1st Reading Deuteronomy 8:2–3, 14b–16a
Psalm 147:12–15, 19–20 (R. v.12)
R:// "Praise the Lord, Jerusalem"
2nd Reading 1 Corinthians 10:16–17
Gospel John 6:51–58
THE FOOD THAT BECOMES A HOME
Friends, Pax et Bonum!
Today is the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, Corpus Christi. Today is also the very first month of June. June, traditionally, is dedicated to devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
Let us focus on the readings. We might expect the readings on this day to be full of rubrics about bread and wine, explicit instructions about the Eucharist, and clear explanations of what is happening on the Altar. However, the readings give us a hunger test in the desert in the first reading, a one-sentence argument about a cup in the second reading, and a crowd that cannot stop arguing with Jesus in the Gospel passage. We shall dwell on these three details from each of the readings to identify what the Eucharist means to us.
The first detail, from the first reading is in Deuteronomy 8:3, thus, "He made you go hungry." Before we talk about what God gave Israel in the desert, we have to talk about what God did not give them and why. Note that the desert was a dry region and food was difficult to find. The text is explicit. God, deliberately, let His people go hungry.
The Hebrew verb used for "He made you go hungry" is wayyaʿănəkā, from the root ʿānâ. Interestingly, it is the same root used in the Torah for affliction, oppression, and the humbling of prisoners. Moses is invariably telling Israel that the hunger they felt in the desert, the gnawing, desperate, disorienting hunger, was a form of divine surgery. God was cutting away the illusion that you can sustain yourself.
When Israel left Egypt, they left the most agriculturally powerful civilization on earth. The Nile fed Egypt predictably, lavishly. Egypt was a bread-empire. To be Egyptian was to know where your next meal was coming from. Israel had spent 430 years in a land that never went hungry (Exod. 12:40). They had absorbed an Egyptian relationship with bread and saw bread as security, bread as self-sufficiency, bread as the foundation of civilization.
The desert dismantled all of that. God first removed their Egyptian bread-confidence entirely. Then He introduced manna, a word whose very etymology in Hebrew is a question: mān hûʾ, meaning "What is it?" (Exod. 16:15). This was a food that could not be stored, could not be predicted, could not be earned, and had no parallel in any human food. It appeared every morning and could not be hoarded overnight or it rotted. Manna was structured dependence. It is bread designed to keep you permanently aware that it comes from outside yourself.
What is Moses doing in Deuteronomy 8? He is, forty years later, interpreting that experience for the next generation. The hunger was the lesson. Not the manna. The hunger came first precisely so that when manna arrived, Israel would know that life does not originate in what you can grow, store, control, or purchase. Life comes from the mouth of God.
The Eucharist, then, is not God's answer to a problem you already know you have. It is God's answer to a hunger He has been quietly cultivating in you, the hunger that all the bread of this world has never quite satisfied. Corpus Christi helps us to discover that you were actually hungry for all along.
Let us attend to the second detail in the second reading (2 Corinthians 10: 16-17). This reading is only two verses long, very powerful. In that short passage, Paul uses the Greek word koinōnia. Thus, "the cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a PARTICIPATION in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a PARTICIPATION in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread" (1 Cor. 10:16–17).
Many translations render koinōnia as "sharing" or "communion." Both are fine as far as they go. But neither carries the full weight of what Paul means. In first-century Greek, koinōnia described co-ownership, active participation in a common enterprise, a binding partnership. It was a legal and commercial term before it was a theological one. When business partners entered koinōnia, they did not only share a feeling or a table. They shared liability, profit, risk, and identity. They were, in a legally binding sense, in each other's affairs.
Paul's choice of this word sees him making a very precise claim that when you take this cup, you are not symbolically remembering Christ's blood. You are entering into a koinōnia with it, a binding, co-participatory, mutually-implicating union. You become, in some real sense, a co-stakeholder in the blood of Christ.
Pay attention to what Paul does in verse 17. He makes an argument that seems, at first glance, to be about community relations. Thus, "Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body." People often read this as a pleasant add-on about unity. But Paul is making a logical argument. The word translated "because" is the Greek hoti. The word is a causal connective. The oneness of the community is caused by the oneness of the bread. It is not the other way around. The Church does not produce unity and then express it in Eucharist. The Eucharist produces the unity and we receive it. There is also something historically stunning here. The Corinthian community was deeply fractured. Earlier in this very letter, Paul rebukes them for dividing along social lines at the Lord's Supper where the wealthy eat well while the poor went hungry (1 Cor. 11:21). In that context, Paul's argument in chapter 10 is a rebuke that you cannot receive the one bread and remain many bodies. You cannot enter koinōnia with Christ's Body and simultaneously fracture His Body in the pew beside you. It is a contradiction in terms.
The Eucharist does not bless an already-united community. It creates the unity. Every time the bread is broken, Paul says, a claim is staked on every person in that room. You cannot be in koinōnia with the Body and walk out of the church unchanged in how you treat the body sitting next to you.
Let us now walk into the Gospel passage from John 6: 51-58. There is a moment in John 6 that we tend to rush past, because what happens before it is so dramatic. Jesus has said, "My flesh is true food and my blood is true drink." The crowd erupts, saying, "How can this man give us his flesh to eat?" (Jn. 6:52). The Greek word used for their response is emachonto, which means they were fighting, arguing, in serious dispute. It is the same word used elsewhere for battle and quarrel.
In this charged atmosphere, with people fighting and preparing to leave, there is one move available to Jesus that would have resolved everything. This will be a metaphorical clarification. Any teacher in that situation could simply say "Friends, I am speaking symbolically. Of course I do not mean literal flesh." The crowd would have calmed. The scandal would have dissolved. People would have stayed. Jesus does not do this. He intensifies.
In verse 51 and throughout the discourse, Jesus uses the word phagēin for "eat". It is actually a standard Greek verb for eating. But beginning in verse 54, when the argument reaches its peak, John's Gospel switches to a different word, trōgōn. This word means to gnaw, to munch, to chew. This is a kind of eating that is unmistakably physical, biological, animal. It is the word you would use for a horse eating hay or an animal working through bone.
John's Gospel chooses the most physically graphic eating-word in the Greek language at the precise moment when people are most scandalized by the physical claims Jesus is making. Jesus is not retreating from the scandal.
There is also a covenantal dimension here that connects directly to our First Reading. The manna Israel received in the desert was extraordinary, but it perished. Manna could not sustain forever. It could not enter the body and remain. But in John 6:56, Jesus says something different about the bread He gives. Thus, "Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him." The Greek word for "remains" is menei, from menō which is to abide, to dwell, to take up permanent residence. This is not food that passes through. This is food that stays permanently.
The manna in the desert was God's provision for a journey. It was never meant to be the destination. But what Jesus offers in John 6 is not provision for a journey. It is the destination itself. It is God taking up permanent residence inside you. That is what menō means. Not a visit. Not a memory. A dwelling.
Pax et Bonum
Comments
Post a Comment