Working for the Food that Endures, Third Monday of Easter, May 6, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Monday of the Third Week of Easter
May 6, 2019
Acts 6:8-15, Ps 119, Jn 6:22-29

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today in the Gospel we continue our annual “second” Easter Octave allowing Jesus to show us the most important way we will be able to experience the newness of life to which our share in his Resurrection is meant to lead us: a communion with him in his Risen life by means of the Holy Eucharist. On Friday, if it were not the feast of SS. Philip and James, we would have seen the foretaste of the miraculous multiplication of his Body and Blood throughout all time and space in the multiplication of the loaves and fish. This was not only a Messianic sign, even a divine sign of the Lord’s preparing a banquet on a mountain for his people (Is 25), but something pointing to the two greater banquets to which that miracle pointed: the banquet of the Eucharist and the banquet of eternal life. Immediately after that miracle, Jesus went up on the mountain to pray and the disciples got into the boat from and crossed westward toward Capernaum. As we saw on Saturday, Jesus walked on the water toward them to show that he transcended the power of death, symbolized by the churning waters and the drowning they portended. When the apostles disembark we have today’s scene.
• Those who had received the free meal had come the seven-mile journey along the north lip of the Sea of Galilee looking for Jesus there. Because they knew Jesus hadn’t gotten into the boat with the other disciples, they asked, “Rabbi, when did you get there?” But Jesus wasn’t interested in small talk. Jesus wanted to help them to grow in faith, to help them to recognize why they were following him and to challenge him to follow him for the right reasons. “Amen, I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs” — in other words, because you saw me perform a miracle and it’s led you to put faith in me and in my words — “but because you ate your fill of the loaves.” They came looking for another free meal, a divine handout, seeking Jesus as a means to address their material hungers and needs. This is not evil in itself. Jesus would teach us to pray, “Give us today our daily bread.” Many of us come to the Lord not just with wants but real material needs, not knowing how we’re going to pay the rent, or put food on the table, purchase the medications they need, or find a job to help support those they love. God wants to hear these prayers. As a loving Father, he wants us to bring our needs to him. It wasn’t this that Jesus was criticizing. Jesus was criticizing the fact that they had stopped there, that they were concerned most about their material needs. Just as with all the healing miracles, however, Jesus in the multiplication of the loaves and the fish was doing a sign to help them to come to ask him for something far more than loaves and fish.
• Jesus tells them, and tells us, “Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.” So many people, good people, spend most of their lives working in to put food on the table, to nourish themselves and their families. We all know how important that is, but Jesus is saying that as hard as we work to fulfill that duty of love, we must work much harder for the food that he will give us, the food of eternal life. What is that food that God puts on the table? What is that nourishment of eternal life? If most people spend forty hours a week or more, sometimes working two or three jobs for perishables, what is the imperishable nutrition for which Jesus tells us we should labor even more strenuously?
• There are four interconnected answers to that question:
  • The first response is knowing God’s Word. In the battles to which Jesus was exposed in the desert, Jesus was asked by the devil to turn stone into bread to feed his incredible hunger after having fasted for 40 days and 40 nights. Jesus responded by saying, as we heard in the Alleluia verse, “Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” To work for this food means to strive to know, understand, treasure and put into practice all the words that come from God’s mouth to feed us.
  • This leads directly to the second common interpretation: Doing God’s will. Jesus says elsewhere in the Gospel, “My food is to do the will of the one who sent me and to accomplish his work.” To work for the food that endures for eternal life is to strive to do God’s will. That’s why it’s unsurprising that Jesus later in this Bread of Life Discourse at the Capernaum synagogue, will say, “For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me; and this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up at the last day.” We sang in today’s Psalm that blessed are those who follow the law of the Lord, who do his will, who obey what he commands. Jesus wants us to have that beatitude!
  • The third is the work of faith. When Jesus says, “Do not work for food that perishes but for the food that endures for eternal life,
    that the Son of Man will give you,” the crowds immediately replied, “What can we do to accomplish the works of God?” There’s a particular type of work necessary to labor for the enduring nourishment Christ gives, and Jesus makes it very clear: “This is the work of God, that you believe in the one he sent.” We need to believe in Jesus and believe in what he says and does. That work of faith is the most essential element in laboring for eternal life in general, but also it’s essential for us to believe in what Jesus says about the upcoming fourth response.
  • The fourth answer is the one that ought to be obvious to us who have heard the Bread of Life discourse many times: it’s Jesus’ presence in the Eucharist. As Jesus will explain to us in upcoming days, the Eucharist is the food prophesied by the Old Testament daily miracle of the manna. Just as God rained down manna each day to feed the people of God as they wandered in the desert before coming to the promised land, so God the Father rains down Jesus, the Living Bread come down from heaven, each day as our spiritual food in the Eucharist.
• All four of these interpretations, of course, go together in the celebration of the Mass. We begin with God’s word, we make an act of faith with regard to it, we unite ourselves with God’s will and “do this in memory of [him]” and then have the awesome privilege of receiving the Word made Flesh, God’s daily spiritual manna, in the Eucharist. Becoming one body with Christ in the Eucharist is meant to help us become one with his will and faithfully accomplish it in the world, as we, united with Christ our head, become his hands, his feet, his heart, and his mouth in the world. This is what the risen life of a Christian in union with Risen Jesus is all about.
