In today’s Gospel we heard the beginning of the Bread of Life Discourse. This is kind of the core of this Gospel in John 6. Last week we heard the feeding of five thousand, and this Gospel reading we just heard followed that, but we skipped a few verses in between. 

The verses that we skipped are Jesus walking on water. He came to the disciples walking on the water and they were frightened, but he joined them and then he went with them to the other side. And that’s why the people were confused and they said in today’s reading, “when did you get here?” 

They didn’t see Jesus go and they didn’t see Him get in the boat with them. They were confused by that, but then they start asking Him,

​​“What sign can you do, that we may see and believe in you? 
What can you do? 
Our ancestors ate manna in the desert, as it is written:
He gave them bread from heaven to eat.”

Essentially, what else can you do to prove you are the Messiah?

So Jesus has just done two amazing signs, the feeding of the 5000 and walking on water. He’s done so many signs in their presence to really show that He is God, and yet they still ask for more. It seems like maybe they want more bread here. Maybe they’re just thinking of their stomachs like in our first reading from Exodus. 

The same kind of thing was happening in that first reading with the people questioning Moses. Moses had shown so many signs through that time of leading them out of Egypt that God was working through him, but they still said, 

“Would that we had died at the LORD’s hand in the land of Egypt,
as we sat by our fleshpots and ate our fill of bread!”

They were just thinking of their stomachs at that time even though there were so many signs, yet God answered their plea and sent them the quail and the manna because that’s what people wanted. He loved them, and even though He had done all these other signs for them, they still doubted and they still wanted to go back to slavery, so God gave them what they wanted.

The people in the Gospel were kind of the same way. They still wanted more proof that this man, Jesus, was doing the will of God, and that He was truly the Messiah. 

If we are honest, we’re not so different from these people. The Israelites leaving Egypt, the people of Capernaum, because we’ve seen the signs in our own lives too. We’ve felt God’s presence. We understand from an intellectual perspective that He exists and that He loves us. We’ve felt that emotionally. 

We’ve seen those signs worked in our world, but we’re so slow to believe it fully to the point that we don’t also ask for things of the world, and put our focus on the things of the world, and even fall into sin like the world will often say is acceptable. That it’s okay. That everybody does it. 

But it’s not what God intended, it’s not what God wants for us. He wants something better. He wants us to live a life of holiness. He wants us to live in accord with His ways, to focus on the Bread of God which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world. He wants us to focus on that bread, not the pleasures of this world that we sometimes focus on and fall into, the temptations of this world. 

So Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life;
whoever comes to me will never hunger,
and whoever believes in me will never thirst.” 

He’s saying that He’s the one that provides true nourishment, something that’s different from the world. Next weekend we’ll get to the continuation of this Bread of Life discourse and Jesus will talk about this even more, but lest you need any more signs, one of the amazing signs we can witness in the world today is Eucharistic miracles. 

Eucharistic miracles have happened throughout the centuries and one that I’ve seen is in Santarem, Portugal. There was a lady who wanted to put a spell on her husband through a witch so the witch said, “ok, get me the Eucharist” and the lady agreed.

She went to Mass and received a host at communion and spit it out into her veil and then she left the church to take it to this witch to do the spell, but on her way the host started to bleed through her veil, so she got scared and hid it in a trunk in her bedroom.

Then in the middle of the night it started to glow from the trunk and her husband noticed. She confessed what she was going to do to her husband and they reconciled at that moment.  You can still see that Eucharistic miracle on display in Portugal.

A few more happened in Italy, in Turin, in Orvietto, but one really interesting one happened in Lanciano, Italy, sometime in the 8th century when a priest doubted the Real Presence when he was celebrating Mass. As he pronounced the words of consecration, bread and wine changed into flesh and blood.

In 1970 and 1971, director of the Laboratory of Pathological Anatomy in Arezzo, Italy, Dr. Edward Linoli found that the consecrated species in Lanciano were real cardiac tissue of type AB blood.  Did you catch that, cardiac tissue, heart tissue, Jesus is giving us his heart.

God still does these signs for us. Even though we probably don’t deserve them, He’ll still show these signs that He’s truly present in the Eucharist. I believe Pope Francis even approved one within the last 20 years when he was a bishop in Argentina. So God is still working those miracles!

Our responsibility is to keep our focus on Jesus. To keep Him at the center of our lives. To focus on Him and what He’s doing. We need to keep our focus on God and recognize all the times that He has shown us signs of His love and realize that He will continue to show us his love if we pay attention. He’ll always show us His love through signs in the world.

It starts here in the Eucharist. He comes to us every week. We tend to normalize it, we tend to think it’s not a big deal because it happens here all the time, but it’s an amazing miracle of how He feeds us and it shows us how much he truly loves us. We need the eyes to see how He truly loves us, that He is still present in our lives, showing us His love every day.