Friends, welcome to Word on Fire Catholic Ministries.

Word on Fire is an apostolate dedicated to the mission of evangelization,

using media both old and new to share the faith on every continent

and to facilitate an encounter with Christ and His Church.

The efforts of Word on Fire engage the culture and bring the

transformative power of God's Word where it is most needed. Today, we invite you to join Bishop Robert

Barron as he preaches the gospel and shares the warmth and light of Christ with each one of us.

Peace be with you. Friends, we're reading, of course, these weeks from the sixth chapter of John,

this pivotal section of the New Testament where John lays out his Eucharistic theology.

And we come today really to the sort of rhetorical high point of this discourse, where things really come

to a head, like, what is Jesus talking about? So it's very important for us. The church asks us

every third summer to do this extended meditation on this passage, because we're dealing with

the pivotal sacrament, one of the most important moments in the life of a Catholic.

So we pay really close attention. Listen to this now. Jesus said to the crowds,

I am the living bread come down from heaven. He talked about manna, you know, centuries before. I'm the

living bread. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. The bread that I will give is my flesh

for the life of the world. Now, we might be accustomed to that. We've heard this, you know,

for 2,000 years within the Christian tradition. But imagine

his audience, imagine an audience of first-century Jews hearing this language. Well, listen what they say.

The Jews quarreled among themselves, saying, how can this man give us his flesh to eat?

To get this, we have to move into their frame of mind.

If you look in the Old Testament, there are frequent prohibitions against the eating of an animal's flesh with blood. I'm going to just give you a couple. Genesis chapter 9, verse 4. Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you, but you shall not eat flesh with its life. That is, it's blood. Here's Leviticus 317. It shall be a perpetual statute throughout your generations. You must not eat any

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