For My Flesh is true food, and My Blood is true drink.” His listeners react with even greater disgust – and Jesus does not apologize. This should gross us out a bit…because that was certainly the reaction of the Jews! Immediately after this Gospel, they start complaining loudly to one another, “How can this man give us His Flesh to eat?” Jesus doesn’t back down – actually He doubles down and says, “Unless you eat (trogon) the Flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life within you. And it is this verb that Jesus uses in John 6 to describe what we must do! He says we must “trogon” His Flesh…we must literally put His Flesh between our teeth and consume Him! It is a visceral, graphic verb that is never used symbolically. But the other word, “trogon”, is much more graphic – it means to chew, to gnaw, to rip with one’s teeth. We sometimes use “eating” symbolically in English when we say, “Let me chew on that idea for a while” or we say, “I need to digest that book.” Clearly we are meaning that symbolically. Ephago simply means “to eat” and that can be used symbolically. There are two Greek words for eating: “ephago” and “trogon”. Could He be using “Bread of Life” symbolically? Not if we look at the original Greek. But Jesus says that He is many other things that He only means symbolically – He calls Himself the Good Shepherd, the Vine, the Light of the World. Jesus clearly says that He is the Bread of Life. How can we explain such a mystery, when our senses seem to tell us that it is just ordinary bread? Let’s take a deeper look at the Scriptures to see how we can understand the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.
It does indeed take faith to believe that this small round Host which we receive at Mass is truly the Body and Blood of the Lord. I have been there, and have seen the statue of Mary, her head still bowing towards the tabernacle, where Her Son Jesus resides.
The priest’s faith was restored – and this Eucharistic miracle has been preserved in that church. A statue of the Blessed Virgin in the church turned and bowed her head towards the altar, to recognize Who was present there. The priest then proceeded to begin Mass, and much to his surprise, as he held up the Eucharist after the Consecration, it began to bleed. The priest was unhappy about this inconvenience, and when the farmer entered the Church, the priest sarcastically remarked, “Why did you come all this way for a piece of bread?” He was about to lock the front door when he saw a single peasant farmer, trudging uphill in waist-deep snow, to the church. Sadly, this priest had lost his faith in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. The priest looked out into the blizzard, with waist-high drifts, and was glad – because it meant he could lock up the church without saying Mass. Around the year 1300 in a small mountain village of northwest Spain called O’Cebriero, it was snowing hard on a cold winter’s day.
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