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Vigils Reading – 18th Sunday
August 4
THE BREAD OF LIFE
From a commentary by Theophylact of Ohrid1
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Our ancestors ate manna in the desert, as it is written, “He gave them
bread from heaven to eat.” Wishing to persuade Christ to perform the kind of
miracle that would provide them with bodily nourishment, the people in their
insatiable greed called to mind the manna. What was the reply of Our Lord
Jesus, the infinite wisdom of God? It was not Moses who gave you bread. In
other words, “Moses did not give you the true bread. On the contrary everything
that happened at that time was a prefiguring of what is happening now…”
Our Lord refers to himself as the true bread not because the manna was
something illusory, but because it was only a type and a shadow, and not the
reality it signified.
This bread, being the Son of the living Father, is life by its very nature,
and accordingly gives life to all. Just as earthly bread sustains the frail substance
of the flesh and prevents it from falling into decay, so Christ quickens the soul
through the power of the Spirit, and also preserves the body for immortality.
Through Christ, resurrection from the dead and bodily immortality have been
graciously bestowed upon the human race.
Jesus said to the people: “I am the Bread of Life. Whoever come to me
shall never hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.” He did not
say the bread of bodily nourishment, but the bread of life. For when everything
has been reduced to a condition of spiritual death, the Lord gave us life through
himself, who is bread because, as we believe, the leaven in the dough of our
humanity was baked through and through by the fire of his divinity. He is the
bread not of this ordinary life, but of a very different kind of life which death3
will never cut short.
Whoever believes in this bread, will never hunger, will never be famished
for want of hearing the Word of God, nor will such a person be parched by
spiritual thirst through lack of the waters of baptism and the consecration
imparted by the Spirit. The unbaptized, deprived of the refreshment afforded
by the sacred water, suffer thirst and great aridity. The baptized on the other
hand, being possessed of the Spirit, enjoy its continual consolation.