Eucharist Bread of Life.

Jesus told the crowd: “Only he who is drawn by the Father who sent me can come to me.” Jesus teaches that faith in him is God’s grace. But this divine grace has specific human prerequisites. A little further, we hear: “And everyone who hears the Father and learns from him comes to me.” Where can we hear the Father’s voice? That voice of God the Father is our conscience. God already placed God’s Word in man’s heart at the creation of man. God’s Word is present in our most secret interior, and we, if we are honest with ourselves, must admit that Jesus speaks in harmony with what our conscience says; he speaks from the depths of our hearts.

Whoever does not respect the voice of his conscience and does not heed it cannot come to Christ. But, those who live according to their conscience can open themselves to Christ and his saving intervention. He can recognize Christ as the Word of God through whom all things were created. We all carry it inside us, as our most secret inside, as our most hidden desire for bliss, beauty, truth, and a whole life. When an unbelieving person encounters the proclamation of Christ and is at least a little honest with himself, he must state that all that Christ teaches is in the deepest depths of his heart. Christ reveals to us, as if from without, the Word through which we were created, the Word for which we were created. It shows with sense and reason what is already subjective in our hearts.

“And everyone who has heard the Father and has been taught comes to me. Not that anyone has seen the Father; only he who is from God has seen the Father”. We are not all mystics, so after a long and detailed purification, we can discover the image of God in the depths of our souls and allow ourselves to be transformed according to this image. That is why God himself appears as the Incarnate Word and enters our human reality. It also enters our consciousness through our senses. Our body also needs to touch the Body of Christ with our senses. According to him, we want to be shaped. Even with our humanity, we have to enter the reality of God.

“Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believed hath eternal life.” What is eternal Life? Eternal Life is constant development, constant growth into the likeness of the Infinite and Boundless Father. This happens when we accept Christ as our Life. Death appears to us after original sin as a gracious limitation of our misguided growth. God does not want a corrupt and depraved man to become the ruler of all things. He does not want the tyranny of human depravity to rule forever. But when we begin to develop by his will and Word, he desires and wants us to exist forever. Jesus himself is the Word, the Seed, the Grain, which will grow by its power in the space of our willingness. You have to accept it by faith.

“I am the Bread of Life. Your fathers ate manna in the desert and died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, and whoever eats it will not die.” When we live from Christ and his mysteries, God guarantees us eternal Life. We no longer experience death as a catastrophe, as the definitive destruction of human power, but as a transition to a higher world where we will be able to know God more directly.“I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. And the Bread I will give is my body, which I will sacrifice for the Life of the world.” Before going further in meditation, let’s think about Bread’s mission and essence. The essence of Bread is to convey to us the vital energy from the Sun so that we can work and grow. Without earthly bread, our purely material existence would be extinguished. We would have to die. Besides giving us the energy we need, the Bread we eat also gives us the elements from which our body is built. We eat bread, but we turn it into our flesh. But Jesus declares himself to be the living Bread. That is, not the bread that participates in us in the quickening. The Bread we buy in the store is dead bread. Many living grains had to pass through the fiery furnace of death so we could partake of it. Jesus is the living Bread who has the power to transform us into his likeness. If we live from this bread, we will live forever. The Eucharist is the fruit of the Tree of Life, which is in the middle of Paradise. The Tree of Life is the Torah, the eternal law of God. The Law of Eternal Life. The Cross of Christ. Jesus is the Bread of Life, the living Bread. He is Bread by his essence because he gives Life. He becomes bread at the moment of transformation. He is the eternal Bread. He chooses earthly bread as the material of this most beautiful sacrament because it best corresponds to Jesus’s nature. He is as good as a piece of Bread.

Jesus introduces himself: “I am the living Bread that came down from heaven.” Whoever eats this bread will live forever. And the Bread I will give is my body, which I will offer for the Life of the world.” The world lives and exists from the sacrifice. Life would be extinguished if love’s ability to sacrifice was extinguished between us. The Sun would cease to emit Light, the Sun would refuse to eat, and man would cease to reproduce because every new man comes into this world at the cost of a sacrifice.

The Eucharist is the food from which we can draw strength for sacrifice. The Eucharist is a sacrifice. “The bread that I give is my body, which I sacrifice for the life of the world.” In this verse, there is an allusion to the life-giving death of Christ on the cross, from which springs of new Life sprung, but at the same time, there is a reference to the Mysterious Body of Christ, which became the bearer of this new Life. Christ has conquered sin and death in this body, and now he invites us to draw strength from him for the struggle.