18th Sunday Year B - Homily 3

Homily 3 - 2015

When Jesus had fed the 5000+, the people were wrapped. But Jesus said, “No, that was just a sign, a sign pointing to something more basic, more important – a kind of food that doesn’t go bad, in fact, that gives eternal life.” So they said, “Well, how do we get that? What more do we need to do?” And Jesus replied, “Believe me, trust me, follow me. I am showing you what God is like.” “Well”, they said, “Moses did something like you did. He fed the people in the desert. But more than that, he fed them with the Torah. He spelt out a whole way of life, that makes Jews so different from others, so much better.” “Well, there is more even than that”, said Jesus. “God wants to give a bread and to nourish not just us Jewish people, but the whole world.” “Tell us about it”, they said. And Jesus said, “I am that bread of life. Follow me, work me out, and you will never be hungry; you will never thirst.”

But fascinatingly, at least in John’s Gospel, Jesus never spelt out a whole way of life when he spoke to the crowds, other than that they trust him as the revelation of God. To the few disciples at his Last Supper, he insisted that they love each other, even as much as he did; but little, if anything, in practical detail. However, John’s Gospel does give a number of signs, that he insisted were pointing to something deeper: the gallons of premium wine at Cana, healing the son of the synagogue leader, intriguing the Samaritan woman, giving sight to a blind man, and even raising Lazarus back to life.

But why did he not really answer today’s crowd’s request, “What must we do if we are to do the works that God wants?”  I wonder if his answer might be something like this. “I know how you are cruelly oppressed by the wealthy landowners buying up your properties. I know you are ruthlessly pressured to pay taxes on the little you do manage to produce. I know you are really hungry at times, most of the time. You need food. It is hard to think of anything else. Yet, is there something even deeper that you really hunger for?” I wonder if all the signs that Jesus worked were really asking, “Was it the brief joy of having a skin-full of wine, the experience of being known and yet accepted, the feeling of being healthy once more, of being able to see, even of coming back from the dead, were those the things that you really wanted?” I think of Jesus’ first words recorded right at the start of the Gospel. Two disciples of John the Baptist followed Jesus, and he turned round and asked them, “What do you want?”

As we listen today to Jesus’ referring to himself as the Bread of Life, is he really asking us, “What do you want? What do you really want?” Do we ever ask ourselves the question? Or do we never question our life style, our attitudes, the quality of our relationships? Are our values really all that much different from those of our surrounding culture? Are we deeply at peace? Do we even know Jesus well enough for him to have any chance of being the Bread of our lives?

In today’s world, the hungry and oppressed crowds number more than 5000 times 5000. Fortunately, we do not figure among them [even if at times for some the going can be tough]. Have we stopped long enough to realise that the privileged lifestyles of us in the Western world are precisely what keep so many people hungry and oppressed?

What do we want? Perhaps to answer the question, and to experience the restless longing for the “food that endures to eternal life”, we need to follow Pope Francis’ urging and adopt what he calls a genuinely contemplative spirituality.