the Sea of Galilee, shortly after the feeding of the “five thousand,” after which Jesus went off to the mountain to be by himself because he became “aware that they intended to come and take Him by force to make Him king.”

That evening, his disciples got into a boat to cross the Lake of Gennesaret, a fresh-water lake also called the Sea of Galilee, and that’s where he walked on water to get to the disciples’ boat.

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Members of the “crowd,” presumably including people who had been fed the day before, had looked for him and were confused about how he had eluded them and Jesus replied that they had sought him only because he had fed them. That, according to the gospel, is when he brought up the “bread of life” issue and the friendly crowd started to become less so.

Bread, according to biblical commentators, was THE diet staple of people of the Jewish and Christian bibles, so it’s no wonder that the people who ate the bread at the hillside gathering were impressed that Jesus could feed them all. But Jesus was disappointed that they failed to understand bread’s deeper meaning.

Ancient Christians, and most Christians from the earliest followers of Jesus to the time of the Reformation in the 16^th century, believed that Jesus was actually present in this bread, though they had no scientific way of describing how it occurred. And that is still the belief of most Catholics, including me, and on different levels, many other members of Christian churches. In this sense, this bread is “his human flesh.”

But Jesus also used the term “bread” to describe himself and his teachings. You “eat” him and “digest” what he teaches, leading to union with God. And for believers in the Incarnation – the belief that God became human in the person of Jesus – Jesus “came down from heaven.”

Promises the Same

As for the resurrection, Jesus predicted that he would rise from the dead, and in various passages in the Christian Bible, he promises the same, and eternal life, for his followers.

So, for a believer, this passage about “bread of life” is less confusing. But like much of the Bible, it’s not entirely clear, which is undoubtedly partly due to biblical literary forms unfamiliar to modern people, and perhaps the fact that most of the writers were not professionals and had trouble describing events clearly and completely.

The “bread” to which Jesus refers, writes Sr. Mary McGlone in the National Catholic Reporter, “…refers to much more than what we send to our stomachs. To take someone in like food is to allow that person to come to life in us. Christ invites us to give him a dwelling place in our heart, mind and psyche. As we do so, we begin to allow all that we are and do to find its source and purpose in him.”