Last week, we heard about the miraculous feeding of 5000 men in the gospel. Today and for the next three Sundays we hear John’s discourse on the meaning of that miracle—how it is a sign that Jesus is ultimately our true nourishment.
The readings opened with the Israelites on their journey to the Promised Land. In the gospel, the crowds journeyed by boat to Capernaum looking for Jesus. Whenever we are on a journey, we need directions or we are apt to venture off course and get lost. I recall years ago, a friend calling to tell me that she and her husband had taken the ferry from Edmonds to Kingston to visit me. “Now,” she asked, “ how do we get to Langley from Kingston?” They knew where they wanted to go, all right, but they needed directions first. I had to patiently explain that to get to Langley, one had to catch the ferry to Clinton, not Kingston.
Life is much like a journey. When I graduated from college, I never imagined that 38 years later, I would find myself standing here at a pulpit in Langley. (To be honest, I hadn’t even heard of Langley back then!) Like many of my peers then, I was searching for my niche in life, for whatever and whomever would bring me happiness, but I was often more concerned about putting food on the table than pondering my long range goals in life.
I wasn’t much different from the crowds in today’s readings. The Israelites were free from slavery yet they were disenchanted. Lacking food, they would have preferred to remain in Egypt and eaten their fill of bread, even if that meant being slaves again. As we heard, their needs were soon filled with manna and quail. (What was called bread from heaven can be found even today in the Sinai desert, produced each spring by certain insects feeding on tamarisk trees.)
The crowds in the gospel weren’t much different. They too were primarily interested in satisfying their hunger. Could Jesus continue to feed them as he had the day before? Thus, they jumped into their boats and headed to Capernaum, looking for the man who miraculously feed so many with so little.
The restless hungry crowds left me wondering, “Is life simply the daily pursuit of putting something on the table to eat?” For many people, that is the bottom line. Of course, along with food, comes the quest for shelter, clothing, recreation, relationships and all else that defines our notion of the American dream.
The opening line of the Declaration of Independence asserts that we are entitled to the pursuit of happiness, along with life and liberty, but the founding fathers did not provide us with any directions. Many of us presume that happiness is found in the quest for wealth, status and good health. That may be the American dream, yet, as many of us have discovered sooner or later, such happiness may be as fleeting as a sultry breeze on a stifling humid summer evening like those we have had lately.
Jesus observed that reality. In spite of their fill, having been fed the day before, the crowd was not yet satisfied. To remedy their emptiness, Jesus assures them that lasting happiness can be found in him. “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst.”
What assuring words! In a nutshell, Jesus was prodding his listeners to move beyond the pursuit of their daily bread to seeking the bread of eternal life, ultimately seeing Jesus as the object of faith. For us Catholics, we equate what he is saying here to the Eucharist, the core of our faith. We believe that our gifts of bread and wine become for us the real presence of Jesus Christ, not mere symbols, and that the Eucharist keeps us moving in the right direction beyond the Mass through life, by separating us from sin, those deliberately chosen acts which distance us from God, who is the source of lasting happiness.
An obstacle for some toward Jesus’ message here is faith, which they see as an act of the mind, rather than the heart. Since the real presence of Jesus cannot be rationally explained, they opt not to believe, despite what Jesus said at the Last Supper.
In biblical times, faith described the glue which binds one person to another. A good comparison for faith would be the loyalty that fans have for their teams, a passion of the heart. This is what Jesus had in mind when he tells us, “Do not work for food that perishes but for food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.” Are we passionate about our faith?
In his book, Diary of a Country Priest, George Bernanos writes, “Faith is not a thing which one ‘loses,’ we merely cease to shape our lives by it.” Ask yourself, are you allowing your faith to shape your life? If not, consider the advice Paul gives, for ultimately we cannot be Christian unless we put on Christ and allow ourselves to be created anew in God’s way of righteousness and holiness.
Like my misdirected friends, who never made it to Langley that day, we can veer off course on our life journey with the countless daily distractions that surround us, yet the direction for getting us the satisfying happiness we seek in life is simple enough. Simply put, Jesus is urging us to redirect our lives toward God. This means a reordering of expectations and values, a path that becomes evident through the power of daily prayer. Monika Hellwig, one of America’s best Catholic theologians, summarized the lesson today well when she wrote, “Human yearning is not stilled by self-seeking or self-gratification, but by self-gift to God in trust and to other human beings in meeting their needs. To be nourished and sustained by Jesus means being empowered to live in this way.”