Readings: Exodus 16.2-4, 12-15 / Psalm 77. 3-4, 23-24, 25, 54 (R/v 24b) / Ephesians 4.17, 2-24 / John 6.24-35
One of my delights as a teacher is to see my students learn, graduate and mature successfully and happily in life. A greater joy is to become friends with them after school. A number of them have become my close friends, and we meet for dinner every two to three months in Thomson. Their wives and children join us.
The food at these dinners is simple, familiar and homecooked. We will always have vegetables, fish, meat, egg or shrimp and rice. There’ll be wine and fruit too. Sometimes someone surprises with siew yoke or char siew, while another brings cheese or cake for dessert. And yes, there is always good conversation, lots of laughter and a deep care for one another.
Regrettably, I sometimes take these moments for granted. I forget the grace I find myself in: food; fun, friendship. I’m blinded to God’s bounty in my life by my preoccupation with work.
Is this your struggle too? Taking God and God’s goodness for granted?
Our first reading is about the human struggle to appreciate God. The freed Israelites are grumbling. Though they are no longer under from Egyptian oppression, they complain about their journey to the Promised Land. They do the whole “poor me” thing as a community. “Poor me” for lack of food. “Poor us for travelling in the desert. “Poor people are we” for not having our fleshpots and our fill of bread as we did in Egypt.
And how does God respond to their complains and regrets? By caring abundantly. God still provides for them faithfully; God rains down bread and meat for their journey.
I believe everyone desires God’s abundant care. Isn’t this what we pray for when we say, “give us this day our daily bread”?
The crowds in today’s gospel story follow Jesus to the other side of the lake. They are looking for God’s bread; more of it for they had tasted God’s goodness when Jesus previously multiplied five loaves and two fish. Now, they come to Jesus again looking for this bread to satisfy their hunger.
But Jesus offers them more than physical bread. He offers them himself. “I am the bread of life,” Jesus declares: God’s bread who gives life to the world, and who feeds the hungry and quenches the thirsty who believe in him.
Today, Jesus teaches them -- and us -- that the best way to receive God’s life is to embrace it wholeheartedly. That is, by believing with all one’s being in Jesus himself.
For Jesus, this kind of believing must be like consuming a whole loaf of bread; there shouldn’t be any leftovers. Selectively choosing how much of God’s life to have and when to have it is unChristian. Such piecemeal sampling cuts one off from the fullness of God’s life.
In John’s gospel, Jesus uses the metaphor of “eating” to illustrate how believing in Jesus must mean more than saying, “Yes, I believe.” It must mean interiorizing ones' belief in Jesus fully, so as to live out more fully God’s life that Jesus reveals in word and deed. And isn’t living out this life in God and with one another what we are gathered here for?
All too often, we are focused on the consecration in Mass. This is the moment when bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ. In this moment, we adore and praise God, and we give thanks for God’s care in feeding us with Jesus, our daily bread. Yes, it is right and just to do these.
But the fullness of the grace of Mass is not in the consecration. It is to be experienced when we take, we eat and we become one with Jesus and with each other.
This is the experience of becoming one, or “one-ing” as Julian of Norwich calls it. It is beautifully expressed in the action and word “communion.” This is how St Augustine describes communion: “Behold what you see, and become what you receive.”
Behold what we see: the body of Christ. Become what we receive: the body of Christ.
Is becoming the Body of Christ what Jesus really offers us when he proclaims, “I am the Bread of Life”?
Take; eat; become: become the Body of Christ. Then, be blessed, broken and given to one another. Given so that someone else, preferably the lost, the least, the forgotten, can have life to the full in God.
Might this be the gift and the task of communion, of our eating the Bread of Life?
Paul emphatically tells us in the second reading that it is: for in Jesus we “put on the new self, created in God’s way in righteousness and holiness of truth.” This new self that is the Body of Christ you and I can become when we take all of Jesus into our lives.
Indeed, the whole chapter and discussion about Jesus as “bread” in John’s gospel is not specifically or even symbolically about the Sacrament of the Eucharist. Rather, Jesus is asking us to receive and acknowledge him as the “one” specifically “sent” by God to be the life of the world. “Merely consuming the Eucharistic presence as some kind of ticket to heaven is a terrible abuse of the gift of Jesus, the whole Jesus, to us.” (Larry Gillick, SJ)
The truth is that Jesus always comes to nourish us again and again, in all aspects of our life, and he is more than enough. In this light, Jesus’ declaration that he is “the Bread of Life” makes sense. Jesus gives us new life to become his own body.
Do you and I really appreciate the gift of Jesus as God’s daily bread that gives us life by transforming us into Christ’s body? Or, do we take Jesus, the Bread for our life, for granted when we come to communion?
We ask for many grains of nourishment when we pray for God’s daily bread. We pray to do God’s will. We pray to receive what God gives us at any one moment, be it like crumbs or crust, or quite stale. We pray for what we will eat. We pray for forgiveness, for happiness, for peace, for hope.
Yes, “our daily bread” is God’s love, shared not only through the Eucharist, but by eating more of the life of grace, the life of God’s love, in the one we follow Jesus. Indeed, it is as the bread of life that Jesus is God’s pledge that we will never be abandoned, or left to go our own way grumbling that we did not get enough.
At the end of our dinners in Thomson, my friends and I give each other a hug, give thanks and promise to meet again. We return home, satisfied and spirited. We leave renewed, but always a little more changed as our relationships continue to transform us from strangers into teacher and students, and now into lifelong friends.
How will you and I go forth after today’s communion with Jesus? Will we do so transformed a lot more after beholding what we see and becoming what we receive -- Jesus, the Bread of Life?
Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore
photo: www.tastingtable.com
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