Bread of life? Incredible!

By Fr. Roy Cimagala

WE cannot deny that we too can somehow share the disbelief of the Jews when Christ declared himself as the “Bread of Life.” We can echo in ourselves their reaction: “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” (cfr. Jn 6,51-58)

It is once again the time to enliven our faith, suspend for a while our human perception of things and allow Christ to tell us things, since he truly tells us nothing other than the ultimate truths that can go over and above what we, with our human and natural powers, can only perceive and comprehend.

We have to realize that in spite of our best efforts to know and understand things, we know that we cannot apprehend everything, much less understand things fully and with finality. And yet we somehow can discern that the reality that governs us goes beyond what we can perceive and understand.

That is simply because of the spiritual character of our nature that would somehow enable us to have at least an inkling, an intimation of the spiritual, let alone, supernatural realities. These are realities that go beyond the sensible world. More than that, these are realities that are poised to make us enter into the supernatural realities since we know we have to contend with mysteries.

This is where and when we have to rely on faith, a gift given to us by God our Creator who wants us to be his image and likeness and, therefore, wants to share his knowledge of things, at least some part of it, with us.

And as the Catechism teaches us, “what moves us to believe is not the fact that revealed truths appear as true and intelligible in the light of our natural reason: we believe ‘because of the authority of God himself who reveals them, who can neither deceive nor be deceived’”. (CCC 156)

So, in spite of the tremendous and incredible truth told to us by Christ, we just have to believe that he makes himself the Bread of Life so that he can consummate his mission of redeeming us and of making us like him who is the true image and likeness that God has of his own self.

Yes, we have to reiterate this fundamental truth about ourselves. We are meant to be another Christ (alter Christus), if not Christ himself (ipse Christus). We have to pound this truth of our faith into our mind and heart repeatedly and strongly.

It would be truly good if on our part we try to do our best to correspond to this truth of our faith. Christ so wants us to be like him that he makes himself a bread for us to eat so we can achieve not only a spiritual identification with him but also a material one, at least for a time as we still traverse this world of ours.

What the gospel of Christ as our Bread of Life tries to tell us is that we should try our best to develop a Eucharistic devotion that would lead us to become truly Eucharistic souls. In other words, it is telling us to be another Christ, Christ himself, the very pattern of our humanity, and the savior of our damaged humanity.

It’s incredible indeed! But that is just how it is. With faith, we can hack it.

Email: roycimagala@gmail.com