The “living bread from heaven” is the Eucharist. But how is this bread living? Because it is truly the body blood soul and divinity or our our Lord God Himself, it is the actual source of life itself. It is important to note here that in greek There are a couple words for life, the first is the bodily physical life of our human existence (pnuema), and the other is supernatural spiritual life (zoe), the life that god gave us and was made for eternal communion with Him.
When Jesus speaks of life here, He is not speaking of the temporary natural life of this world, but the eternal supernatural life that is promised to those that make it to heaven. The eucharist is litterally a foretaste of that heaven, but it is also the medicine that we need now in this physical world to heal our souls, to transforms our broken fallen nature, and to prepare our souls for an eternity with God in heaven.
The eucharist is the real presence of God, and when we partake of it, we become one with Him (for a short while). We unite with the God of the universe, body, blood, soul and divinity. He becomes part of us, and we for slight time become transformed by Him into Him. It is only a short time while here in this sinful world, but it is a glimpse of what eternity in heaven will be, an eternal and perfect marriage with Him forever. This is an amazing reality…, mind boggling when you actually think about it.
But the eucharistic host is just a piece of bread, how can we believe that it is actually transformed into the real Body of our Lord Jesus Christ? This is the challenge of our faith, and it is not easy. But we do have some help. Thomas Aquinas explains it by noting the difference between substance and accidents of a thing. The accidents of a thing are its attributes, a red ball has the accidents of redness, roundness, and bounciness. But the when you add all of those accidents together, you get the substance of it, a bouncy red ball. The accidents can change, the shade of red, the size or shape of the roundness, the degree of bounciness, but the substance stays the same. But with the Eucharist, the accidents of bread remain the same, but the substance changes. This is a great mystery, and while we cant understand it perfectly, we are able to understand it somewhat. But at the end of the day the reason for why we believe always comes down to faith. To understand that concept a little better, we turn to the Ignatious study bible, which explains faith in the eucharist like this:
There are two ways of viewing the bread of life, and they both depend on faith. The first is that Eating is seen as a metaphor for believing in Jesus and that by eating you will be eventually lead to believing. But in John 6 Jesus is 100% clear that the eucharist is His Body and His blood. And eating human flesh is so contrary to our nature as humans, and is rightly seen as abhorent to do so. Thus we are somewhat stuck. Thus the second view is that you must first believe before you can eat. But how can we believe something that is so unnatural? In either case the answer require trust in God and faith that His words are true. So when we combine all of this together we understand that “If eating is believing, then believing leads to eating” and “If believing leads to eating, then eating is believing”
In philosophy this is called a tautology, and is often seen as a logical falicy, but that is the point. The eucharist is not logical, it is not something that you can fully understand with your natural human mind, and scientific study…, it requires faith. But just because it requires faith does not mean that it is not real. The transformative nature of the eucharist, is absolutely real and verifiable, the evidence is everywhere. Just Search on the web for “eucharistic miracles” and you will be astounded by what you find. Jesus said that you will know them by their fruits, and the fruits of the eucharist are legendary.
The mystery of the eucharist may be hard to understand with our human mind, but it is not impossible. It requires an open heart and God’s grace, but it is totally possible, but it begins with faith. Thomas Aquinas said (paraphrasing): “the mysteries of the faith will forever remain elusive to those that do not have faith, but if you simply open your heart to Him, and make the move toward God and ask for His grace, He will pour down onto you all that you need and more to begin to understand.” But if you hate or reject God, then nothing He says or does will ever make sense to you. But He is waiting for you to ask Him to increase your faith, what are you waiting for, start right now? Your eternity awaits.
