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A good Sunday to all.

Last week we heard the crowds at Capernaum telling Jesus that in the desert Moses had given them the bread that had come down from heaven. But Jesus answered immediately: 'That is not true. Moses never gave them the bread that came down from heaven. He gave them the manna, which is the material bread, nourishes the biological life on this earth.' He has given them the food that all animals need, but this food is not enough to be human.

The Jews do not distinguish between three kingdoms as we do: the mineral kingdom, the vegetable kingdom, the animal kingdom; they say that there is a fourth kingdom, the human kingdom and that the one who belongs to this fourth kingdom needs to feed himself with another bread, which is the wisdom of God, which for the Jews is embodied in the Torah, and this wisdom of God, this bread that humanizes, comes from heaven.

With this distinction between the material bread that nourishes the life that is ending and the bread that comes from heaven, the multitudes could only agree with Jesus, but he added another statement which is unacceptable to the Jews; he said, "I am this bread which came down from heaven." It is on this subject that the multitudes react.

Let us listen:

 

"The Jews murmured about him because he said, 'I am the bread that came down from heaven,' and they said, 'Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph? Do we not know his father and mother? Then how can he say, 'I have come down from heaven'?"

 

Faced with what he said, the crowds begin to murmur against Jesus. The Greek verb used "γογγγύζετε" = gongízete, does not mean to grumble, to murmur, but means to dispute, to be indignant, to firmly reject what Jesus has said. What is the reason for this scandalous reaction to what Jesus said? For two reasons, the first is that the pious Israelite is convinced that he already has the bread from heaven, the Torah, the wisdom of God.

This Torah is the bread that feeds the human being, the bread that makes you human. For example, it tells you: do not kill; it is the animals that kill; if you belong to the human kingdom, you must not kill and this humanizes you; it humanizes you in the way of handling sexuality because people are not like the animals that live their sexuality for the preservation of the species, and that's why it tells you that if you want to belong to the human kingdom do not commit adultery. It tells you not to hold a grudge in your heart; it tells you that you must have only one God if you want to be a real person, have no other idols.

The Israelite is convinced that he needs no other bread. He feels fully human if he fulfills all the Torah that has come down from heaven as a gift from God. Israel was and is proud of this gift which makes them feel privileged among all the peoples of the earth. Deuteronomy chapter 4 says: "The other peoples, when they hear of this perfect law, will say: 'This is the only wise people that exists in the world.'"

I want to emphasize this love of Israel for the Torah because it is good to keep in mind. Every year at the end of the Feast of Tents, the Israelites celebrate the feast of 'Simchat Torah,' the joy of the Torah. They dance and embrace the Torah scroll in the synagogues as a husband embraces his wife. It is the sign of Israel's gratitude for this gift received from God.

The Torah scrolls are to be written by the rabbis; it takes a year and a half to write the entire Torah, and if, by chance, of the 304,805 letters of which the Torah is composed, the scroll was unusable if even one is not correct. The Torah scroll was kept in the holiest place in the synagogue, the sacred ark, the ărōn Kodesh, and in front of it is the veil on which is usually embroidered the Menorah that the symbol of the light coming out of that ărōn Kodesh. During the reading—those who have been to Israel will have noticed this—they mark the text in the Torah not with a finger because the text is sacred, but with a small pointer. Finally, when a scroll is no longer usable, you cannot throw it away, not even a piece of the scroll, but you must keep it and then bury it in a cemetery. That's the end of this parenthesis, but it is good to keep in mind the love of Israel for the Torah.

In this context, Jesus makes an unprecedented claim for the Jews that he is the incarnation of the wisdom of God. And they say to him: Who do you think you are, how can you claim to be the incarnation of the human? This is the reason why they reacted in a challenging and determined way.

And now the second reason for their rejection. 'You are a carpenter's son, and the wisdom of God can't be incarnated in a carpenter, and that, therefore, there is no need to read the Torah, but only to look at you, that you are the embodiment of the Torah. No, this is too much.' Let's try to get this straight. We know that Jews, Muslims, and Christians refer to a sacred text: the Torah for the Jews, the Koran for the Muslims; in fact, in the book of the Koran for 54 times, the Jews, Muslims and Christians are called 'the people of the book.' But there is a substantial difference that we must take into account to understand what Jesus says.

Jews and Muslims have the wisdom of God guiding their lives embodied in the Torah and the Koran that came down from heaven. For Christians, the wisdom of God is not embodied in a book but became flesh in Nazareth, in the womb of Mary. It is true that through a book, we know, we see, we hear, we touch Jesus through the Gospel, but the book is only an instrument to find Jesus, who is the wisdom that came down from heaven. And it is of this bread that people hunger, and until they have not found it, and assimilated this bread until they find Jesus of Nazareth, they will never be satisfied; they will never be fully human.

What is the message for us today? Who are these Jews who answer Jesus in Capernaum? Why does the evangelist John speak of the Jews when we are in Galilee? They are all Galileans there. In John's Gospel, the term 'Jew' represents everyone who feels satiated with the food he has and does not want more; it is enough. The Christian respects all humanisms and appreciates what is beautiful and humanizing contained in the Torah. It certainly indicates the right direction to live as humans, but it is not the final goal; it does not indicate the perfection of the human; it does not tell us that to be human, we need to forgive unconditionally, seventy times seven. It does not say that we need to come to love, do good, and even give our life for the enemy, for the one who has wronged you. The wisdom of heaven incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth reaches there. And, therefore, we affirm that beyond that it is impossible to achieve; and if you do not get there, you are not yet a person.

The Jews spoken of in today's Gospel are not those of Capernaum; they are dead; they are all those who today believe that they are satisfied with the wisdom they have. This can happen to those who follow other humanisms: the Jewish, the Buddhist, the Hindu, the Muslim humanism. But, Jewish in this sense, is also the baptized, the Christian who could still be very far from having assimilated Christ, far from having assimilated the perfect man that is Jesus of Nazareth. They might have tasted some crumbs of the Gospel, but then they stopped at some good recommendation, did not accept to go further to take in all this bread. So, they have not yet grasped the humanism of Jesus of Nazareth. It is the Jew present in each one of us.

And now Jesus helps us to identify these Jews that are in us to make us discover how he stands for his own position, how he justifies the rejection of the bread from heaven, which is Christ. Let us listen:

 

"Jesus answered and said to them, 'Stop murmuring among yourselves. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him on the last day. It is written in the prophets: 'They shall all be taught by God.' Everyone who listens to my Father and learns from him comes to me. Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father. Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life.'"

 

Before, the Jews murmured against Jesus, now they murmur among themselves and with others. They have heard a shocking statement. Instead of confronting Jesus for clarification, they begin to murmur among themselves, that is, to dispute what he has said, but they do it among themselves. This is what happens today; when we meet Jesus through the proposal of his Gospel and his word, inevitably our way of thinking, of reasoning, of living, is called into question; it is altered because that way of reasoning is as far away from ours as the sky is from the earth, and then what do we do?

Not everyone is willing to accept this word and make a change. We are instinctively inclined to defend our positions, to protect our convictions, what we have always done and believed in. Even practicing Christians can reject the evangelical proposal. Today we have a light of the Gospel, a light on Christ that we did not have a few decades ago, and in the face of this new bread, even many Christians prefer the bread they have been eating up to that moment and reject the newness of Christ.

How do they justify their choice, how do they defend their position from the provocative proposal that comes from the Gospel? They behave exactly like the Jews of Capernaum. They begin to murmur and protest, not to confront with the Gospel, but among themselves, that is, they go to look for another Jew who thinks like them, they confront each other to confirm that they are right, that they must go on living like that. And the other Jew will say, 'forget it he's a heretic... one who is in love with new things, with fashion, but he's moving away from the true tradition.' This is why the Jew goes with another Jew just to avoid confrontation with the Gospel, with Christ.

If the Jew that is inside of us leads us instinctively not to let us convert, Jesus' battle is lost. That is why Jesus speaks to us about the need to become aware that there is an intervention of the heavenly Father. The Father draws to him the veil that is Jesus; his Gospel is the bread of life that humanizes you; it is not a conquest of ours; it is a free gift of God that attracts us to Christ.

And it says that we will all be taught by God. What does it mean? We have in our DNA the instinctive attraction to the Father in heaven because we are his sons and daughters, and this attraction leads us instinctively to vibrate in tune with the word of Jesus of Nazareth, with his person. There is an inner voice that tells us that what he says to us is humanizing and true to be like him, to be truly human.