• But the main point for us is not simply to know what is the imperishable nourishment for which we should be striving but actually to live for it. Many Catholics, just like the first century Jews, spend more of our time hungering and working for hamburgers and french fries, for pancakes and sausages, for salads and sweets, than we do for Jesus’ word, will and flesh and blood. Sometimes those of us in the priesthood and in religious life likewise need to review our intentionality in following the Lord today, whether it’s really out of the hunger that flows from love, or out of routine, past choices, security, etc.  That’s why Jesus repeats this Eucharistic course for us year during the Easter Season, because so many of us have not really put these words into action — and Jesus wants to help us.
• In today’s first reading, St. Stephen, one of the first seven deacons, men “filled with faith and the Holy Spirit,” ordained by the apostles to help carry out the Church’s charity, is an example of someone who labored for the food that God gave. He was willing to give his whole life to obtain the food of everlasting life. Today in the first reading we see him, “filled with grace and power [and] working great wonders and signs among the people.” Jews from various nations had come to debate him, but they couldn’t withstand his wisdom and the power of the Holy Spirit speaking through him. So they sought to do to him what the Jewish leaders had previously done to Jesus: accuse him with false witnesses of blasphemously speaking against Moses, God and the Temple because he was passing on the Words of Jesus, on every syllable of which he was constructing his life. Tomorrow we will have the account of his martyrdom. But in between, what we unfortunately won’t hear at Mass is his tremendous testimony before the Sanhedrin. I’d urge you to read it at home today by turning to the sixth and seventh chapters of the Acts of the Apostles. What we see there is just how deeply he has assimilated the Word of God and was living on every syllable of it, showing how all of salvation history had culminated in Jesus and was meant to culminate in the life of every believer. So much was he laboring with faith for God’s word, will, and Word-made-flesh that the mortal danger he was in didn’t frighten him. He had become so united with Jesus Christ in his Eucharistic self-offering that he would give his own body and shed his own blood in union with Jesus’ for the salvation of the very members of the Sanhedrin who would sentence him to death and especially for the conversion of the man (Saul of Tarsus) who was presiding over his execution. Now St. Stephen shares in the eternal wedding banquet, being nourished forever by the food of eternity. We ask him to intercede for us that we will likewise be characterized by the same hunger, the same faith, the same grace and power, the same risen Christian life, and strive today, in all our work, for the food that endures forever.
• I would like to make three other applications. Today is the 41st anniversary of my first Holy Communion. Whenever I think back to that day, at St. Michael’s Parish in Lowell, MA, I remember how much preparation went into it: at least four years of longing, from the time I thought that those who received Jesus in Holy Communion were the luckiest people alive and that the priest who was able to hold him in his hands and give him to others the most fortunate creatures in the universe; so much preparation and attention, a nice used suit, several good confessions, the attempt to bring my young life into a holy Communion with the God I would receive. I think we all love the prayer that Mother Teresa and the Missionaries of Charity put in every sacristy with regard to priests, to celebrate this Mass as if it were your first Mass, your last Mass, your only Mass. Each of us is called to receive the Lord in Holy Communion each time as if it were the first, the last, or the only time we would. And to labor for that gift! The second application is to Fr. Ernest Blais who was my predecessor as pastor of Notre Dame (later St. Bernadette) parish in Fall River, who died 25 years ago today and for whom I’ve been asked to offer Mass. I didn’t know him personally, but we shared a bond. He had bequeathed his beautiful gold chalice, filled with precious gems, to the parish at his death and we would use it for the greatest feast days of the year. We know that Jesus didn’t have such a precious chalice during the Last Supper and shouldn’t overemphasize the things of the liturgy, yet at the same time, Fr. Blais’ munificence in spending so much on a beautiful paten and chalice to touch the body and blood of the Lord, says something. I never appraised them, but my guess is that they were worth at least $25,000, maybe even $50,000, the equivalent of two, three or more years of a priest’s salary. Fr. Blais was showing that he was working for the food that endures to eternal life by working so hard for what would contain that eternal food. We remember him today and ask the Lord to bring him to the fulfillment of the eucharistic banquet in heaven. The third application is to Fr. John Mendicoa, a priest friend of mine from my youth, who died suddenly on Thursday of leukemia that I found out about only a few hours before he died. He was originally from the Basque region of Spain and came to our parish when he was teaching at the University of Lowell. All of us were captivated by how he would pray the Mass, especially the consecration, with his thick accent. We knew that he firmly believed that he was holding God in his hands. I also witnessed his Eucharistic love later in life. In 2011, he was falsely accused of abuse in the 1980s (which is when I first knew him, working for five years at St. Michael’s rectory). The accusations were found unsubstantiated after a year’s investigation and he was given retirement status, but — for reasons beyond me, but what seems to be so that certain victims’ groups wouldn’t protest him as if he were guilty and as if the Archdiocese of Boston weren’t doing it’s job to keep people safe, even though he was innocent — kept in restricted ministry. He needed to ask for permission to celebrate public Masses. It was a very difficult cross for him, but he kept on living a Eucharistic life. He was from a generation of priests who never really celebrated private Masses, but during these years of restricted ministry, as he lived with and cared for Fr. Paul Bailey, my childhood pastor who died three months ago today, he would attend daily Mass at Holy Trinity Parish in West Harwich, MA, and adore the Eucharistic Lord every day at the beautiful Our Lady of Life Eucharistic Chapel on the parish property. We pray for him, too, that all his labors and love for Jesus in the Holy Eucharist have in fact led him to eternal life and that his faith in Christ, the one essential work, has led him from walking by faith to the beatific vision.

The readings for today’s Mass were: