In last week's readings we heard of the Lord's abundance toward us in the story of the loaves and fishes. We also considered that in his feeding us he not only gives us all that we need, but he always provides enough for there to be plenty left over. God gives us what we need and more. He not only provides richly for us but he also invites us to feed others in the same manner that he gives to us.
In comparison, the readings this week continue along a similar pathway. They too speak to us of God's feeding the people. We consider the story of the exodus from Egypt. During their wandering in the wilderness of Sinai, the Hebrew people complain from their hunger, "O Lord, did you lead us into this desert just to make us die of starvation!"
Probably all of us are familiar the narrative of Moses leading the Hebrew people from their slavery in the land of Egypt. We know from the account that God didn't abandon them to die in the desert. Rather they received a sign from heaven. God fed them daily on manna, which was a mysterious bread that fell out of the heavens.
I have to admit that I tend to identify the story of the Hebrew people in the desert more as a Lenten narrative than one we would necessarily consider here in the summer, in the midst of Ordinary Time. However, it really is a message that speaks to us clearly of our everyday journey along the path of ordinary life. It bears a huge relevance to where our lives are spiritually at all times. So at least it's a story that we should consider in terms of what it means for us to be participants in the everyday reality of salvation.
For the Hebrew people, the sojourn in the Sinai was an event of transformation and a journey of conversion. Thus, we may see it as symbolizing our journey and conversion as well.
Personally I love the story we have today because it speaks in terms of signs and symbols, and thereby it sparks our spiritual imagination and invites us to enter the story from where we are in the here and now. It engages us in the spiritual reality of that which for us is the ultimate sign and symbol of transformation. That is, it engages us and invites us to reflect on, and to take hold of, that which is the source of our spiritual nourishment, namely the reality of the Eucharist.
Nineteen years ago, as a catechumen in the RCIA, I recall considering what a great privilege I had of being able to offer thanks for something as simple as a meal. I might not have been able to find all the right words to express it then, but to make the sign of the Cross and give thanks before eating a meal seemed somehow to connect to what was I was doing in becoming a Catholic.
Indeed, Eucharist is an act of thanksgiving. In fact, it is the act of thanksgiving above all others. Our participation in Eucharist immerses us in that which is the source of all goodness and it reaches a place in us where nothing else can reach. It touches us in depths of our being and transforms us into the image of God who, in an elegantly simple truth, is love.
In the gospel today the Lord Jesus speaks about coming to us from heaven. "I am the bread of life," he says, "…the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world." In this we consider God's great gift to us of his Son. We consider the miracle of the incarnation, which the world—even in many of its great religions— says is not possible. However, faith makes it possible for us to confess, and to know, and to give thanks, that God himself came into the world as a savior among us offering the gift of abundant food that lasts to eternal life.
God invites us to his banquet and our partaking in the abundance of Christ sustains us in every situation, but it also has the power to act on us: it moves us from one place to another in a movement that is analogous to the movement of the Hebrews out of Egypt, where although they had the comfort of their fleshpots, they did not have the bread from heaven. Interestingly, we must often experience the desert before we can understand the significance of the feast that comes from God.
Our lives reveal the power of the Eucharist to transform us when we yield to God and allow ourselves to be moved from the spiritual Egypt of life, which symbolizes a place where we may live only as strangers and aliens never to know the sweet goodness of God's abundance but only tasting the paltry bitterness of slavery. Contrariwise, in our experience of conversion we learn to know the power of God and to apprehend or grasp the real presence of Christ among us, which makes true interior renewal possible.
St. Paul's exhortation to the Ephesians is to be transformed and to put away the former way of life and to seek out the way of God. He says to be renewed in the spirit of your minds and to "put on the new self, created in God's way in righteousness and holiness of truth."
The scriptural lessons today involve an invitation for all of us to enter into true relationship with the one who identifies himself as the bread from heaven. It's an invitation to begin a totally new way of living, a way that looks beyond the passing world to that which has a true and lasting reality—a reality of life that is such that we have only begun to glimpse it.
In the gospel Jesus asks only that we believe in the one sent from heaven. He makes it possible for us to believe because we are witnesses of the power of God to provide. Each of us knows the goodness that God gives us—perhaps some are more aware of it than others, but each of us has received a God-given invitation to live a life that reflects what is lasting, real, and abundantly satisfying. No wonder it is called Eucharist for on our part it is indeed the act of thanksgiving for such a great and abundant salvation—so great a presence—that it fills our lives to overflowing and impels us to seek it all the more.
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