It is an inner voice that tells us that when we hear in the Gospel that tells us: 'do not cling to the goods of this world, don't compete to accumulate, give it all for love,' that is an inner voice that tells us that he is right. To be human means to put our goods at the disposal of our brothers and sisters; in the face of a wrong received, you hear a voice inside you that tells you not to take revenge, to turn the other cheek; an inner voice tells you that he is right; to be a person means to turn the other cheek, don't take revenge. Jesus says that whoever welcomes Christ as the bread from heaven has eternal life; not that he will have it in the future as a reward; when one adheres to Christ and his proposal of life, one becomes attuned to his own life, the life that lasts for eternal life, the life that is nourished with the wisdom that comes from God, with the bread from heaven.

And now Jesus begins to present himself as bread to eat. He still does not speak of the Eucharist but of bread to assimilate what comes from heaven, which is him. Let us listen:

 

"I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the desert, but they died; this is the bread that comes down from heaven so that one may eat it and not die. 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."

 

Jesus has told us about bread, but only at this point in his discourse does he introduce the verb 'to eat.' To the Jews who are listening to him, he says, 'Your fathers in the wilderness ate manna, but the manna was not bread that came down from heaven; it nourished a life that perishes; in fact, they all died.' "I am the living bread that came down from heaven; if anyone eats of this bread, he shall live forever, and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world."

What is Jesus telling us? But, first, let's try to understand because it is not difficult, and it is extremely important for our life. If Jesus had given us material bread, we would be grateful, but it would not have been a great gift because it would have been for a life that perishes; he is speaking to us now of the gift of a life of the Eternal.

First, this verb 'to eat' is extremely important to understand the Eucharist, which over the centuries has been obfuscated in its meaning by so many devotions. The verb to eat—faguein— is repeated 11 times in this chapter. Then there is another much stronger verb, 'trogein' in Greek, meaning to grind, chew, and then there is a third verb—bere—which will be repeated three times. Jesus is not yet speaking of the Eucharist but is preparing this subject in its true meaning.

Let's try to understand, the metaphor of the bread of life is used in the Bible to indicate the word of God, which is the bread of life. The prophet Ezekiel says: 'The Lord says to the prophet, son of man eat this scroll then go and speak to the Israelites.' In other words, assimilate this word not only with your mind but incarnate in your life and then communicate it to the people. The verb 'to eat' used here in the sense of assimilating makes flesh of your own flesh this word of God. Only when I announce it with the word, but then they see it embodied in my life, my announcement becomes convincing. Also, the prophet Jeremiah says: 'When I found your words, O Lord, I devoured them greedily, and your word was the joy and gladness of my heart.'

It is the verb to eat, meaning to assimilate, this word of God. Jesus says: "The bread that I give is my flesh." What does this word flesh mean so as not to misunderstand the meaning that Jesus gives to eat his flesh? In the Semitic conception, flesh does not indicate muscles. This is a dangerous misunderstanding; even when speaking of the resurrection of the flesh, many continue to think about the recompositing of the muscles. Not so, the flesh in the biblical sense is not the muscles; it is the whole person, but considered in its aspect of a weak, transitory creature. ...and above all, a mortal creature. That is the flesh. To say that the person is ephemeral, frail, weak, subject to death, they say that man is flesh. It is not contempt for the human condition. It is simply a recognition of the fact that the reality of the human condition is this. Psalm 78 says: "Many times has the Lord appeased his wrath at the sins that have been committed by his people and did not punish them because he remembered 'I must be patient because they are flesh, a breath that departs and does not return.'"

Let us keep in mind that this is the biblical meaning of 'flesh.' The evangelist John when he writes that "the Word became flesh"—the word of God, the revelation of God became man in Jesus of Nazareth, one of us, not because of his outward appearance. Still, he became like us in every way and assimilated all our life forms, but with all their frailty, limits, and precariousness, including death.

The Word in becoming man became flesh, became mortal. Then what does this expression 'to eat his flesh' mean? It means accepting, assimilating, and making one's own the wisdom of God that we see incarnated in a man with a fragile human nature, present in Jesus of Nazareth. If we look at Jesus of Nazareth, we see the perfect man; therefore, Jesus is not making a cannibalistic proposal, and his hearers understood this very well; the cannibalistic proposal did not scandalize them. No, they understood the provocation that Jesus was making. 'You think to humanize yourselves perfectly by eating the bread of the wisdom of the Torah. Now the wisdom of God is present in this frail flesh of man, the son of a carpenter.'

It is a matter of assimilating his wisdom. We are still not talking about the Eucharist; he always refers to embodying his person presented in the Gospel message. He is only introducing the subject that will be made explicit from next Sunday: To assimilate him, who becomes Eucharistic bread.

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