The Bread of Life
“For the Souls in Purgatory – Eternal rest grant unto them O Lord”
John 6:35
Jesus said to them, ‘I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst.’
Grace Prayed For
Lord, convert our appetites — turn us from the bread that perishes toward the Bread of Life, that our hungers might finally find their true food.
Reflection
We are a chronically hungry species.
Not just for food, though that too. We are hungry for meaning, for connection, for assurance that our lives matter, for love that doesn’t disappoint, for beauty that lasts, for a self we can respect. We feed these hungers with remarkable creativity and remarkable inefficiency — with work and entertainment, with achievement and acquisition, with relationships and substances and screens. And yet the hunger returns. It always returns.
Jesus makes an astonishing claim in the middle of a crowd that is still thinking about bread rolls: I am the bread of life. The ‘I am’ echoes the divine name — the same words God spoke to Moses from the burning bush. Jesus is not offering a product that satisfies hunger. He is offering himself as the satisfaction.
This is either one of the most beautiful promises in history or one of the strangest. We are invited, in this Easter season, to take it seriously as a real possibility — that in Jesus, in knowing him and following him and receiving him, something fundamental in the human appetite can be met in a way nothing else quite reaches.
The mystics testify to this. Augustine’s ‘Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee’ is not pious poetry; it is the report of a lived experiment. The hunger that drove him from pleasure to philosophy to Manichaeism to Christianity was, he discovered, a hunger that could only be met by the God who had made him for precisely this.
For your group today: Name a hunger you carry that ordinary things have not satisfied. Sit with that hunger not with anxiety, but with curiosity. What is it, at its deepest, really asking for?
Bread is already on the table.
When Time Allows Reflect on the Posts in Library and Musings
Sharing
Jesus last words on Earth were to his disciples, can be found in Matthew Chap 28 when Jesus told his disciples, “Then Jesus approached and said to them, “All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age.”
Jesus calls all of us to share in his redemptive mission here on Earth. I would ask you to share this Scripture reflection with your family, your friends and your acquaintances, and then share it with a couple of individuals that you may may not be comfortable sharing with, keeping in mind always the words of Jesus, And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age
Author was assisted by AI in the drafting of this Post