The Living Bread that gives us eternal life
By Fr. Roy Cimagala Chaplain
Center for Industrial Technology and Enterprise (CITE)
Talamban, Cebu City
Email: roycimagala@gmail.com
CHRIST said that of himself. “I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.” (Jn 6,51)
We need to savor these words of Christ if only to strengthen our belief that in the Holy Eucharist, in the Blessed Sacrament, in the Holy Communion, what we have is the real and living Christ and not just a symbol of him.
We need to level up our awareness of this reality which, of course, can be accessed only if we have faith that is nourished by real piety and devotion. We need to realize more deeply that what Christ offers in the Holy Eucharist is he himself who wants to be with us to the extent of wanting to enter into our own body, so he and us can be made one, as we should be.
Yes, when we receive him in Holy Communion, we actually would have the eternal life already with us, although still in a tentative, not yet in a definitive, state. This is a truth of our faith that should always be kept alive and vivid in our mind and heart so that we learn to live the life that is proper to us, that is, as God our Father and Creator wants it for us.
We need to be aware of the real dignity that we have, a dignity that God is giving us, a dignity that brings us to the level of God, no matter how unworthy we feel we are. We should just “force” ourselves to believe this truth since there is no way we can understand it if we simply rely on our natural reasoning.
We should just follow the example of Mary who, upon being told that she was going to be the mother of the son of God, asked how it can be. But when it was told to her that the Holy Spirit would overshadow her and she would conceive the son in her womb, she simply said, “Be it done according to your word,” even if she definitely did not quite know how that would happen. She just “forced” herself to believe out of faith.
It’s this kind of faith that we ought to have with respect to the real presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament or to Christ as the Bread of Life who wants to be taken by us, so we can have eternal life.
It is once again the time to enliven our faith, suspend for a while our human perception of things and allow Christ to tell us things, since he truly tells us nothing other than the ultimate truths that can go over and above what we, with our human and natural powers, can perceive, much less comprehend.
We have to realize that in spite of our best efforts to know and understand things, we know that we cannot apprehend everything, much less understand things fully and with finality. And yet we somehow can discern that the reality that governs us goes beyond what we can perceive and understand.
That is simply because of the spiritual character of our nature that would somehow enable us to have at least an inkling, an intimation of the spiritual, let alone, supernatural realities. These are realities that go beyond the sensible world. More than that, these are realities that are poised to make us enter into the supernatural realities since we know we have to contend with mysteries.