This is the bread which cometh down from heaven: that if any man eat of it, he may not die.
ουτος εστιν ο αρτος ο εκ του ουρανου καταβαινων ινα τις εξ αυτου φαγη και μη αποθανη
14 Church Fathers comment on this verse
Then He presents the most convincing proof that they were counted worthy of an incomparably greater gift than their fathers. He alludes to those wondrous men who lived in the time of Moses. Therefore, after saying that those who ate the manna died, He added: “He who eats this bread will live forever” (v. 51).
This bread, however, is not like that, but abides forever. Thus, if they wish, they will receive goods far greater than their fathers received. How is what is given by Christ not greater? For although everyone will taste death, he nevertheless lives in the hope of the resurrection.
In these words one may very clearly see what was foretold by the prophet Isaiah: "I became manifest to those who did not seek Me, and I was found by those who did not ask for Me.
I said, 'Here I am,' to a people who did not call upon My name. All day long I stretched out My hands to a disobedient and contradicting people" (Is 65:1-2).
Removing the whole outward covering from this discourse, and taking away all its clothing, so to speak, He now manifests Himself openly to the Israelites.
He says, "I am the bread of life," so that they may know what they must do if they desire to rise above corruption.
If they desire to be freed from death itself, which struck them because of transgression, they must come to receive the One who has power to give life.
They must receive Him who destroys corruption and abolishes death. For all this truly belongs and is proper to Life by nature.
Because they appealed to the manna given to their fathers in the wilderness from heaven, they did not accept the bread truly come down from heaven, that is, Christ.
Therefore He necessarily compares the type with the truth. Thus they might see that manna is not the heavenly bread.
Rather, the heavenly bread is the One whom the experience of reality shows to be such by nature.
Your fathers and ancestors, He says, ate the manna and paid the debt of bodily nature.
Through it they obtained the support of temporary life. By it they gave the body its daily nourishment, and they scarcely managed not to die immediately.
The clearest proof that it was not the truly heavenly bread, He says, is that those who ate it by no means attained immortality through it.
Likewise, the sign that the Son is, in the proper and true sense, the bread of life is this.
Those who have once tasted of Him, and through participation have in some way been united with Him, are shown to be above even the bonds of death.
We have already said much about this: manna is taken as an image or shadow of Christ and pointed to the bread of life. Yet it was not itself this bread of life.
The Psalmist seems to confirm this when he cries out in the Spirit, "He gave them bread from heaven; man ate the bread of angels" (Ps 77:24-25).
Perhaps these words may seem to have been spoken by the Spirit-bearing one about the Israelites. In reality this is not so. Rather, the meaning of the saying concerns us.
Indeed, is it not the height of absurdity and folly to think that the holy Angels in heaven, though they have received a bodiless nature, eat coarse food?
Do they need help to sustain life, like that required by this earthly body? I think nothing prevents us from thinking that, since they are spirits, they may need such food.
Clearly, it would be spiritual and noetic food. Why then is the bread of angels said to have been given to the ancestors of the Jews, if the prophet speaks the truth when he cries this out?
It is clear that manna was typological, in the image of Christ. He embraces and sustains all things in being, nourishes the Angels, and gives life to those on earth.
Therefore the prophet calls what was indicated in shadows by the name of the truth.
By the impossibility of holy Angels eating earthly food, he draws his hearers, even against their will, away from the crude thought, that is, from manna.
He leads them up to the spiritual understanding, that is, to Christ Himself, who is the bread even of the holy Angels themselves.
Thus, those who ate manna, He says, died. Plainly, they received from it no participation in any life.
It was not truly life-giving, but only a remedy against bodily hunger. It had the significance of a type of the truth.
But those who receive into themselves the bread of life will have immortality as their reward.
Completely freed from corruption and all its evils, they will be raised to the eternal and endless continuance of life according to Christ.
These considerations of ours are not hindered by the fact that those who enter into communion with Christ must still taste death according to the debt of nature.
Although they undergo what belongs to human nature by falling under this common end, nevertheless, as Paul says, they "live to God" (Rom 6:10-14, 8; cf. Gal 2:17-21).
