The Bread of Life

Saint Anne Church - June 5, 1994

Today we celebrate Jesus really present in the Holy Eucharist. In this sacrament Jesus does not just give us something, like a special grace; he gives us himself: "I am the Bread of Life."

In the Sacraments he instituted, Jesus takes things we use in our daily life and makes them signs of spiritual reality.

Now, why in the Holy Eucharist did he take bread and wine? He wanted to signify how intimately he wanted to become part of our life. Just as food becomes part of our flesh and blood. Likewise, in Holy Communion, Jesus wants us to understand that spiritually he becomes our own flesh and blood, our very life.

That is precisely what makes us Christians: when Jesus lives in us, his life becomes our life. St. Paul caught the idea and expressed it beautifully in his letter to the Galatians (2:20): "The life I live is not my own; it is Christ living in me." In a similar vein, he says to the Philippians (1:21) "For me life means Christ."

A Christian is one who has been joined with Christ in Baptism. We receive life from him. His life becomes my life. Like the Vine and the Branches, as Jesus says. Paul expresses the same idea using a different metaphor: We are the Body of Christ: He is the Head, we the members. One and the same life flows from the vine into the branches, and throughout the head and body. That's how intimately we become one with Christ in Baptism.

That life in Christ in us is nourished and grows through the reception of the Holy Eucharist. At the Last Supper, Jesus took bread and said to his Apostles: "Take and eat; this is my body." Likewise, he took a cup of wine and said: "Take and drink: this is my blood." This is ME. In this sacrament I come to live in you. I give you my life.

If that is so, with what sense of awe we should receive Jesus in Holy Communion! With what joy, what faith, what devotion!

Unfortunately, we humans get used to everything and the holiest realities after a while seem to become ordinary. So that we receive Holy Communion and hardly realize who it is that comes to us. That is a reason why so often our communions bear so little fruit in our soul.

A couple of stories will help us realize more vividly the awesome reality of Holy Communion.

The first story is one that preachers of old used to like to tell. It's about a Protestant woman who was conversing one day with a friend of hers who was a Catholic, and she said to her: "If I believed as you do that Jesus is really present in the Holy Eucharist I would crawl on my hands and knees to go and receive him everyday."

Now, a very moving story about a Protestant Minister who converted to the Catholic faith just a few years ago. Actually, he was baptized, confirmed and made his first communion at the Easter Vigil in 1986. His name is Scott Hahn.

Scott Hahn was a Seminary Professor and a man who really knew the Bible and sought to live by it. While still a Protestant, he became curious about what Catholics believed, and went to the Catholic University of Marquette to learn about the Catholic faith and practices firsthand. He had no intention, at first, to be a Catholic; rather he wanted in all honesty to know what Catholics really believed in order to prove them wrong by the Bible. The more he learned about Catholicism, the more he discovered that on one point after another they were right.

Well, while at Marquette University, one day he went to Mass for the first time at the University parish. There he saw rank and file people, ordinary people from the neighborhood, coming for the midday Mass at 12 noon. “I looked at their devotion, their sincerity, taking time out in the middle of the day to worship. I watched how, during the consecration their heads were bowed, their lips were moving... I was moved. I went back the next day, and the next and the next. Within a week or two I had fallen in love head over heels with the Mass. The Eucharist became in a sense the all-controlling, central desire of my life. I can't describe to you the passionate hunger and thirst that came over me as I saw all those people going up and being fed with the Body and Blood of Our Lord.”

A short while later, I hear the Lord saying to me: What do you want? What do I want? That's easy. "I want to receive Our Lord in the Sacrament, I want the Eucharist.”

Would that we realized that in Holy Communion, we have Jesus in person, our God, who comes to dwell in us to be more and more our very life! What an awesome thought! We can say, like Thomas, when Jesus appeared to him after his Resurrection: "My Lord and my God!" The more we realize that Jesus in person comes to us in Holy Communion, the more we shall receive this sacrament with joy and fervor! And like Scott Hahn and other converts, we shall hunger and thirst for that heavenly food which is Jesus himself.

"I am the living bread come down from heaven. If anyone eats this bread he shall live forever." (Jn 6:51)

Sermons on the Eucharist Index