CorpChristiA23.    Deuteronomy 8:2-3, 14b-16a.  “Moses said to the people: ‘Remember how for forty years now the Lord, your God, has directed all your journey in the desert, so as to test you by affliction and find out whether or not it was your intention to keep his commandments.”   He fed them with a manna that was food unknown to them and proved not to be so agreeable to them but nonetheless filled their hunger.The Lord provides but does it in his own way.The Lord bends us to his will so to make us in his way because he alone knows what is best for us.

John 6:51-58.  John 1:14a says: “and the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.”  The Word is Jesus, that is, that God’s divine love was expressed or spoken among us in the human form of God made man.  The flesh of the sacrifices offered up in the temple in Jerusalem were offered up to God but also at times consumed as a sign of unity with the divine.  Jesus offers up his flesh, his body, as a sacrifice for us in atonement for our sins.  We consume his sacrificial body as a sign of our unity with the divine.  He is the food of our spiritual life without whom we are spiritually dead even though humanly alive.  He “is the bread that came down from heaven.”

1 Corinthians 10:16-17.  The Liturgy or Mass we celebrate takes part in the drinking of the blood of Christ and the eating of the body of Christ.  So what we are made of is the Person of Christ himself.  We are no longer just flesh and fluid of the earth but children born of the divine by the One who now is our life.