Readings (Year B):
Ex 16:2-4, 12-15
Ps 78:3-4, 23-24, 25, 54
Eph 4:17, 20-24
Jn 6:24-35
Reflection: The bread of eternal life
In August 1943, a Frenchwoman lay dying in an English hospital while across the channel in her native Paris, occupying German soldiers sat in cafes drinking coffee. At thirty-four, she was young but probably felt much older: ill and frail since childhood, she suffered from incapacitating migraines throughout her adult life. Intellectually and spiritually, she was precocious, a student of Homer, Plato, the Hindu Upanishads and Christian gospels. Since her death, Simone Weil’s witness has come to be admired by minds as diverse as Albert Camus and Pope St. Paul VI, and her thoughts on beauty and eating might enlighten today’s gospel, the beginning of Jesus’s bread of life discourse in John.
Having witnessed the multiplication of the loaves, the crowd follows Jesus to Capernaum, asking for another sign. It is unclear what was lacking in the previous miraculous multiplication of loaves and fishes, but they double-down, reminding Jesus in case he forgot that Moses gave their ancestors manna in the desert. Jesus’s response both consoles and provokes: “I am the bread of life; he who comes to me will never be hungry.” The crowd will soon leave him, though, apparently not hungry enough to eat what Jesus is offering.
Simone Weil was very concerned with the relationship between eating and beauty. She believed we consume beauty rather than allowing it to spring forth into our attention. She wrote, “We want to eat all the other objects of desire. The beautiful is that which we desire without wishing to eat it.” In this era of one-click purchasing and infinite scrolling, Weil’s observations have become only more relevant. She challenges us to distinguish the cosmetic types of beauty we are accustomed to chasing and consuming from the humbler, hidden beauties of the spirit.
The Eucharist, however, strikes at Weil’s distinctive notion that what is beautiful we should refrain from eating. Perhaps we weren’t used to thinking of the Eucharist itself in terms of beauty; no matter how bejeweled or sparkly the liturgical vessels and vestments are, we still perceive ordinary bread and wine. But in this moment Jesus asks us to open the eyes of our faith, to encounter God’s beautiful love incarnate again. But more than that, further than most of us otherwise would be comfortable going, he commands to literally eat of God’s love! By doing so we become mysteriously intimate with divine beauty.
Most of us want to live beautiful lives, but we live in a loud, many-hued world where it’s difficult to know true beauty from its counterfeits. My eyes chase whatever glitters; my mind continually seeks proofs for its self-importance. But the bread Jesus gives, reenacted in the Eucharist, questions this appetite of mine and pushes me towards humility and self-giving. This is the bread of beauty. This is the bread of eternal life.
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