August 18, 2024
We can recall the homely smell of freshly baked bread, a good beginning to the day.
But bread has to be baked with huge heat for the flour. The wheat is crushed. A way of saying that in life there is the joy and the pain; and things can go wrong.
Life’s joys and sorrows are a mixture, and much of the best has some of the worst. The bitterest pain can be when the loved one dies, but you would never cancel out the love for the pain.
Death is like that – the worst of life leads to the best of eternity. We often find something great in the worst of times.
We get a good result in exams and you forget the pain of getting them.
The best and the worst in Jesus’ life are in the bread and wine of the Mass. The Eucharist recalls the love of God and the cruelty of the human race, all at the one time. Love given and received, but also torture and death at the hands of cruel people.
At the Eucharist, we hold up the world’s goodness and joys, along with its depressions and failures, and ask God to be with us in both. Bread symbolises what is good, wine the pain – this is a way of looking on the Eucharist.
Come and eat – come and offer. The best and the worst. The host we will be host we receive, and is the full and real Jesus, pain and all. It is truly the bread of life and the cup of salvation.
Imagine Jesus offering you some bread:
this ordinary food is the bread of life.
When we eat the bread and drink of the cup,
we proclaim your death, O Lord, until you come again.
