Anyone who eats this bread will live for ever;
and the bread that I shall give is my flesh,
for the life of the world. (John 6:51)
It is hard for us to imagine the shock of Jesus’s listeners at these words from Sunday’s Gospel. Up until now, they had understood his self-reference as "the bread of life" to be a metaphor for believing in him. At the start of Sunday’s Gospel they do not object to this, but only to the fact that the seemingly ordinary Jesus says he comes from heaven: "How can he now say, 'I have come down from heaven'?" (6:42).
