Bread of Life

                      19^thSunday in Ordinary Time

                     

       The gospel readings for this year, the B cycle of readings, are usually taken from the Gospel of Mark. But here in the midst of summer we are presented on five successive Sundays with a series of readings from the famous sixth chapter of the Gospel of John. It is famous because of its exposition of the theme of the Eucharist as the bread of life, the bread that will never fail, and will give eternal life.

We recall that two weeks ago the sixth chapter of John began with the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes whereby Jesus fed a large crowd with only a few loaves of bread and a couple of small fish. Immediately after that Jesus calmed a storm on the Sea of Galilee and after the Apostles expressed amazement, he told them that they did not understand the significance of the multiplication of the loaves.

Last week Jesus reminded the crowd that followed him not to look for signs or miracles but “to work for food that endures for eternal life which the Son of Man will give you.” 

Today’s readings take up the theme of the food from heaven that will give life. It is clear that the food given to the starving prophet Elijah in today’s first reading was not ordinary food. A hearth cake and a jug of water would not be sufficient to revive a dying man and enable him to embark on a journey of 40 days and nights.

Today we are in the midst of John’s great Eucharistic discourse and we hear the famous words of Jesus.

Amen, amen, I say to you,

whoever believes has eternal life.

I am the bread of life.

Your ancestors ate the manna in the desert but they died,

This is the bread that comes down from heaven

so that one may eat it and not die.

I am the living bread that came down from heaven;

whoever eats this bread will live forever;

and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.

It has always been difficult for people to accept these words. Even some of his disciples found it hard to accept and left Him. Down through the centuries it has also been hard to believe. Things came to a head five hundred years ago when some, although not all, Protestant reformers could not believe, despite the words of Jesus in scriptural passages like today’s, that the bread and wine offered in the Eucharistic sacrifice could actually become the body and blood of Jesus. The words of Jesus could not be taken literally. They were just symbolic.

Abuses in the customs and practices of the church at the time of the Reformation even led reformers to complain that the church had departed from the original practices and beliefs of the earliest Christians. Reformers argued that they were not leaving the church but restoring it to its original purity.

Nevertheless, in the past five hundred years, the more scholars have studied the early church, the more they have seen that from the beginning Christians took the words of Jesus in John’s gospel to mean what he said. Almost immediately after the Resurrection of Jesus they began to regularly share a Eucharistic meal together in the same way as He did at the Last Supper when He told them to “do this in remembrance of me.” The earliest Christians believed that Jesus was the bread of life, and that they ate this bread when they shared the Eucharistic meal.

However, what does it mean to believe? How do we know we believe? St. Paul was one of those early Christians. Christian belief is shown in action. 

All bitterness, fury, anger, shouting, and reviling

must be removed from you, along with all malice,

and be kind to one another, compassionate,

forgiving one another as God has forgiven you in Christ.

The early Christians understood that you could not say you loved someone if you treated them badly. If they did harm their loved ones or their neighbor, they knew that they must repair the damage. 

During Roman times pagans came to see that Christians behaved differently than others. Often when plague or disease struck Roman cities, pagan priests and officials fled the cities for fear of contamination but Christians stayed behind to care for not only their co-believers but also for their pagan neighbors.

It is not hard to find this caring among believers all over the world today. Despite scorn, ridicule, and outright persecution, Christians continue to act on their beliefs. I recall one teacher at an inner-city Catholic school whose students were mostly non-Catholic, who said “we teach them not because they are Catholic, but because we are Catholic.”

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Reading 1.  1 Kings 19: 4-8

Reading II. Ephesians 4: 30-5:2

Gospel. John 6: 41-51 (the bread of life)