by Br Julian McDonald cfc
To the fool Wisdom says: “Come and eat my bread, drink the wine I have prepared! Leave your folly and you will live;” Proverbs 9: 1-6
“Do not drug yourselves with wine, this is simply dissipation; be filled with the Spirit.” Ephesians 5: 15-20
“They who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. They who eat my flesh and drink my blood live in me and I live in them.” John 6: 51-58
Today’s gospel-reading is the second last of five from Chapter 6 of John’s Gospel. All five of those readings deal with John’s exploration of Jesus’ attempt to explain to a crowd chasing after him what he meant when, in his efforts to explain who he was, he stated boldly: “I am the bread of life” – a statement repeated several times in the course of this Chapter 6.
As I pondered this statement, it struck me that the people in Jesus’ audience probably understood it better than people listening to it in our churches today. The Jews in front of Jesus understood it so well that they refused to accept it, rejecting it as an outlandish claim coming out of the mouth of somebody as ordinary as Jesus. For us to appreciate the claim that Jesus made requires some knowledge of the religious culture that was familiar to the people of Jesus’ audience. It was a culture very different from ours, which has been gradually infected by secularism and self-interest. In the time of Jesus, religion and daily life were so closely linked that they were almost inseparable. Temple worship and sacrifice were part and parcel of daily life for the people of Jesus’ day.
Animal sacrifice was a regular part of temple worship and ritual. In Jewish thinking, blood was regarded as the part of the body in which life resided, and consequently belonged to God, the source of life. In temple sacrifice, it was customary to drain the blood from a sacrificial animal before the sacrifice took place and part of the animal’s flesh was given to the members of the family making the offering for a celebratory meal, at which God was regarded as an unseen guest. There were some Jewish people who subscribed to the belief that God entered the flesh of the sacrificial animal and that consuming the meat that was allocated to them meant that God was then dwelling in them. As part of the sacrificial ritual, the blood, drained from an animal in advance of the sacrifice on the temple altar, was sprinkled by the presiding priest on the burning offering and on those present, as a sign that everyone participating was being touched by the life of God.
John would later describe Jesus’ final meal with his disciples (We now name it the Last Supper) as the New Passover Feast at which Jesus proclaimed that his disciples were to be, like him, bread for others through service and compassion. To be “bread” for others would mean reflecting to them the love, the mercy and compassion of God in the way in which Jesus had done in his mission to the people of his day.
When we look at the priorities of our contemporary culture, what seems to be prominent is emphasis on self-interest, self-promotion and a sense of entitlement, all of which ultimately seem to provide little in the way of satisfaction. In contrast, Jesus taught that we will find meaning, purpose and nourishment in life only when we focus our energy on working for peace and justice and on reaching out to others with care, compassion, mercy and reconciliation. In recent reflections, I have pointed out that Augustine captured the true meaning of Eucharist when he suggested that priests, in offering the bread of life to communicants at Mass, would do well to say to each one: “Behold who you are, become what you receive” (namely, Jesus, the Bread of life).
Today’s readings from Proverbs and Ephesians complement our gospel-reading from John. From the beginnings of their history, the ancient Hebrews cultivated an appetite for wisdom, evidenced in the so-called “wisdom” Books of the First/Old Testament such as Proverbs, Wisdom, Ecclesiastes (Qoheleth) and Ecclesiasticus (Ben Sirach). Wisdom was so sought after that it became personified, as we see in today’s first reading from Proverbs. In order to be bread broken and given as nourishment for others, we need wisdom to guide us. Today’s first reading from Proverbs invites us to nourish ourselves on what wisdom has to offer us so that we can live selflessly for others, guided by sound perception of where what we have to offer is truly needed.
In today’s second reading from Ephesians, Paul urges us to steer clear of searching to satisfy our own appetites with what might give us no more than temporary pleasure; to avoid being drunk with things like wine. Instead, he urges us to “be filled with the Spirit” in imitation of Jesus from whom life for others spilled out in abundance.
