18th Sunday Year B

See Commentary on (John 6:24-35) John 6:22-50


Homily 1 - 2009

I want to pick up a couple of issues from today's Gospel. The first is Jesus' comment: The bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world. There is an assumption there worth teasing out: it is the assumption that in some sense, in the sense that matters, the world needs life.

In the Gospel of John, when the author talks of the world, what he is referring to is not so much individuals as such but people together. We're different when we are together: We do things that we wouldn't do if we were by ourselves.  Look at the ways people behave at football matches, young people at celebrity concerts, kids in gangs, men at war – killing, torturing, etc. We will justify things that we would never agree with otherwise by saying that they are in the national interest.  Look at the heartless, brutal ways we deal with asylum seekers – so many of them fleeing regimes where they have been tortured and brutalised, hoping to find a decent country where they will be respected, welcome and safe, and able to live in peace.  Success, power, materialism, human and environmental abuse are all death-dealing in their own ways.

We need each other. It's in our own interest that we band together. That is the stuff of civilisation. Inevitably, we have our social, political, religious, sporting institutions. Yet, unfortunately, we often get our sense of belonging, we often get our sense of security by seeing ourselves as distinct from nameless others who don't belong to our group. We tend to see ourselves as better than .., as superior to ..  We know who we are by being clear who we are not, who we're against, or who are against us - and we come to look for a God who is on our side. But there is no such God as a God-on-our-side. God wants to give life to the whole world.

Even within our own groups, all is not always well. We thrive by competition. Others can be threats.  There is enormous floating anger in our world - road rage, violent protests. We even fight over our sporting allegiances.

We need redemption, not just as individuals; we need redemption when we band together.  Our group dynamics, our social dysfunction, the spontaneous ways we see each other, and treat each other when we're together, need redemption. Left to themselves, our rivalries can even, at times, become murderous.

We need the bread of God that gives life to the world. But, for that to happen, something else is necessary. As the Gospel said: This is the work of God - this is the way to become part of God's project of salvation - that we believe in him who God has sent. Our world will change to the extent that we believe in Jesus.

What is so magic about believing in? What does the Gospel mean by believe in? It's not just saying Yes to a number of statements. It means trusting Jesus, trusting his way; entering into relationship with him; falling in love with him: entrusting ourselves to an open-ended journey whose destination we're not sure of and certainly can't control.

At the end of today's passage, Jesus said: Whoever comes to me will never be hungry; whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. Entrusting ourselves to Jesus enables us to get in touch with our deepest hunger, our deepest thirst, our deepest heart desires. Once in touch with them, we begin to see the sheer superficiality, the emptiness, of so much that drives people.

We see our rivalries, and our self-interest for what they are – and we become free of them. God's project for saving our world gets under way: This is the work of God that you believe in the one whom he has sent.


Homily 2 – 2012

Which is it over the week-end? Football? or the Olympics? Or switching between both? Or neither?  Even gold medalists grow old.  The winners at Beijing struggle to succeed in London; and probably won't figure at all at the next Olympics.  Glory doesn't last long – unless they can land a job as a TV Commentator.

When I was a lad I used to dream – dream of being named the best on the field by Bro Bill O'Malley at St Pat's College in Ballarat.  The dream never became reality.  When the Redemptorists gave us the annual retreat at the College, I used to dream of being a martyr.  Thank God, that didn't eventuate either!   Dreaming, yearning – desiring.  I suppose we all do a bit of it – whether we're young or old.  Unless I'm mistaken, the Buddhist way of life would see the journey towards Nirvana, the goal of life, as the quieting, and eventual elimination, of all desire.

All this musing has been going on in the back of my mind as I have been reflecting on today's Gospel passage from St John.  There, Jesus spoke about working for food that endures to eternal life.  Eternal life …  He speaks of eternal life as both a now experience and our future destiny.  At the end of the passage, he observed: whoever comes to me will never be hungry; whoever believes in me will never thirst.  Hungering, thirsting … dreaming, yearning … Jesus seems to be saying that eternal life is not the elimination of desire but the fulfillment of all desires through the satisfaction of the deepest desire.

Which raises the question: What might be that deepest desire? Here I think our Christian faith gives us the inside running.  Like Judaism, like Islam, we believe that there is one God.  But the oneness of the God we believe in – the totally Other – is not a sort of solid oneness, a solitary God.  Without really understanding it all, we believe that this one God is somehow Trinity.

Through the action on us of what we call the Spirit of God, we have come to believe that Jesus is God; but yet distinct from the ultimate ground of Being [that we refer to as the Father of Jesus].  Our words fail miserably; but we Christians see our one God not so much as solid or as solitary, but as relational.  For us, ultimate reality is relational.

And it is in the image of that inherently relational God that humanity has been cast.   We are truly ourselves, fully human, only in relationship.  The goal of living is not to stand alone on any podium, but to relate in love, not better, holier, more perfect than others, but faithful in mutual love.   The task of life, the working for God that Jesus spoke of, is to learn to be faithful to others – beginning [or climaxing] with Jesus himself.   In his words: believing in the one the Father has sent, or, more explicitly: whoever comes to me will never be hungry; whoever believes in me will never thirst.  [Believing, of course, in John's Gospel, is not assenting to statements about God or Jesus, but in surrendering, entrusting ourselves, to them in total faithfulness.]

