Jesus said to the Jewish crowds: “I am the living bread that came down from heaven;whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.” The Jews quarreled among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” Jesus said to them, “Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him. Just as the living Father sent me and I have life because of the Father, so also the one who feeds on me will have life because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Unlike your ancestors who ate and still died, whoever eats this bread will live forever.”

A good Sunday for all, sisters and brothers.

Today’s celebration was born in the context of strong arguments about the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. After these arguments, there were many interpretations and many devotions to the Eucharist. Some, certainly positive; others away from the true meaning –the gesture made by Jesus at the Last Supper.

It is to this founding event that we must always refer when dealing with the EucharistThere are so many devotions, so ingrained, that we have moved away from the authentic meaning. It is not a matter of criticizing certain devotions that have produced saints, so we respect them, but we must always make reference to the Last Supper, the simplicity of the gesture made by Jesus and the sense of commitment in eating that bread.

I think that today’s feast is timely to do a bit of restoration work, as we do with ancient paintings, when the dust has been deposited which have overshadowed the original color. We need to rescue the original color, to find the ‘original color’ of this Eucharist, which we want to refer to connect with the Gospel, especially with the text that is presented today, which is part of the discourse of Jesus in the synagogue of Capernaum—which you see behind me—after the gesture of distributing the bread.

Let us notice above all this context where the Eucharist is born, the meaning that Jesus gave to the gesture made during the last supper. First of all, the institution of the Eucharist is during a dinner. It is not a sacred context; it is a profane context. Not in the context of the temple, but in a banquet.

In fact, Paul calls the Eucharistic celebration of the community of Corinth: ‘The Lord’s Supper’, where the resurrected Lord is remembered. Let us reflect on this text of the evangelist John that we find on this Sunday.

Jesus begins by saying, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever.” Will receive the life of the Eternal. Not as we think ‘eternal life’ as a life that does not end anymore. It is not the ‘duration’ that illuminates this adjective. ‘Eternal’ means life that belongs to the Eternal, to God—a completely different life from the biological life we have in this world. He who eats this bread receives the life of the Eternal.

There is a word that appears many times in this discourse that Jesus does in the synagogue of Capernaum. Actually, there are two verbs in which it is worth insisting. The first is ‘faguein’ which means eating. It appears 11 times in a single chapter. Then there is the verb ‘troguein’, even stronger, which means to grind, which Jesus wanted to convey in the Eucharist. which Jesus wanted to convey in the Eucharist. It is not something to be guarded, or to be contemplated on and, much less, worship, but to ‘eat’, to assimilate, as it is done with bread.

Then there is another word: ‘drink’, which appears three times in this chapter. Therefore,the insistence is on these very concrete verbs. This should lead us away from a certain devotional language, intimate language of the past, but still continuing today, which distances itself from the authentic meaning of the Eucharist. I have heard people mentioning about keeping Jesus company, to comfort Jesus who is in the Eucharist, that he is always alone and we must keep him company … there was reference to the ‘divine prisoner’. These intimist expressions have to be abandoned. The objective of the Eucharist is not to capture Jesus in order to have him closer… for he is always at our side, with us.

The Eucharist is to be eaten. I have insisted on this verb because it is the insistence of Jesus in this discourse. John does not narrate the institution of the Eucharist but this long discourse gives us the meaning of the Eucharist. Let us now see what the Master says. Today’s gospel text is only the last part of the discourse. Jesus has spoken his word which is bread of life. And those who heard him understood that it was his announcement, which is a bread of life.

The bread that nourishes the life of the Eternal —a life that has been dreamt about, a life that must develop, must grow, a life that cannot remain hidden, otherwise it develops only the biological aspect, but the child of God, the Eternal that is in us, does not grow if it is not fed.Food is the word of the Master, his message, his doctrine. This was understood by those who heard Jesus. Therefore, not one lives by bread alone, but by every word that comes out of the mouth of God.

And the incarnate word, made flesh, is Jesus of Nazareth. A word that is not only heard,what he proclaims, but what is seen, because it is his person which embodies the word, the message that comes from heaven. Then Jesus goes one step further: “The bread that I give for the life of the world is my flesh.” The discourse develops slowly. This bread, which is the word descended from heaven, the bread of life is my flesh otherwise, we live only biologically like our ancestors.

What does Jesus understand? He is not yet talking about the Eucharist … he slowly enters the discourse. Jesus speaks of the ‘flesh’. The ‘flesh’ for us are the muscles, not so for the Semitic conception. When a Semitic says ‘flesh’, he makes reference to the weak, fragile, precarious person, destined to death.

Man is ‘flesh’, meaning fragile, weak, vulnerable, ephemeral. This is the condition of man; he is not an angel. Man is flesh and lives in this condition; and when the evangelist John at the beginning of his gospel says: “The Word was made flesh,” it does not mean that it has clothed himself with muscles but that Jesus has assumed not only the outward semblance of man but has been made in everything similar to us, with all our fragility, the precariousness of our human life. And when he became flesh, he became mortal.

