Your fathers did eat manna in the wilderness, and are dead.
Read Chapter 6
Cornelius a Lapide
AD 1637
Your fathers, &c, in the desert, "signifying," says S. Chrysostom, "that the manna did not long continue, nor come to the land of promise; for as soon as they reached it the manna ceased." But this Bread of Christ endureth for ever. Listen to the words of Josue (v12): "And the manna ceased on the morrow after they had eaten of the old corn of the land; neither had the children of Israel manna any more; but they did eat of the fruit of the land of Canaan that year." For as God fails us not in things needful, so He gives not an abounding of superfluities.
And died: i.e, manna fed your fathers after the way of other food, and neither did, nor was able to protect them from death; but My Bread will save from death.
That whosoever shall eat of it, by true faith and living charity, shall never die. That Isaiah , the manna had not the virtue of preserving life from corporeal death, much less the souls of your fathers from death, but this My Bread has the power of freeing from death not only ...
They then who ate the manna (He says) are dead, not having received any participation of life therefrom (for it was not truly lifegiving, but rather taken as an aid against carnal hunger and in type of the true); but they who receive in themselves the Bread of Life, will have |408 immortality as their prize, wholly setting at nought corruption and its consequent evils, and will mount up unto boundless and unending length of Life in Christ. Nor will it at all damage our words on this subject that they who have been made partakers of Christ, need to taste bodily death on account of what is due to nature; for even though they falling into this end undergo the lot of humanity, yet, as Paul saith, they that shall live, live to God.
He then establishes a thing most likely to persuade them, that they were deemed worthy of greater things than their fathers, (meaning those marvelous men who lived in the time of Moses,) and so, after saying that they were dead who ate the manna, He adds,
Ver. 51 . He that eats of this bread, shall live for ever.
Nor has He put in the wilderness without a cause, but to point out that the supply of manna was not extended to a long time, nor entered with them into the land of promise. But this bread was not of the same kind.
And the bread that I will give is My flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.
Here one might reasonably enquire, how this was a fit season for these words, which neither edified nor profited, but rather did mischief to those who had been edified; for from that time, says the Evangelist, many of His disciples went back, saying, This is a hard saying; who can hear it? John 6:60; since these things might have been entrusted to the disciples only, as Ma...