As we will say at the end of the Eucharistic Prayer:  “Through Jesus, with him, and in him, O God almighty Father, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all honour and glory is yours …”

And we can be faithful to Jesus because he has first been faithful to us.  He truly believes in each one of us.


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.


 

Homily 4 - 2018

Today’s Gospel passage follows on from last week, where Jesus fed the crowd of five thousand men plus a probably similar number of women and even children. Quite a spectacular feat – especially appreciated, given that most of them were free to gather as they did because they were unemployed or underemployed. They lived on, or under, the poverty line; and were often hungry. Overnight the scene had shifted from a deserted area around the lakeside back to Capernaum. But many of the same people were in this crowd, and gave him an enthusiastic welcome.

The Gospel writer, John, wanted to speak of a Jesus who was interested in something more basic than feeding them, and went on to have Jesus say, “Don’t work for food that cannot last”, that runs out once you have eaten it [like it had the day before]. Rather, he has Jesus say, “Work for food that endures to eternal life.”

With mention of eternal life, the Gospel narrative changes, and becomes more a meditation on what Jesus really is on about. It is directed no longer to the Jewish crowd but to the members of the Christian community for whom John wrote the Gospel. But, as context for the meditation, John has Jesus continue, as it were, his conversation with the Jewish crowd. He immediately introduces the literary technique that he follows elsewhere in his Gospel: he has people misunderstand Jesus. So, after he has Jesus say, “Work for food that endures to eternal life”, he has the crowd ask, “What must we do if we are to do the works that God wants?” This opens up into the real issue, and provides the opportunity to have Jesus say, “This is working for God: you must believe in the one he has sent”, that is, Jesus himself.

The crowd wants to be told explicitly what to do. They have been brought up on detailed commandments, on spelt-out ways of doing things – as you train children. No need to grow up – just work harder. But Jesus insists instead that they, “Believe in the one God has sent” – Believe in me; trust me; entrust yourselves to me. That is adult stuff – not unlike, Fall in love with me … then work it out for yourselves. Once you fall in love with someone, you don’t need anyone to tell you what to do – you know it naturally; and the more you love, the more you want to do it, and you do it freely and willingly – and it’s great.

This is highly relevant for us. Look at our Church. It is getting smaller – people opting out in great numbers. The drift will continue unless we learn to grow up, to get beyond doing simply what we are told, content merely to stay on the receiving end, expecting to be looked after and entertained. Instead, we need really to “believe in” Christ and become enthusiastic about him.

Traditionally, there have been four main triggers to arouse enthusiasm about Jesus. People are either fascinated by the truth of what he had to say; or are drawn to his integrity and pursuit for social justice; or appreciate the emotional freedom released through charismatic experiences; or find him through prayer and contemplation. Growth continues as they learn to integrate all four.

Back to the story: Jesus’ mention of believing in “the one God has sent” got the crowd thinking of Moses, and they suggest that Jesus work some sign to confirm his credentials, as Moses did in the desert of Sinai,"Our fathers had manna to eat in the desert” – bread from heaven, provided by God. Jesus said there is something even better. God, in Jesus, is giving a kind of bread that “gives life to the world”; in fact, Jesus is himself “the bread of life”. Then he added, “Whoever comes to me will never be hungry; whoever believes in me will never thirst” – which will introduce next Sunday’s reflection on the further potential impact of Jesus on the lives of believers.


 

 Homily 5 - 2021

In today’s passage from the Gospel of John, Jesus urged his hearers to “work for food that endures to eternal life, the kind of food the Son of Man is offering you.”

In their desire for further clarity, they asked Jesus what working for the food that endures to eternal life might involve, or, as they put it themselves, what they should do in practice “to do the works that God wanted”. That seemed near enough for Jesus, so he answered, “This is working for God: you must believe in the one he has sent” — namely in Jesus himself.

Not expecting that answer from Jesus, they asked for reassurance, “What sign will you give to show us that we should believe in you? What work will you do?” And for good measure, they suggested that Jesus do something like what happened twelve centuries earlier when, while Moses was leading the Jewish People to freedom from their bitter enslavement in Egypt, “their Fathers had manna to eat in the desert.” And they quoted Psalm 78 for good measure, “He gave them bread from heaven to eat.”

To clarify any confusion on their part, Jesus remarked that “It was not Moses who gave you bread from heaven.” And to make it totally clear who was at work among them now [forget about twelve centuries ago!], Jesus added, “It is my Father who gives you the bread from heaven, the true bread; for the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world”. [All present tense!] Not surprisingly, they asked, “Sir, give us that bread always”.

And then Jesus took things a step further - and dropped the bombshell! He said, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry; whoever believes in me will never thirst”. That “whoever” includes us as well.

Why John wrote his Gospel was precisely to invite us to check it all out — not simply to take him at his word, but to to check out what he wrote against our own personal experience of Jesus in our lives.

“This is working for God: you must believe in the one he has sent”. Somehow, the quality of our faith transforms us — as food does. What is food that endures to eternal life like? How would you describe your experience of it to yourself? Never hunger? Never thirst? How long have you had to feel your way into that? And how would you put it into words now?

John’s Gospel will continue to challenge us over the next few weeks. And though the stage has been set, he has not even mentioned yet the mystery of the Eucharist. That is still to come.