We are all, wherever we live and whatever we believe, united in this need of God’s providence; our hunger and thirst, and turning to the earth to satisfy them, is an experience of human solidarity. Today’s feast take us further still. Jesus knows not only the everyday human needs of hunger and thirst, and how they can affect us, but He recognizes, too, that something similar can go on for us in our relationship with God. If missing food and drink makes us unable to live at our best, then missing God attacks our person on a profound level. Jesus not only recognizes this constant human hunger, but responds to it by opening His own Body and life to us, as the way into the heart of God. By receiving Christ’s Body and Blood in the Eucharist, we receive a food that transforms us into what it is itself – Christ’s own life, lived in joy and love at the Father’s heart.
Going to Holy Mass can all too easily become part of our routine, or an additional thing to fit into a busy schedule. Today’s feast invites us to stop for a while and reflect more deeply on this great mystery of the Eucharist, and renew our living faith in it. To be invited to Mass is to be invited to share Christ’s life of love with the Father; it is an invitation, too, to recognize that here we find ourselves one with God’s people, as St. Paul reminds the Corinthian Christians. Responding to this invitation has implications: about how well we prepare to celebrate the Eucharist; about whether we could fruitfully receive the sacrament more often; about how we live as witnesses to being “one body” in Christ. Above all, it challenges us to think how we can, ourselves, live “eucharistically”. Perhaps there will be moments in the coming week where each of us can be bread for others, broken and shared as Christ is himself.