Our Daily Bread

Dear Friends,

Jesus, I think, was very clever.

He used the ordinary things of life in such extraordinary ways that you and I can never quite use them in ordinary ways again.

Take bread for example. “Give us this day our daily bread,” Jesus teaches us to pray (Matthew 6.11). Our daily bread is the encouraging word, the news that warring parties in distant lands have laid down their arms, the Eucharist in which we partake, the insight we come to, the touch of love. Our daily bread.

Jesus is himself our daily bread. “I am the bread of life,” he tells us (Jn.6.34-35). “No one who comes to me will ever be hungry.” No one. No one will ever be hungry.

I have a feeling that Jesus threw us a curve with that one. We tend to want to take him literally – but we know better. Hunger exists. Hunger has many faces. Sometimes when we are restless or feel lonely, misguided or very small, we are hungry for something we don’t have in a literal sense. But if we believe that Jesus spoke the truth, then we are indeed being fed all along by our God, but don’t necessarily recognize it. The Bread of Life will feed us. We are sustained by the Bread of Life.

Isaiah’s words are the same as Christ’s promise to us: “The Lord will give you the bread you need” (Isaiah 30.20). To you, to me, to everyone without exception.

Jesus gives himself to us at Eucharist. His Body and Blood take over the perceived bread and wine and He becomes food and drink to nourish us daily and through life. That is what we celebrate on this feast of Corpus Christi – the feast of the Body and Blood of Christ. Moreover, as Pope Leo the Great put it in the fifth century, “Our sharing in the Body and Blood of Christ has no other purpose than to transform us into that which we receive.”  Today, we celebrate the feast of our being transformed into Christ if we allow it and welcome it.

We could spend time over the question, “How can this be?” More to the point, let us be glad today that our God is a creative God, who does the unthinkable, the unimaginable so that we may be nourished for the journey and that our own imaginations may lead us to new ways of nourishing others in the Name of God.

“Taste and see the Goodness of the Lord,” we pray.

~Sister Joan Sobala