They do so as those who are destined to live forever.
For as regards this visible bodily death, my brothers, do we who eat the heavenly bread that comes down from heaven not die by it? As they are dead, so we also must die. This is what I said, concerning the visible and fleshly death of this body. But as regards that death with which the Lord frightens us, by which their fathers died, Moses also ate manna. Aaron ate manna, and Phinehas ate manna. Many ate there who pleased the Lord, and they did not die. Why? Because they grasped the visible food spiritually, hungered for it spiritually, and tasted it spiritually, so as to be spiritually filled. For we too now receive visible food. But the Mystery is one thing, and the dignity of the Mystery is another. How many receive food from the altar and die, and die while receiving it?
Why does the apostle say: “He eats and drinks judgment to himself” (1 Cor 11:29)? Therefore see, brothers: eat the heavenly bread spiritually, and bring innocence to the altar. Though there are daily sins, they are not mortal. Before you approach the altar, consider what you say: “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors” (Mt 6:12). You forgive, and you are forgiven. Approach without doubt. It is bread, not poison. “This is the bread which comes down from heaven, that one may eat of it and not die.” “This is the bread which comes down from heaven” (cf. Jn 6:50). The manna symbolized this bread. The altar of God symbolized this bread. These were mysteries. In their signs they were different, but in what they symbolized they were the same. Hear the apostle: “I do not want you to be ignorant, brethren, that our fathers were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea; and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea; and all ate the same spiritual food” (1 Cor 10:1-3). The same spiritual food, but bodily food that was different. For they ate manna, and we eat something else. Yet spiritually they ate the same as we do. They are our fathers, not the fathers of those Jews. We are like them; they are not like them. And he adds: “and all drank the same spiritual drink” (1 Cor 10:4). They drank one thing and we another, but only in visible form. In spiritual power, both drinks symbolized the same thing. For how did they drink the same? “They drank,” he says, “from the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ” (1 Cor 10:4). Hence the bread, hence the drink. The rock was Christ in sign, and the true Christ in the Word and in the flesh. And how did they drink? The rock was struck twice with the rod (cf. Num 20:11). The two blows prefigured the two wooden beams of the cross. “The bread which comes down from heaven is such that whoever eats of it will not die.” But this concerns the power of the Mystery, not the visible appearance of the Mystery. It concerns the one who eats inwardly, not outwardly; the one who eats in the heart, not the one who chews with the teeth.
And there still remained the work that abolished that Passover and was to become the Passover for the Gentiles, a source of life until the end. Our Lord Jesus took bread in His hands (Mt 26:26), at first ordinary bread. He blessed it, signed it with the sign of the cross, and sanctified it in the name of the Father and in the name of the Spirit. He broke it and distributed it in pieces to the disciples with all graciousness. He called the bread His living body, filling it with Himself and with His Spirit. He stretched out His hand and distributed the bread that His right hand had sanctified: “Take, eat (Mt 26:26) this bread, which My word has sanctified. Do not consider what I have given you to be bread. Eat it, without despising the crumbs. The bread that I have sanctified is My body.
Even its smallest crumb sanctifies thousands upon thousands, and it is able to give life to all who eat it. Take, eat with faith, not doubting that this is My body. Whoever eats it with faith eats in it fire and the Spirit (Mt 3:11). But for the one who eats with doubt, it is simply bread. Yet the one who believes and eats the bread sanctified in My name, if he is pure, will remain in purity. If he is sinful, he will be forgiven. But whoever rejects it or despises it should know with certainty that he insults the Son, who called the bread His body and truly made it so. Receive it and eat it, all of you. Eat in the Holy Spirit, for this is truly My body, and whoever eats it will live forever. This is the heavenly bread that came down from above to earth. This is the bread that the Israelites ate in the wilderness and did not value. The manna that came down to them and that they gathered was a type of this spiritual bread that you have now obtained. Receive and eat, all of you. In this bread you eat My body. It is the true source of forgiveness.”
