The Church calls the Most Holy Eucharist, the “source and summit of our lives,” because it underscores not just the importance but the absolute necessity that the Most Holy Eucharist must have in our lives as Catholics.

Today Jesus finishes what has come to be called His Bread of Life discourse and, at this end, as we hear, the disciples are shocked. And, they aren’t just shocked, they are even questioning whether they can accept Him, whether they believe all that He has taught, all that He has done.

For, while those in the first reading decided to continue to serve the Lord, and to believe in Him because they saw the miracles and felt His protection, those in our Gospel that witnessed the same, that felt the same, find themselves now questioning whether they can continue on with Him, whether what He spoke was, indeed, truth or something else. And, as a result, they find themselves making a very difficult choice: to continue following Him or to completely abandon Him.

Yet, never once does Jesus recant on what He said nor does He explain Himself, or apologize for asking them to partake in, what to many, seems like cannibalism, instead, He questions their faith and He says: “What if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before?”

As if to say, if you saw that miracle, would you then believe? Would you then stay? But they were trying to understand a mystery of faith only by intellectual means, they were trying to understand it, as our Gospel puts it, with the eyes of the flesh, but as Jesus says, it is the spirit that will give this insight, because His words are Spirit and life, His words can only be understood with the ears of faith and with a heart that trusts.

St. Pio would often say that he learned more at the school of the cross than in any book. In fact, many of the saints, even an intellectual giant, like St. Thomas Aquinas, who wrote volumes and from whom the Church has formed a large part of its theology, stopped writing when he had a vision of God, simply saying: “I can write no more. I have seen things that make my writings like straw.”

They knew, as Jesus shows, that we cannot understand the mysteries of faith without faith. Jesus knew that, ultimately, only some would accept Him and what He had to say and others, simply, would not. He knew, as sad as it may be, that, in the end, not everyone would continue following Him. And, unfortunately, many people did leave; they returned to their former ways of life and they abandoned Jesus, because they could not accept the reality, the truth that many people cannot accept today, the reality and the profound power of the Most Holy Eucharist.

That is why Jesus asks probably one of the most difficult questions of the twelve, His own friends, those who have been with Him from the beginning, have seen His miracles, have lived side by side with Him, following Him from town to town, boat to boat, mountain to mountain: “Do you also want to leave?” As if to say, “after all this do you still truly believe I am who I say I am?” And He waits for a response.

And, St. Peter, on behalf of the twelve, responds simply and clearly: “Master to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”

And, yet, that same question He poses to us as well, a question He asks us every day of our lives, a question we hear in the face of temptation, in the face of despair, in the face of sadness, in our darkest hour, in our brightest hour, in our confusion and in our doubt: “Do you also want to leave?”

There is no harder question that we can answer in our lives, nor more difficult, because it is, as it was to the twelve, our very Savior asking if all He has done is not enough for us, if what He has given is still lacking, if we can find something or someone greater than He who laid down His very life for us, and continues to do so in the perpetual sacrifice He has left us on that altar. 

It is His most intimate and His most personal question for us, and, at the same time, the most somber, because He is not just asking us if we believe Him, but if we trust Him, if we love Him enough to remain with Him always, to spend time with Him often, especially in the Most Holy Eucharist.

Every day Jesus asks us that question and every day, as He did with the disciples, He patiently waits for our response.

What, then, will that response be?