What Food Is For

Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ (Corpus Christi). Sunday, June 7, 2026

Dt 8:2-3, 14b-16a; Ps 147:12-13, 14-15, 19-20; 1Cor10:16-17; Jn 6:51-58

The Catholic philosopher Joseph Pieper, writing in the years after World War II, warned that modern society increasingly judges things by their usefulness alone. Food becomes useful. Work becomes useful. People become useful. Everything is measured by function.

Decades later, Michael Pollan made a similar observation about our relationship with food. In In Defense of Food, he argues that we have stopped thinking about food and started thinking about nutrients. We no longer eat eggs, fish, or bread. We consume protein, omega-3s, carbohydrates, and vitamins. We know how many grams of protein are in our lunch. We know how many steps we walked yesterday. We know our resting heart rate, our cholesterol numbers, and our sleep score. We know more than any generation before us about what food does to the body.

Yet many of us have forgotten what food is for.

Food becomes calories. Calories become energy. Energy keeps the machine running.

And then we come to Mass and hear something utterly different. We are told that eating bread is the most important thing we will ever do. Not because it will make us healthier. Not because it will help us live a few years longer. But because the food placed upon this altar is the Body of Christ, and receiving it is the difference between merely existing and truly living.

If that sounds strange, it should. It sounded strange when Jesus first said it.

In the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel, Jesus calls Himself ho artos ho zōn—the living bread. Not nourishing bread. Not sacred bread. Living bread. Bread that possesses life in itself and gives that life to whoever receives it.

At first , in this passage, John uses the ordinary Greek word for eating, phagein. Later Jesus changes the word. He begins using trōgein. Phagein is the ordinary word for eating. Trōgein means to chew, to gnaw, to feed upon. It is physical, concrete, deliberately vivid. John refuses to let us explain the mystery away. Jesus is not speaking symbolically. He is speaking about flesh. He is speaking about blood.

The crowd understands Him perfectly. “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” That is the question of people who understood Him all too well.

In response, Jesus does not soften the teaching. He does not say, “You have taken me too literally.” Instead, He repeats Himself. The people at Capernaum were shocked. Their mistake was not their shock. Their mistake was walking away.

The claim remains as startling today as it was then. The Church is saying that bread becomes the Body of God. That is either the greatest truth ever spoken or the greatest illusion ever believed. There is no comfortable middle ground.

Before dismissing the claim, however, consider something. The modern world says eating is fuel, but every culture on earth knows there is more happening at a meal than biology. We celebrate with meals. We mourn with meals. We reconcile with meals. Food does not merely sustain life; it creates communion.

The deepest human hunger has never been physical. The man who cannot stop replaying the conversation he ruined. The woman lying awake at two in the morning wondering whether she has wasted her life. The father sitting in a hospital waiting room wishing he could trade places with his child. These are not people looking for calories. They are hungry for something the world cannot manufacture.

Christianity does not say that hunger is irrational. It says there is a deeper spiritual hunger. 

That is why the first reading takes us into the desert. Israel is starving. Nothing grows there. Yet God feeds His people with manna. Moses tells them to remember because the manna is a sign. The bread from heaven points toward another Bread from heaven. The hunger of Israel points toward another meal—toward a night before a crucifixion, toward a priest who took bread into His hands, blessed it, broke it, and gave it to His disciples.

Saint Paul tells us what that gift means. “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ?” The word he uses is koinōnia—communion, participation, sharing in. Not merely remembering Christ. Participating in Christ.

That is why we celebrate Corpus Christi. The God whom the universe cannot contain has made Himself small enough to be received.

So what does this feast ask of us?

The people at Capernaum were shocked. The saints were shocked too. The difference is that the crowd walked away and the saints fell to their knees.

We all arrived this morning carrying something: a burden, a fear, a grief, a failure. Into the middle of that ordinary human struggle comes an extraordinary claim.

The living bread has come down from heaven.

It is on this altar.

The question is the same one faced by the crowd at Capernaum:

Will we walk away?

Or will we kneel?