Today’s readings: 1 Kings 19:4-8, Ephesians 4:30 - 5:2, John 6:41-51

Brazilian priest and theologian Clodovis Boff recalls a poignant scene that he witnessed in northeast Brazil in his early years of ministry.

A middle-aged woman went up to a priest after mass. “I received Holy Communion without first going to confession,” she told him. “How come, my daughter?” asked the priest. “I have not had anything to eat for the past three days,” the woman replied. “I arrived late for mass, and when I saw that you were distributing those little white hosts, I went to communion just out of hunger.”

Pondering this episode, Boff admits that he cannot but be reminded of Jesus’ words: “I am the bread of life.”

It is hard to appreciate the deeper meaning of the Eucharist, of Jesus as the Bread of Life, in a culture that does not have first-hand experience of hunger. As a result, the Eucharist can easily be understood not as that without which we cannot live, but as little more than a pious devotion one might as well do without.

Jesus’s threefold assertion of himself as the Bread of Life in today’s gospel comes in response to the murmuring of the cynical crowd. They have just been fed by the miraculous multiplication of loaves, yet their hearts are hardened, and they fail to see the need to be nourished by Jesus himself.

The murmuring crowd is not altogether foreign to our own attitude towards the Bread of Life. We too might tend to be cynical before the Eucharist. How else to explain the dwindling numbers of people who seek to be nourished by the Eucharist despite the Second Vatican Council’s insistence that it is the source and summit of all Christian life?

One such reason might be that scandalous incongruence between the Bread of Life consumed and that practised.

Just like Elijah in the first reading, who is utterly demoralised and longs to die because he is unjustly persecuted, we too recognise that this life has its cruel hardships and injustices. Yet the bread that was mysteriously provided to him serves as a sign of hope that spurs him to keep going against all odds.

In his book With the Silent Glimmer of God’s Spirit, Lambet Leijssen insists that “the Eucharist has been established as a sign for the peoples of the ‘notwithstanding-all-that’ of the[ir] situation”. So long as we live on this earth, pain and division will never cease to be our lot. But by celebrating the Eucharist, we participate in a silent protest, a “silent cry”, to use Dorothee Sölle’s words, that drives us to hope for a world transformed.

This is not a frivolous hope, but a hope rooted in God’s self-gift towards us out of love. The Eucharist of which we partake is another step towards fullness of union with God.

The Bread of Life will remain devoid of meaning unless it is integrated seamlessly in the rest of the fabric of society, unless we become Jesus’s real presence on this earth.

Another experience from Boff serves as a fitting conclusion. While working in poor state in northeast Brazil, he encountered a bishop who was visibly shaken. When asked what was the matter, the bishop replied: “I just saw a woman with three children and with a fourth one clinging to her neck. They all looked weak. I insisted she gave her child some milk. After a few moments of reluctance, she partly removed her shawl, and I could see that child was sucking at her wasted breast. But instead of milk, the mother was feeding her child with her blood, just like the pelican, the symbol of the Eucharist!”

“And the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.” (John 6:51)