This is a salvific act on God’s part, a “providential” act, through which he could arrive where man could not. But the desert experience, described in such detail by the author, makes us think of the deserts of our own life, of the weariness, the difficulties, the barrenness and lack of meaning gripping our lives that make it impossible to move forward. Prisoners of our own complaining and nostalgia for the comforts of bondage when at least there was food!
And so, God is the One who gives the food capable of giving strength and vigour. There is “another food” that can revive the hope that is in you, that will help you on your way. As once in the desert, so too today, God gives the “Bread of angels”, such that no one has ever seen.
Bread from Heaven
Jesus gives himself to me, to everyone, in this Bread and makes us able to pursue our journey toward Heaven, toward eternity. “Whoever eats this bread will live forever”. In this Bread, Jesus makes me partake of his love, he clothes me with it, he nourishes me with it. He himself is both the banquet and the food. Jesus himself is Eucharist: “This is my body…. This is my blood…”. In other words: This is my life, it is I. The Eucharist is an anticipation of what we will live in eternity together.
We have been made for great things
In giving us this Bread, Jesus makes us realize we have been made for great things, higher things. By looking toward the things above, which is consistent with the call to be “born from above” (see Jn. 3:3), Jesus reveals the perspective through which we are called to look on life – not stopping at earthly things, looking only horizontally (see Col. 3:1-4), but looking up, aiming high. The Eucharist is the Sacrament which catapults us toward the things of Heaven. It invites us to think higher, in a vertical dimension, according to God and not according to others (see Mk. 8:33). Toward that end, the Eucharist is offered to us as nourishment, strength, the bread from heaven so that “whoever eats my flesh will live because of me, will live forever” (see Jn. 6:51, 54). This, and only this, can deliver us from a flat and trivial life.
Not a ticket, but a logic
Viewing the Eucharist as a “ritual”, a kind of “weekly ticket” we need to pay, an obligation, leads us to fall back into the logic of the old covenant – “obeying” an external law that does not change life, and even less, does not save it. Instead, Jesus invites us to assume the logic that the Eucharist become a style of life, a new way of being, knowing how to receive him in our hands in order to offer the Eucharist in Him and to others.
Understanding the Eucharist, living the Eucharist, will lead us to the point of making this experience of love become a style of live, a “higher measure”, a way to love and to serve. Jesus said, “Do this in memory of me”. “Doing this memory” means “doing it like him, moving from “I” to “we”, as someone connected to others, who takes care of others after the example of Jesus who washes the feet of his disciples (see Jn. 13:1-11), or of the Good Samaritan (see Lk. 10:29-37).
The Eucharist gives us the experience of rediscovering the “Community”, and of “Encountering the community”. It is the laboratory of fraternity. This is why a Christian can never be content with personal prayer because there are times when the Community, Jesus’s friends, gather together to pray. This is the Eucharist. In this gathering, we listen to the Word and nourish ourselves on the Eucharist.
Prayer
Lord Jesus, with your instructions to follow the man with the pitcher of water, you make me understand that I am to follow in the footsteps of those who seriously live their baptism: help me imitate those who aim high in life.
Lord Jesus, by inviting me to the upper room, you ask me to abandon a flat way of life: help me be carried away with the desires you place in my heart.
Lord Jesus, by giving me bread and wine, Your Body and Your Blood, you teach me that life is either a gift, or it is not life: nourished by You, help me to make my life an offering pleasing to the Father.
Lord Jesus, in gathering your disciples around the table, you teach me that there is no Eucharist without the community, and there is no community without service. Help me to make my life a Eucharistic life.
(Prayer by Father Andrea Vena)
