EIGHTEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (2024)
Readings:
Exodus 16:2-4, 12-15
Psalms 78:3-4, 23-25, 54
Ephesians 4:17, 20-24
John 6:24-35
It doesn’t take long for most humans to forget about their blessings, and focus solely on their challenges and difficulties. The Israelites had waited a long time before being freed of their bondage in Egypt; it was no easy task for the God-fearing Moses. Even though there was much that was unknown about the future, they left Egypt singing hymns of praise and rejoicing. Miraculous deeds helped them escape the wrath of the Pharoah, and decades of wandering in the desert would be a large part of their future.
Finding enough food to eat was a perpetual problem, and when hunger hit, and it hit often, they would muse and wonder whether they were better off in Egypt, where “they sat by our fleshpots and ate our fill of bread.” Moses surely tired of their whining. Gratitude for their freedom should have given them something to chew on and assuage the ordinary hunger that, to this day, afflicts so many.
While the hunger gave the Israelites the opportunity to complain, it gave their God an opportunity to show them how much He heard their cries, and how much He loved them. So God sent them food: quail in the evening, and Mannah (literally, “what is this?”) in the morning – the “bread that the Lord has given you to eat.” Their dependence on God’s goodness is what would get them through their forty-year stint in the desert.
The psalm response refers to the Mannah as “the bread of the angels,” an appropriate ascription given our viewing of the Mannah as a foreshadowing of the Eucharist. Last week we began the evangelist John’s famous Bread of Life Discourse with the story of the feeding of the vast multitude. In today’s gospel those same crowds are searching for Jesus and His disciples, fascinated that Jesus could feed so many with so little they desire to “accomplish the works of God,” if Jesus will share what they are with them. But their understanding of what Jesus just did with five barley loaves and a few fish is very thin, and Jesus desires to lead them deeper into the mystery of who this Son of Man who stands before them really is. Besides, why work for “the kind of food that perishes,” when the Son of Man will give them “the kind of food that endures for eternal life.” They are well aware of their tradition which speaks of our first reading when Moses gave their ancestors Mannah from heaven to satisfy their hunger. Jesus reminds them that it was not Moses who opened the heavens to let the bread of angels drop down, it was His Heavenly Father who, benevolently rained down Mannah, and it is Him who now gives them “the true bread from heaven,” His Son, who “comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”
The religious officials will be disturbed by what Jesus has to tell them, and when they insist Jesus gives them this eternal food, His answer disturbs them even more: “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst.” To cut the religious leaders some slack, they are unaccustomed to such eucharistic talk, and it is not too difficult to understand their outrage that Jesus is telling them if they want the ‘food that comes down from heaven,’ they are going to have ‘to eat His body, and drink His blood.’
It is startlingly amazing that what we do with such frequency is so little understood by those who bear the name of Christian. Our feasting on the body and blood of Jesus, as the evangelist John relates, brings us the eternal life that all humankind naturally longs for. It is through the actions of a priest that the heavens open and the simple gifts of bread and wine become the very body and blood of the Son of God. St. John’s Bread of Life discourse makes it eminently clear what is not spelled out in our earlier versions of the Last Supper. By the time John wrote his gospel there was a theologically deeper understanding of the Eucharist, and just as Jesus tries to get His listeners to understand that of which He speaks, He invites us in every Eucharist we are privileged to celebrate, to enter more deeply into the mystery of our Savior. Let us not ignore the invitation.
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