Hungry?

In today’s first reading from Deuteronomy 8, Moses tells the people this about the Lord:

He therefore let you be afflicted with hunger,
and then fed you with manna,
a food unknown to you and your fathers,
in order to show you
that not by bread alone does man live,
but by every word
that comes forth from the mouth of the LORD.

This verse finds its perfect fulfillment in Christ, the eternal Word of God, who in today’s Gospel (Jn. 6:51-58) identifies himself as “the living bread which came down from heaven….”

This is that bread which came down from heaven:
not as your fathers did eat manna, and are dead:
he that eateth of this bread shall live for ever.

People can sometimes be blasé about Holy Communion. We may forget how unlooked-for and precious a gift it is: “a food unknown to you and your fathers.”

We may also have numbed ourselves to the spiritual hunger that only Christ can satisfy.

It would be good for us to take this special opportunity, this Solemnity of the Body and the Blood of Christ during this Year of the Eucharist, to be more aware of the deepest hunger with which we are afflicted and of the precious gift that the Lord gives us in his very flesh and blood.

Pange, lingua, gloriosi
Corporis mysterium
Sanguinisque pretiosi...