For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven, and gives life unto the world.
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Cornelius a Lapide
AD 1637
For the Bread of God, &c. Christ proves that not the manna, but His own Bread, i.e, He Himself, is true Bread, i.e, truly heavenly and Divine, by two arguments1. Because He alone really came down from heaven2. Because He alone gives true life to the world, i.e, the blessed and eternal life, which only is true life. Observe: this Bread is called the Bread of God, because formed by God alone, and the property of God alone. Because God lives by Himself and His own Divinity: and because this Bread is truly the Son of God, and God Himself
Cometh down: not in the past, but the present tense. The Greek is καταβαίνων, the present participle. The expression therefore signifies the perpetual descent of Christ upon the Eucharistic altar even to the end of the world. For whensoever the priest consecrates the Eucharist, Christ, who after His death ascended into heaven, comes down from thence to the consecrated species of bread, and in them declares His presence (Se presentem sistit et ex...
It was needful not only to remove Moses from God-befitting Authority, according to their conception, and to shew that he was a minister of that miraculous working, rather than the bestower of it, but also to lessen the wonder though miraculously wrought, and to shew that it was nothing at all in comparison with the greater. For imagine Christ calling out something like this, The great things, sirs, do ye reckon among the little and meanest, and the beneficence of the Lord of all ye have meted out with most petty limits. For with no slight folly do ye suppose that the manna is the Bread from heaven, although it fed the race alone of the Jews in the wilderness, while there are other nations besides without number throughout the world. And ye supposed that God willed to shew forth lovingkindness so contracted, as to give food to one people only (for these were types of universalities, and in the partial was a setting forth of His general Munificence, as it were in pledge, to those who fir...
Not, says He, to Jews alone, but to all the world, not mere food, but life, another and an altered life. He calls it life, because they all were dead in sins. Yet they still kept downward bent, saying,