I was not speaking earlier of temporal life, nor of death from this life. Even if someone dies, nevertheless, if he receives My bread, he will live forever. For he receives who examines himself (1 Cor 11:28). He who receives will not die the death of sinners, for this bread is the remission of sins.
He comes down from heaven in order to nourish and to grant immortality. Then He explains His words and teaches what this bread is of which He speaks.
After this the Lord again begins to unfold that, since only through Him can one enter into communion with the Father and into participation in eternal life, it follows that He is the bread of eternal life. Those who ate manna, He said, all died. But “I am the living bread,” giving eternal life. Therefore the one who eats this bread will live forever. Until now, under the name of bread the Lord meant His teaching, which grants eternal life to the believer. He had explained this earlier in Jerusalem: “He who hears My word and believes Him who sent Me has eternal life” (Jn 5:24).
Now He adds something special, more suited to the idea of heavenly bread: “And the bread which I shall give is My flesh, which I shall give for the life of the world.” This is the bread that He Himself is preparing to give to believers. It is the bread offered by Him, certainly to the Father, for the life of the whole world. Of the former bread He had said: “My Father gives you the true bread” (v. 32). Here, on the one hand, He presents His flesh, His humanity, offered as a redeeming sacrifice for the world. On the other hand, He presents it as food that gives believers eternal life. It is like the showbread in the tabernacle and temple, which was offered as a sacrifice to God and then given as food to the priests.
In the preceding discourse, Jesus Christ called Himself the true bread of God that came down from heaven. This offended the Jews. They were offended not because Jesus Christ taught about Himself as the Messiah, but because He ascribed to Himself a heavenly origin. They grounded their unbelief in this self-witness of Christ by saying that they knew His earthly origin from the family of Joseph of Nazareth. Yet this unbelief was not the fruit of misunderstanding. The miracles of Jesus Christ sufficiently testified to the extraordinary character of His person. Jesus Christ saw the hardness of their hearts and now shows why they so stubbornly do not believe in Him.
It is because, He says, no one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him, as was foretold already in the Old Testament. Therefore, because of the hardness and unworthiness of the Jews who heard Jesus Christ, the gracious action of the Father, calling to salvation, had not yet touched their hearts. Without it, man, blinded by sin, cannot see the light of truth. But lest anyone misunderstand Isaiah’s prophecy (54:13) about direct teaching from God, Jesus Christ says that this prophecy must not be understood as though any man could ever see God and converse directly with Him. Nor can man know the essence of God through immediate vision and contemplation. God acts invisibly upon men by His grace. Immediate vision of the divine essence belongs only to His Son. Therefore, only through the Son can men receive the full light of the knowledge of God needed for salvation, and through it eternal life (17:3). Therefore: “Amen, amen, I say to you, he who believes in Me has eternal life.”
But the Savior answered the murmurers, as always, by proclaiming with greater power, fullness, and clarity the very truth they rejected. Thus He acted with Nicodemus. Thus He taught the Samaritan woman. Thus He answered the temple elders who called Him to account for breaking the Sabbath. Yet the timid rabbi and the sinful woman had enough faith and sincerity to enter more deeply into His words. They humbly sought their meaning and so came near to the truth. These hearers were different. Providence had granted them instruction from the lips of the Son of God Himself, who revealed to them the great mystery of redemption. Yet they rejected this great benefaction.
Then the Savior, with irresistible directness and clarity, revealed to them that He is the source of eternal life sent down from heaven. “I am the living bread which came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. The bread which I shall give is My flesh, which I shall give for the life of the world.” By these words, on the one hand, He pointed to the coming great work of redeeming sinful mankind through the offering of the flesh of the Son of Man for the life of the world. On the other hand, He pre-established the Mystery of Communion, which would serve as the means by which later generations of the faithful would partake of Christ’s redeeming work.
