You Are What You Eat

The human race is obsessed with food.

From our earliest existence, it’s been our most fundamental need and focus.

As a species and as individuals.

Without it, we wouldn’t live long enough to reach any other basic needs.

So it’s not surprising that much of our art and culture and language revolve around food.

The earliest known records from our ancient ancestors are about food.

The hunt scenes, painted on cave walls.

Those early ancestors spent most of their day looking for food.

And when they couldn’t find it—whole communities starved to death.

Some still do today.

But most of us, today, take our food for granted.

In our greatly blessed society, it’s plentiful, it’s readily available.

We may not always get our favorite dishes.

But few of us have ever faced any real danger of starvation.

Even with our abundance,

Our modern American language still reflects our age-old, universal preoccupation.

Food-and-eating terminology serves as the basis for hundreds of common expressions

Expressions that have no literal connection with physical food.

They’re figures of speech, metaphors.

They often deal with our taking something into ourselves.

Internalizing something intellectually or emotionally rather than physically.

We devour great books; we have an appetite for adventure.

We hunger for knowledge; we thirst for freedom.

When we have an easy decision to make or problem to solve, it’s a piece of cake.

If it’s a difficult one, we can chew on that for a while.

After we ruminate a bit we might be able to digest it.

Those Jews of 2000 years ago had fewer food sources.

And they faced a much higher risk of starvation than we do today.

They had to be even more focused on food than we are.

So, it’s not surprising that they were already accustomed to food and eating metaphors.

Like that in today’s Old Testament reading, where wisdom is offered as food and drink.

But then we come to Jesus and his claim that he is the living bread.

And that they must eat his flesh and drink his blood.

His listeners could have easily assumed a purely figurative meaning.

Yet we’re told they didn’t; they quarreled among themselves.

They seemed to sense that he meant something more.

Jesus evidently intended his words to be a bit shocking, a bit graphic.

The word he chose to use for “eat” wasn’t a gentler word like “take in” or “consume”.

But a much harsher word like “crunch” or “gnaw”.

Even with the gentler terms, the flesh-eating blood-drinking language is a bit off-putting.

Even as a metaphor, it seems too intimate, almost cannibalistic, a little creepy.

But when the crowd balked at his words, Jesus didn’t back off.

He got even more insistent and more graphic.

My flesh is true food, my blood is true drink.

The crowd may have found Jesus’ graphic language less shocking than we would today.

They had more hands-on dealings with flesh and blood than we do.

They were probably more put off by his audacity.

Who does this guy think he is!

We know he’s the son of Mary and Joseph.

How can he claim he’s bread come down from heaven!

That’s what many found to be just too hard to swallow.

But, of course, Jesus meant what he said.

And he meant it on at least three different levels.

First, as a metaphor describing how we should receive and accept him.

How we should internalize his message, take in his spirit, make it part of ourselves.

His words were also a metaphor describing his fate.

Maybe that's why he was thinking in terms of crunch and gnaw.

He wasn’t going to be literally devoured.

But he was going to be literally sacrificed.

His body would soon be wracked by the scourging and the crucifixion.

His blood would be spilled out.

And at the final level, his words were not a metaphor at all.

But the literal truth.

His flesh, that human body, held the spirit of God himself.

The Son of God himself.

And he would, literally, give us his body and blood to eat and drink.

The crowd couldn’t begin to image how that would be possible.

They had to assume Jesus was going too far with some over-the-top metaphor.

They had to ask How can this man give us his flesh to eat?
Jesus didn’t answer them directly, but we now know the answer.

He gives his body and blood not in some shocking, cannibalistic, repulsive form.

But through a miraculous transformation.

A miracle using most palatable and universal foods—bread and wine.

A miracle that leaves the appearance and taste of that bread and wine.

But transforms their actual substance into his body and blood.

We now know that we can go even beyond internalizing Jesus’ Spirit and his teachings.

We can internalize Jesus himself—not figuratively, but literally and physically.

And just as that bread and wine is miraculously transformed,

We too will be transformed.

Because, as we all know,

You are what you eat.

The Feast of Corpus Christi

Jn 6: 51-58          Read this Scripture @usccb.org