Today, we start Chapter 6 of John’s Gospel, whose entire content is the subject of the bread. This issue has an important place in Jesus’ message— from the temptation in the desert and the multiplication of the loaves right up to the Last Supper.

The great discourse on the bread of life discloses the full spectrum of meaning of this theme. It begins with the hunger of the people who have been listening to Jesus and whom he does not send away without food. But Jesus does not allow us to stop there and reduce man’s needs to bread, to biological and material necessities. “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God” (Mt 4:4; Deut 8:3).

—The miraculously multiplied bread harks back to the miracle of manna in the desert and at the same time points beyond itself: to the fact that man’s real food is the Logos, the eternal Word, the eternal meaning, from which we come and toward which our life is directed.