“Your fathers ate manna”: the Jews themselves had earlier pointed to the miraculous manna, wishing to see a similar miracle from Jesus (Jn 6:31). The Lord points to this and explains that the bread of which He speaks is more wondrous than manna and surpasses it in its effect upon man. This is shown by the fact that those who ate manna in the wilderness died, whereas the one who eats this bread will not die. Death here means both bodily and spiritual death, but in different applications. Those who ate manna in the wilderness all died bodily. Spiritually, those died who saw in this food only bodily nourishment and did not abide in faith. Those who partake of the bread of Christ will die bodily. Yet they will live spiritually in communion with God through faith.
Then they will rise on the last day (Jn 6:39-40, 44) and live forever a blessed life in union with God. But those who do not have such communion with God through the eating of this bread, even after rising, will remain in spiritual death and alienation from God, as condemned (Jn 5:29). They ate manna in the wilderness and died, because manna was not living bread. The one who eats the bread of Christ will not die, because this bread is living.
After this explanation of the Pharisees’ perplexity, the Lord again bears witness: “I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate manna in the wilderness and died. The bread that comes down from heaven is such that whoever eats of it will not die” (vv. 48-50). Up to this point, in His conversation with the Jews about the bread of life, Jesus Christ had let them understand by “bread” Himself as the divine Teacher of Truth, and His teaching that leads men to God and eternal life. But from verse 51, the Lord Jesus Christ clearly unfolds the teaching on the Mystery of Holy Communion: “I am the living bread which came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever.
The bread which I shall give is My flesh, which I shall give for the life of the world.” The connection of verse 51 with the preceding verses is as follows. Jesus Christ speaks, as it were, in this way: “My words offend you. You do not want to believe that I, who have revealed to you the will of My Father, feed those who hunger and thirst for the righteousness of God. Therefore I call Myself the bread that came down from heaven. What then will you say when I reveal to you the greatest mystery, which you cannot now even understand? Only those who believe in Me will understand it, and even they will understand it not now, but later. What will you think if I tell you that I have given My Body for the salvation of the world? And what if I tell you that this Body of Mine will be the true bread that gives eternal life?”
Verses 47-50. As before He told the Samaritan woman that earthly water does not quench thirst, but the spiritual water He gives quenches the soul’s thirst (Jn 4:13-14), so now He compares earthly manna (Ex 16:13) with heavenly manna. He says that earthly manna did not impart immortality to the body, whereas heavenly manna grants immortality to the soul. “Amen, amen, I say to you: he who believes in Me has eternal life.” He says this in the face of weak faith and unbelief, confirming His word with an oath-like assurance. “Your fathers ate manna in the wilderness and died.” Those who boasted of manna and pointed to the miraculous manna forgot that it did not save their fathers from death.
More than this, because they resisted the will of God, they experienced God’s wrath (Ps 94:10-11; Ps 77:33; 1 Cor 10:5). Such is everything utilitarianism devises for man. Is it worth troubling oneself greatly at its instruction, when all its inventions and exhausting labors do not save from death? No. That would mean thinking far too lowly of one’s soul and of oneself. It would mean condemning oneself to the lot of a working beast (Ps 89:3-6).
In chapter 3 we saw that the Lord spoke to Nicodemus about the mystery of the Incarnation, saying: “For God so loved the world that He gave His Only-begotten Son. That whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.” Earlier, in verse 35 of the present chapter, the Lord said of Himself: “I am the bread of life; he who comes to Me shall not hunger.” In verses 32-33, speaking of the manna, He said that God, not Moses, had sent it. The Lord added: “For the bread of God is He who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” Here the Lord indicates still more clearly the difference between the bread-manna, which does not give eternal life, and the bread of life, who is the Lord Himself.
Of the greatest importance in the Lord’s final words is the expression that the one who tastes the bread of life will not die. This expression is set against another divine saying, pronounced by God at the creation of man, when the Lord first gave him a commandment: “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat. For in the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die” (Gen 2:17). Sin committed brought death into the world. Yet then the Lord God promised man a Deliverer in the “seed of the woman.” But only he will not die who is joined to Christ and to His most pure flesh and blood, according to His commandment, by approaching to partake of them. For by them sin is washed away and man is saved.
Passages read together with this verse.
Greek text, 17 words with lemma, transliteration and Strong’s number. Tap to expand.
THEOSIS