Please read the Scripture passage before the homily.
How can a god die? How could the Jewish God die: God, by nature of being God, is the source of all existence and life. Jesus told us to eat his body and drink his blood: how is this not cannibalism?
One needs a body, one needs molecules, earthiness in order to die. The act of dying is the release of all earthy elements from attachment to a person. For God to die, God has to have earthiness, molecules, a body; without them, God cannot die. For God to die, God had to take flesh of a mother, and so be born into the world. We believe that God did just that by taking on human flesh and being born of the Virgin Mary. We believe that in this body Jesus, God, died and then rose from the dead.
This sixth chapter of John has presented us Jesus’ feeding of the five thousand, his walking on the sea and his teaching on the bread of life, which, as he explained, meant believing in Jesus as God’s agent more than it meant eating a meal on a mountain. Now he presents Jesus, whose flesh and blood are food and drink.
Eating Jesus’ flesh and drinking his blood, however, is not cannibalism. Cannibalism is eating the molecules, muscles that make up the visible body of a person. Eating the flesh and blood of Jesus is not eating an earthly body, which is cannibalism, but eating and drinking of the living, heavenly, glorified body of Jesus. Cannibalism is eating death; Eating Jesus is life.
Jesus, as the bread of life, calls us to believe in him as God’s special messenger and agent. It means that Jesus, as the Word of God, has to be eaten, consumed, in the faith and trust of belief. This belief in Jesus as bread of live, as Word of God, finds its corollary in the belief and trust that leads to eating and drinking of the flesh and blood of Jesus in the Eucharist.
God needed a body in order to die; Jesus needed to be glorified so that we could eat and drink in order to share Jesus’ divine life, just as he shares our human life.