If Jesus had not been killed, he would have died because man is born to death. This is our condition. The Semitics said: man is flesh and it is our fragility. What does Jesus say? He says that the Word, the revelation that comes from heaven, is present in his flesh, in his fragility is the message that comes from heaven and nourishes the life of the Eternal in us.Those who heard him understood. They did not think it was a cannibalistic proposition. They understood that they should assimilate his message if they wanted to live the life of the Eternal, eternal life. And ‘eating’ in this first sense means to assimilate the wisdom coming from heaven, although it is clothed with this fragile aspect that is the man Jesus of Nazareth,with all the limited aspects that characterize our human weakness.

There is no mention yet about the Eucharist, but it will now enter into the discourse of Jesus. “Jesus answered them: I assure you unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man (‘faguein’—quite shocking to the Semites) and drink his blood, you do not have life within you.” He then further emphasizes: “Whoever eats (‘troguien’—chews, grinds with his teeth)my flesh and drink my blood has eternal life … My flesh is true food and my blood is real drink.”

This is a very crude request for a Semite. And drinking the blood is disgusting. What does Jesus mean by “eating his flesh and drinking his blood”? It is the interpretation that Johninvites us to assimilate about what has happened in the Last Supper. When Jesus takes bread(not ‘takes the bread’ as some translations say) because Jesus takes of the bread and says”This is my body”.

The Synoptics speak of the ‘body’. John prefers another expression: ‘flesh’. But they have the same meaning. When Jesus says: This is my body it is a Semitic expression that means “this is me”. At the Last Supper, they did not understand anything. The apostles simply saw a gesture that Jesus made when he took bread and said, “This is me.” What was he trying to say? Not that the bread is transformed into the body of Christ, in his own person. It is Jesus who becomes bread. “I have become bread.” It means: “My whole life was consummated to nourish the life of the brothers and sisters.”

All his life he has been a gift and it is this symbol of the bread that Jesus has chosen as a sign of his whole history, his whole life. And what is there to do with that bread? Bread has only one purpose: to be assimilated, to be eaten. Not to be saved. Let us be attentive to some devotions to which I have mentioned earlier. If we put in an ostensory, far away, an elevated host and ask a child what it is, he will tell me a lot of things except that it is bread to eat. Therefore, it distances me from the proposal that Jesus offers me to assimilate that bread, to assimilate all his history, to make his person mine.

This is not a cannibalistic proposal. I remember that as a child when I was preparing for First Communion, they told me that Jesus was present in flesh and blood, hidden under the spice of bread and had to be eaten. I did not like it, I did not accept it, this gesture did not attract me at all… The teachers had distanced me from the meaning of the Eucharist.

It is the sign of the whole story of Jesus. Jesus is present with all his life history given up for others and makes me a proposal. And this also has to be told to the children. The proposal is to assimilate with a very compromising gesture. Eating that bread, grinding it means: I must assimilate it well. Before I make this choice I must understand what I commit myself to: to unite my life to Jesus and, therefore, to make my life a life totally given for love, consumed, crushed like the life of Jesus.

Then drink from the chalice. It is a gesture that we must always do. It has never been prohibited the communion under both species and must always do it, every Sunday, for all present —of course by immersion, as it is proper for hygienic reasons. But the gesture should be to eat that bread and drink, if only with the gesture of immersion. What does it mean to drink blood?

In the Bible the blood has a very clear meaning, it indicates life—the blood is life. There is in the Old Testament a rite performed at Sinai when the covenant was made between God and the people: Moses took blood from the immolated victims and poured it on the altar and on the people. What does that mean? It indicated the communion of life as if God and the people were consanguineous, belonging to the same family and, therefore, had to protect each other. The people should be faithful to God and God should protect his people because they had the same life, they were united in the same blood. This is what the gesture made by Jesus means.

This gesture means that if you accept to drink from this chalice it means that you accept life, which is the Spirit of Christ, the love that unites us to the interior of the Trinitarian love.This is the commitment that is made when one eats that bread and drinks from that chalice.Jesus continues: “He who chews my flesh and drinks my blood dwells in me and I in him.” It is a communion of spousal life.

The Eucharist is the commitment of husband and wife. In the rite of marriage, the husband asks the wife: do you want to join your life to mine? Then there is the gesture of giving the ring, which means the union, the union that has no end. And the wife responds: I want to join my life to yours. And the two become one flesh. They have a single project of living in common, and they must carry out this option unconditionally.

This is what happens in the Eucharist. It is Jesus who says: ‘you know my story’ … And we know that we cannot celebrate an authentic Eucharist if it is not preceded by the reception of his word. His word that becomes bread in the first part of the Eucharistic celebration,because two people do not join in marriage if they do not know each other if they have not deepened their mutual knowledge and if they do not assume that the one is for the other, that one cannot be happy without the other. This is what Jesus asks: Are you aware of the proposal that I make you with this gesture?

Eat this bread, assimilate my history and you will have in you the life of the Eternal. This is the meaning of the Eucharist on which we have reflected on this Sunday.

I wish you all a good Sunday and a good week.