Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you…For my flesh is true bread and my blood true drink. Having witnessed the crowd’s enthusiastic appreciation of the miracle of the loaves, Jesus invited those who had come looking for him to hunger for something bigger. While he was certainly concerned about their physical needs and was more than willing to provide for them, he also wanted them to open their eyes and see the real opportunity that God had presented to them. He wanted them to open the eyes of their minds and understand that the multiplication of the loaves was not just a random miracle performed to satisfy their curiosity. The multiplication of the loaves was rather a SIGN that was meant to open the eyes of the people into coming to know and understand the real identity of Jesus (and by so doing understand and appreciate his mission). Jesus who was working such mighty deeds in their midst was not just a doer of miracles. As the crowd had rightly recognized, Jesus is the prophet who had been promised by God (cf. John 6:14). Jesus is the new Moses whom God had promised to raise from among the people so that once again mighty signs that reveal God’s glory could be worked in the community (cf. Deuteronomy 18:15). Moses is renowned among the sons and daughters of Israel and regarded as a great prophet not only because God worked some mighty deeds through him but most importantly because he enabled the Israelites to stay in a life-giving relationship with God. Like Moses, Jesus has come to gift men and women with this life-giving relationship. And it is this life-giving relationship that he was encouraging the crowd (and by extension us) to seek.
Jesus, although he fulfilled God’s promise to raise from amongst the people a new Moses, was more than Moses. Jesus was not a mere prophet. Jesus was God himself. Jesus himself was the very life that he had been sent to offer the world. As God, he was the bread of life that had come from heaven to give life to the world. This is the bread that he was offering the world, the culmination of which took place as he gave his very life to his brothers and sisters as he hung on the cross. Moses, as great as he was, did not give his life for his fellow Israelites. Jesus is the “real” bread for which the crowd needed to hunger.
Jesus Christ is the true bread because he satisfies the real hunger of the world. Whereas the miracle of the loaves and the hunger that it satisfied were no mere illusions, the human person hungers for much more than physical bread. As a being created in the image and likeness of God, the human person has a need that transcends the realm of the material (cf. Matthew 4:1ff: ‘man does not live on bread alone’). The multiplied loaves of bread soon got depleted, and those who partook of the loaves had their fill one day and found themselves hungry again the following day (the reason why they requested Jesus to give the bread that will satisfy their hunger once and for all). Unbeknown to them, Jesus had come to meet the yearning that they were feeling in the depths of their beings. The multiplied loaves of bread could not meet such a need.
The deepest yearning of the human person is met in God his creator. It is a yearning that can never be met by anything or anyone else apart from God (St. Augustine says that the human heart/soul remains restless until it finds rest in God). This yearning, put in the human soul at creation, enables us to live the transcendent life that distinguishes us from other created animals. However, as a consequence of sin, this yearning has been blurred and blinded to the extent that it gets confused with other yearnings and cravings that the human person cultivates. Jesus, as it were, rectifies this hitch by redirecting the human soul’s yearning to its proper object: God. This is the bread that Jesus was offering the crowd. He was offering himself to them because he is the only means through which the human soul can satisfy its true desire. Jesus is the only means through which the human person can re-enter into a life-giving relationship with God.