Bread: Not As Ordinary as You Might Think

Solemnity of Corpus Christi

One of my favorite foods from my pilgrimages to the Holy Land is the bread.  The way it is made, we would likely call it pita bread, but it’s an unleavened bread that has a pocket in it, though it’s totally enclosed until you rip into it.  It puts Wonderbread to shame in my opinion.  Of course, it’s not made just for sandwiches.  It’s also for dipping into hummus, sopping up some of the sauce or gravy with the food, and other ways of eating.  It’s the same type of bread that you can get at Middle Eastern restaurants like the Beirut in Toledo.  And while Adrian has more restaurants than you can shake a stick at, there’s no place that really sells good, Middle Eastern bread that I have found.

It may seem odd to focus so much on bread.  Bread is so ordinary.  No matter what kind it is, most people expect it with their meal, even if sometimes as a roll.  As much as I go on about bread, there is nothing too special about it.  And yet, Jesus used bread as one of the elements, or what theologians call the matter, of the Sacrament of His Body and Blood.

Our readings today on the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ all revolve around bread (and also wine).  In our first reading, Melchizedek, a prefigurement of Jesus, offers bread and wine, and then blesses Abram.  A good chunk of the Letter to the Hebrews focuses on this small passage we heard from Genesis, and what it prefigured.  And we, as Catholics, should have our sacramental sense tingle every time we hear bread and wine in the Old Testament.

St. Paul in our second reading recalls Jesus instituting the Eucharist, that Jesus offered bread and wine, but no longer referred to it as bread and wine, but as His Body and Blood.  And the Gospel we heard is the multiplication of the loaves and fish.  Now, to be clear, Jesus did not use fish as a part of the Eucharist, though maybe it does explain why Catholics love having fish fries.  But Jesus multiplies the bread, bread which satisfied everyone who was there, around five thousand men, not counting the women and children.  

Why bread?  Why did Jesus choose bread as part of the matter of the Sacrament of His Body and Blood?  We can only speculate, but many have thought over the years that it has to do with the different aspects of bread.  In the first place, bread is ordinary.  It was a staple of the Middle Eastern diet.  God takes the ordinary, and makes it extraordinary.  He does that with bread, but He also does that with us.  God takes our bread, our ordinary lives, whatever they entail, and He accepts them from me, your priest, and then returns it to you, no longer bread, but the Body of Christ; no longer your common life, but transformed.  Bread is a metaphor for us: nothing special, but common.

In the second place, we can look at how bread is made.  In a document of disputed origins called The Didache, some parts probably dating from the 5th century, others dating from the 12th or 13th century, there is a prayer that purports to be said at the Eucharist.  Part of the prayer reads, “As this broken bread was scattered over the hills and then, when gathered, became one mass, so may Thy Church be gathered from the ends of the earth into Thy Kingdom.”  This prayer examines how bread is made.  First, the grain is scattered across the field.  Then it is gathered together.  After it is gathered, it has to be crushed to make flour.  Then flour is added to water, is baked, and then you get bread.  Humanity, too, is scattered across the field of the world.  But Jesus unites what was scattered; He gathers all of humanity in Himself, and gives them the opportunity to be one with Him through faith.  Humanity, too, is broken, often crushed.  We each have our own crosses in life, the ways in which we suffer.  When we unite our suffering with the waters of Baptism, our participation in the suffering and death of Christ, and are warmed by the love of Jesus, we become one loaf of bread, bound together in the Kingdom of God.

Wine, too, has a rich symbolism, as it is taken from grapes on the vine (we recall Jesus saying that He is the Vine, we are the branches), crushed and pressed into wine which, as the psalms say, gives joy to the heart.  But maybe I can talk about wine in a different homily.

So maybe bread isn’t so common.  It certainly has a vast symbolism which is perhaps why God chose to use it so often in the Old and New Testaments.  Whenever we hear bread, hopefully our minds will immediately think about the Eucharist and about Jesus’ abiding presence with us.  As we walk through the streets of Adrian today in our Walk with Jesus, we will follow what looks like a small piece of unleavened bread.  But we know by faith, that it is no longer bread, but is truly Jesus’ Body.  May our joy for what Jesus did with bread, changing it into His Body, be manifest when we come to Mass, when we walk with Jesus today, and even in our daily lives, that we might truly be a Eucharistic people, a people who are always grateful and on the lookout for the presence of the Lord.