Vigils Reading

THE TRUE BREAD FROM HEAVEN

From Origen’s treatise On Prayer2

[Jesus] says, “My Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is He who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world”. The true bread is He who nourishes the true Man, made in the image of God; and the one who has been nourished by it will come to be in the likeness of Him who Created him. And what is more nourishing to the soul than the Word, or what is more honorable than the Wisdom of God to the mind that holds it? What more rightly corresponds to a rational nature than truth?

But if someone objects to this and says that He would not have taught us to ask for “daily bread” if He meant something else, let him hear that even in the Gospel according to John sometimes He speaks about it as though it were something other than Himself, and sometimes as though He were Himself “bread.” An example of the first is, “Moses gave you bread from heaven, not the true bread, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven”. An example of referring it to Himself is what he says to those who said to him, “Give us this bread always”: “I am the bread of life; he who comes to me shall not hunger, and he who believes in me shall never thirst”

Now all food is called “bread” in Scripture, as is clear from what is written about Moses, “For forty days I neither ate bread nor drank water”. How manifold and varying, then, is the nourishing Word, since not everyone can be nourished by the solid and vigorous food of divine teachings. That is why, when He wishes to offer food for an athlete, suitable for the more perfect, He says, “The bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh”, and a little further on, “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is true food”. This is the “True food”, the “flesh” of Christ, existing as the Word become flesh… And when we eat and drink Him, He also has dwelt in us.

Just as the corporeal bread distributed to the body of the person to be nourished goes into his being, so also “the living bread which came down from heaven” and is distributed to the mind and the soul gives a share in its own power to the person who provides himself food from it. And thus the bread we ask will be “daily” in the sense that it will be “for our being.”… It procures at one time health, vigor, and strength to the soul; and since the Word of God is immortal, it shares its own immortality with the one who eats it