When they asked Jesus how he had gotten there ahead of them, the Lord chided them: “Very truly, I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life. ”Ordinary bread satisfies only physical longing, and It does so in a transient way: one eats and one must soon eat again. But the heavenly bread, Jesus implies, satisfies the deepest longing of the heart, and does so by adapting the one who eats it to eternal life. The Church Fathers loved to ruminate on this the me of divinization through the Eucharist, the process by which the consumption of the bread of life readies one for life in the eternal dimension. In the versions of the Lord’s prayer found in the synoptic Gospels, we find the phrase ton arton...ton epiousion, usually rendered as “daily bread.”

In 1950, Flannery O’Connor was brought by friends to a dinner with the prominent author Mary McCarthy and her husband. At the time, O’Connor, who would eventually blossom into one of the greatest Catholic writers of the twentieth century, was just commencing her career, and there was no question that she was a junior member of this elite circle of conversation. In fact, in a letter describing the scene, she commented, “Having me there was like having a dog present who had been trained to say a few words but overcome with inadequacy had forgotten them.”

The ultimate sacrifice having been offered, Christ the priest comes forth at every Mass with his lifeblood, and the universe is restored. The priest’s actions at the altar are but a symbolic manifestation of this mystical reality, which is why he is described as operating in persona Christi (in the person of Christ). And this is why, furthermore, the forgiveness of sins is so central to the Eucharistic liturgy.

But God does indeed desire something for his human creatures— namely, fullness of life—and this comes when they surrender themselves in love to him. The sacrifice of Jesus is nothing but this total self-gift to the Father that effectively straightens out the human race, and therefore God is delighted when we actively participate in it, joining our minds, wills, and bodies to it. The sacrifice of the Mass does not constitute a challenge to God; rather, it breaks, as it were, against the rock of God’s selfsufficiency and returns to us as a life-enhancing power.

We are now in position to address more fully the issue that we raised at the outset of this chapter—namely, how the Mass can be construed as a sacrifice. We have already shown how the sacrifice of Jesus’ cross sums up and gathers the sacrificial history that preceded it. The Mass, the Eucharistic liturgy, can be understood as an extension or re-presentation of the sacrifice of Jesus, bringing the power of the cross to bear in the present. Hence the Mass, in a very real sense, recapitulates and makes concrete everything we have been describing in the course of this chapter.

In order to appreciate these perhaps overly familiar words, we have to put ourselves in the thought world of Jesus’ first audience. As they heard these extraordinary statements, the Apostles were undoubtedly hearing overtones and resonances from the scriptural and liturgical tradition that we have reviewed. Jesus was using the Passover supper to give a definitive interpretation to the actions that he would take the next day, Good Friday.

Over his cross, Pontius Pilate had placed a sign, announcing in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek that Jesus was the King of the Jews. Though Pilate meant it as a mockery, it was in fact the fulfillment of a prophecy. An essential aspect of the hope of Israel was that one day a king in the tradition of David and Solomon would rise up, take his place in Jerusalem, and deal definitively with the enemies of the nation. This is precisely who Jesus was and precisely what Jesus did. But what an odd, unexpected sort of king he was, conquering Israel’s enemies through nonviolence. Disempowering them by refusing to respond to them in kind.

We see it in a number of Gospel scenes where Jesus is tired out after his contact with the sick, the lost, the sinful. At the beginning of Mark’s Gospel, we find an account of a typical day in the ministry of Jesus. The people press on him from all sides, compelling him to find refuge in a boat lest he be crushed by the crowd, and at one point there are so many supplicants surrounding him that he couldn’t even eat. Mark tells us that Jesus went off to a secluded place to pray, but even there they sought him out, coming at him from all sides. In the magnificent narrative of the woman at the well in the Gospel of John, we hear that Jesus sat down by Jacob’s well, “tired out by his journey.”