Whoever comes to me will never be hungry; whoever believes in me will never thirst.
"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 in
his time was a prefiguration of what is happening now.
"Moses
represented God, the real leader of the spiritual Israelites,
while that bread typified myself, who have come down from heaven
and who am the true bread which gives genuine nourishment.”
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 even the body for
immortality. Through Christ resurrection from the dead and bodily
immortality have been gratuitously bestowed upon the human race.
"Jesus said to the people: 'I am the bread of life.
Whoever comes 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 had 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 death will never cut short.
Whoever believes in this bread will never hunger, will never
be famished for want of hearing the Word of God; not 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.
(Commentary
on John’s Gospel: PG 123, 1297.1301)
Theophylact (c. 1050-1109), theologian and language scholar, studied at
Constantinople. He taught rhetoric and was tutor to the imperial
heir presumptive: hence his treatise on the Education of Monarchs.
In 1078 he became archbishop of Ochrida in Bulgarian territory.
While diffusing Byzantine culture among the Slays, he allowed
the use of Slavonic texts. He wrote commentaries on several
books of the Old Testament and all of the New except Revelation.
He especially stressed practical morality, as did Chrysostom,
his model. |