One evening in summer on the rocky slopes overlooking the Sea of Galilee from the north, Jesus had fed five thousand people with a few pieces of bread. Next day these same people and Jesus were crowded into the synagogue in Capharnaum. Our Lord was speaking to them: ‘I am the bread of life. Your fathers did eat manna in the desert and are dead. This is the bread that comes down from heaven that if any man eat of it, he may not die…. I am the living bread which came down from heaven…. If any man eat of this bread he shall live for ever. And the bread that I shall give is my flesh for the life of the world’ (John 6, 48-52).

Unlike all other great spiritual teachers Christ claimed not only to lead and point to a better life, he made the astonishing claim that he was that life. Further, he put it in the form that he was also the instrument by means of which we acquired this life, he said he was the ‘Bread of Life’. This bread, or food, was in fact to be, as he promised, his flesh.