9 May 2019
Thursday of the Third Week of Easter
“Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life.”
Jesus continues to preach to the crowd in our Gospel today, telling them not only that believing in Him is the key to eternal life, but even to knowing God. For who, truly, could teach us about God, except for God? Who could reveal His mystery except for Himself? Even the prophets who came before Jesus only shared what God Himself had revealed to them. And so that mankind could come to know God to the fullest extent possible, God revealed Himself in the most human of terms: He became human. For none has seen the Father “…except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father.”
All those who seek God in sincerity of heart will be led to Jesus; He is, as He says to St. Thomas and St. Philip, “…the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through,” Him (John 14:6). Certainly the Church teaches that one can, through reason alone, come to realize the existence of God, and there is no shortage of religious thought as to what that God is like. But only by coming to know Jesus will we come to know that God on a personal level, for no one among us, in spite of their wisdom, intelligence, or holiness, has seen God face-to-face. No one understands God as He understands Himself, and so Jesus reveals God to us: He is the self-revelation of God.
Thus Jesus is the Bread of Life, the true sustaining bread come down from Heaven, for “…in him we live and move and have our being,” (Acts 17:28) and it is from Him we not only have received life, but continue to be anchored in existence. Thus the more we come to know God, the closer we draw to Him, the more alive we become: we deepen our relationship with and reliance upon the very Source of our being. We turn more and more from sin, the source of death, and embrace rather the wellspring of eternal life that is God.
“One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes forth from the mouth of God,”(Matthew 4:4) and God has uttered but one Word—His Son—and that Word “…became flesh and dwelt among us,” (John 1:14). Today that same Word says “…the bread that I will give is my Flesh for the life of the world.” This is the Word of God which comes forth from the mouth of God: this is the bread by which we shall live if we truly desire to live forever. For it was by the Word of God that mankind first came into existence (Genesis 1:26-27), and it is by that same Word by which He has restored our life (John 1:4-5).