Mystical Word  |  Weekly Reflection
Mystical Word is a weekly reflection on the Sunday Gospel reading by L.J. Milone, Director of Faith Formation, Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle

Jesus the Bread of Life gives us the Knowledge of Divine Oneness

Gospel reading for August 11, 19th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Jesus proclaims, “I AM the bread of life.” Jesuit and biblical scholar Felix Just observes, “JESUS HIMSELF says ‘I Am’ (Greek eimi) forty–five times in John's Gospel (including when other characters quote Jesus' words). Twenty–four of these are emphatic, explicitly including the pronoun ‘I’…which would not be necessary in Greek grammar. These emphatic references can also be sub-divided into ‘Absolute’ or ‘Predicate’ statements.” The I AM statements in the Gospel of John are of two kinds: absolute, simply the two words “I AM,” and predicates such as “I am the bread of life,” “I am the light of the world, or “I am the resurrection and the life.”

I AM is the divine name. We learn the divine name from the story of Israel’s liberation from Egypt. In the book of Exodus, Moses meets God in the burning bush. God tells Moses that God will use him to free Israel from Egypt.  “‘But,’ said Moses to God, ‘if I go to the Israelites and say to them, “The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,” and they ask me, “What is his name?” what do I tell them?’ God replied to Moses: ‘I AM WHO I AM.’ Then he added: ‘This is what you will tell the Israelites: I AM has sent me to you’” (Exodus 3:13-14).

We should know that “I AM WHO I AM” is not a name. The divine name is a refusal to be named. God does not give a proper name like Joseph or Rachel. God cannot be named because God transcends all names, that is, all thoughts and therefore all theologies. Thus, the divine name means incomprehensible mystery. God is wildly BEYOND all creation, all things.

Again, Jesus identifies himself with this wildly mysterious God by referring to himself as the I AM both absolutely – without any qualifications – and with predicates such as “bread of life.” Jesus says, “I AM the bread of life.” This is the crux of the Bread of Life discourse, John 6:22-59. Jesus is saying he embodies the mystery of God and that he communicates this divine mystery to whomever will accept him in faith.

As the bread of life, the bread from heaven, Jesus transmits the knowledge of divine oneness. Identifying with the mystery of God by using the divine name, Jesus asserts his knowledge of the divine. He then tells us he will give us this knowledge as food, as the very sustenance of our lives. We need to know God to live. To know God is to be fully alive, eternally alive.

The I AM is the divine knowing, or, as the monk C.F. Kelley says, “‘unrestricted knowledge itself’ which, being unconditioned and beyond distinction, transcends all manifest acts of intellection, just as it transcends all possible modes of experience.” Jesus the bread of life communicates this divine knowledge, which is not the cumulation of data and facts about God but the Infinite Knowing of the God beyond God. Transcending all thinking and being, divine knowledge is “the intrinsic reality of God in his Godhead” (Kelley).

Again, Jesus gives us this divine knowledge as bread and wine, his Body and Blood. We receive this knowledge in contemplative silence and in the Eucharist, above all when we trust in God beyond our minds. We have to let go of our knowing to enjoy the divine knowledge, the I AM, within us or offered to us as Jesus’ Body and Blood. We must have faith. And then, according to the monk Bruno Barnhart, “this unitive knowledge which is one with Jesus will continue to pound, like a sea of boundless light, upon the confines and defenses of the human mind, until it finally breaks itself upon this wall and saturates the thirsty earth; from then on it gleams everywhere, within and without the ramparts.”

When we open ourselves beyond the mind by faith and by the embodied practice of eating and drinking Jesus’ Body and drinking his Blood, we will know God within us and one with us. The wondrous medieval mystic Meister Eckhart rejoices over this: “Never has a person longed after anything so intensely as God longs to bring a person to the point of knowing him. God is always ready but we are very unready. God is near to us but we are very far from him. God is within us but we are outside. God is at home in us but we are abroad.”