Jesus said to the crowds: “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
The people then disputed among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”
So Jesus said to them, “Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Thos who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. “

“Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever.”
Jesus said these things while he eas teaching in the synagogue at Capernaum.
— John 6:51-59

If your destiny were to love the whole world, how would you do it? Perhaps you would come as bread. And if you desired to nourish the hungry, to heal the sick and to be a model for others in contemplation, simplicity, community and relationships, how would you appear? You might become as bread. If you wanted to create intimacy and be a sign to all of equality and justice, you would come as bread.

Today we rejoice in a God who comes to us as bread. Whereas human beings have chosen to be remembered in portraits, in statues, in their memoirs and by tombstones which bears their names, our God has chosen simple bread.

We come to each liturgy with the expectation that Jesus will reveal himself to us. But we can learn as much from the manner of the revelation as from the revelation itself. Our God comes appearing as bread, the stuff of everyday life, food for rich and poor alike, the thing we earn by the sweat of our brow. Bread: the simplest yet most essential form of food, the substance we break when families come together, the thing in the Lord's prayer that syrnbolizes all our daily needs.
The manner in which Jesus is remembered is in keeping with a prince of peace, a suffering servant, a carpenter's son from Nazareth. Remembrances of Jesus through magnificent cathedrals or priceless art may all be well intentioned, but they are devices not of God's choosing. His choosing is bread. The simplicity, the catholicity the necessity of Jesus are all found in bread.

And what has become of Jesus, the living bread? That bread of life, which was kept in the homes of Christians during the infant years of the church, and shared at their family tables at prayer time, is no longer in our homes. He is here in church, locked in the tabernacle at that. For every reason that justifies the practice of keeping God hidden and locked, another cries out for his release. Why? 'Because our perceptions of Jesus have suffered, and our willingness to approach him has, too. We have come to believe that he is still in a tomb, distant, inaccessible, remote. Forgotten in the locking away is that our God comes as bread, and all that bread implies. He came to the midst of his people, just as his Father pitched his tent among his beloved people as they wandered in a desert.
Ezekiel, the reluctant prophet, provides a lesson in why God is food. Not terribly eager to preach God's word, Ezekiel was called to eat the scroll—not to read it, but to eat it. The point is that we become what we eat; our food becomes bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. A balanced diet makes for a healthy person. We live on meat and vegetables and the like; we are nourished and remain strong through such food. But today we are called to something else, too. Like Ezekiel, we are summoned to be nourished by God - by his word and by the bread in which he comes. To be without food, as we tragically witness in parts of our world, is to become listless and soon die. Without the food we are offered today, we too risk spiritual apathy, even death.

Look about you. You will undoubtedly see people who appear well-fed, but who might be in fact spiritually undernourished. The Eucharist addresses our condition. We journey: we sometimes wander aimlessly; we sometimes are lost. We hunger for food, though not as urgently as the children of the third world who stare out at us through hollow eyes and swollen stomachs. Perhaps we hunger more for grace, direction, peace. We thirst for justice, quiet, companionship. In this, the spiritually deprived children of affluence know hunger as sharp as those who eat only in their dreams.

ls it possible to be hungry, and not know it? Is it possible to know it and yet refuse the food which will satisfy? How important it is for both emotional and spiritual health to be in touch with such feelings; our hungers, angers and denials. The person who cannot acknowledge his hunger is neither in touch with his need, his pain, nor with the poverty and lack thereof, in his life. This person, especially, is addressed today. This one, especially, is summoned to recognize the beam in his own eye, the unacceptable part of oneself, so that he might cease to criticize it in others, but above all, so that he might be healed, and be fed.

"Come to me, all you who labour" is a call not to the righteous or the worthy, but to the burdened and afflicted. "People who are well do not need a doctor; sick people do. '' "I have come to seek out and find the sheep which are lost," These are words of invitation. Tabernacles and other devices that keep God at a distance are our designs, not God's. He is the bread of life, not of death. He desires to move freely among even the lowly. His home is neither gilded, nor ornate, nor locked. His home is at our tables, as bread. for the hungry, Lord of the oppressed, a God for the divorced. He has shared their outrage, wept their tears, and known, the meanness of their streets. And the poor man of Nazareth knows also the pain of the rich, in their hunger for what money cannot buy. The bread of life sets captives free, all captives.

Should we grow up with the perception of a distant God, our readiness to approach him, will suffer. But the reality is that he is bread - what does that tell us? Corpus Christi says that God is bread, and that we are invited. He is food for struggling, weak, even sinful people. What happens at the consecration of each Mass remains incomplete until the bread is broken, eaten, shared. We all long for completeness, for wholeness. It is found in the eating. Only we can complete the Eucharist. This is the real presence, when it is allowed to heal us, satisfy us. The presence is real whether or not we come to it, but we are fed only if we eat. The point is not to eliminate the tabernacles of the world, but, to know our God as approachable.

And what does Corpus Christi say to those who do eat regularly at this table? It says that no longer may we remain unconcerned about any person who hungers in any way. When Jesus multiplied the loaves and fed the multitudes that he did so out of compassion. Nothing was asked of those who ate. How times have changed! To eat this bread now is both to acknowledge our brokenness and to commit ourselves to healing a broken world. Eating here demands commitment. St. Augustine prayed that we be more concerned with the change that takes place in our hearts and in the congregation than with the change at the altar. Bread becoming flesh should be more a religious and spiritual experience than a philosophical or scientific one. It must be done with others; it is an action of the church. It can only happen among people who invoke God's name, who share a common faith, who remember that God, is a- tent dweller. It is done by people who know that they must listen and eat, or perish.

So then, what does Jesus' way of relating say about ours? How are we to become bread for others, to put on Christ? We must examine Jesus' way of friendship, of calling into freedom, of encouraging and supporting the struggle against structures which discriminate. To remember Jesus in this way is to become him who became bread for others. It is to call for the destruction of all barriers, and be mindful of Christians elsewhere in this world celebrating this same Body of Christ. Some hunger while we eat; some wage war while we are at peace; some see our nation as their enemy, wealthy but uncaring, powerful but oppressive.

To eat in this place is to allow oneself to be moulded and fashioned, much like the wheat which became the bread. Goldened by the sun, receptive to the rain, its destiny is to be transformed from tenacious stalk to pliable flour; its destiny is to become food for others, to love the whole world. The process of becoming bread for others requires patience and demands that we grow and change.
So Corpus Christi is simple images. It is of tents and people and bread. There is something familiar, comforting and unencouraging about bread. There is something powerfully disarming about Jesus' way of loving and manner of revealing. He does not love without feeding; he does not desire remembrance without love. Freeing, nourishing, uncontrolling, he approaches wrapped in the familiarity of bread, so as to touch our hunger, so as to proclaim it is time to eat.