Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, July 31, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Vigil
July 31, 2021

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday, as we enter into the second of five weeks of meditation on the sixth chapter of St. John’s Gospel, in which Jesus speaks to us prophetically about the reality of his presence in the Holy Eucharist and how we should respond to it.
• At the beginning of the Gospel, we see that those who received Jesus’ free meal in the miraculous multiplication of the loaves and fish, on which we focused last Sunday, were looking for another free meal. Jesus called them out on it, because he wanted to help them grow in faith. “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 because of their material hunger and saw 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 come to the Lord not just with wants but real material needs, not knowing how to pay the rent, or put food on the table, purchase medications, or find a job to help support loved ones. 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.
• 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 adult lives working 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 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, “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 of the food that endures to eternal life: 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.” 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.”
• 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.
• 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 self-gift. 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.
• 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, to labor for it, directour efforts toward this as our goal, as our reward, as our desire.
• At the end of this Sunday’s Gospel, still obsessed about food and free meals, the crowds ask Jesus, “What sign can you do, that we may see and believe in you?” saying, “Our ancestors ate manna in the desert, as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’” We remember the story of the manna. If we don’t, it will be this Sunday’s first reading. The Jews were grumbling in the desert, fearful that they would starve to death. So Moses brought their complaints and pleas to God, and God replied by saying, “I am going to rain bread from heaven for you, and each day the people shall go out and gather enough for that day” (Exod 16:4). And every morning for forty years, they awoke to find a miraculous edible dew that looked like coriander seed, with the white like gum resin, tasting like wafers made with honey (Num 11:7; Exod 16:31). They Israelites had no idea what it was, and hence called it “manna,” which literally means, “What is it?” Moses told them, “It is the bread that the Lord has given you to eat” and instructed them to gather as much of it as each one needed for a day. This is how they survived in the desert for forty years, until they reached the promised land. Every morning except the Sabbath God in his wisdom made the Israelites get the manna, but even on the Sabbath, they would eat the second daily portion of manna that they had gotten the day before. The Book of Exodus tells us that God made them do this every day in order to “test them,” to see whether or not they would follow his instruction and be faithful (Exod 16:4).
• Jesus, however, applies the history of the manna to the reality of his presence in the Holy Eucharist, saying that he is the “true manna,” the “true bread … that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” The crowd’s response was materialistic but nevertheless prophetic: “Sir, give us this bread always,” and Jesus replied, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst.”
• If the Jews needed to consume the manna every day in the desert, and Jesus is the true Manna, he is implying that we should be working for this “true Bread” every day. In the Our Father, Jesus taught us to pray, not, “Give us today all the bread we’re going to need this week” or “Give us now all we’ll ever need,” but “Give us this day our daily bread,” because he wanted us to recognize that every day God wants to grant that prayer. The early saints of the Church commented at length about the Greek word we translate as “daily” — epi-ousios — which literally means “super-substantial.” They said it referred less to the material bread that we need to consume for physical survival, but to the bread that goes beyond our substance — the Eucharist — that we need for our souls. The early saints said that Jesus was teaching them to pray that the Father would give them every day the Eucharist. In response to the request of the Jews, “Sir, give us this bread always,” Jesus has, by giving us his body and blood and making it available not just on Sunday in special way, but every day.
• God has desired to give us each day this “daily bread come down from heaven,” because he knows that we need to be spiritually fed each day. I’m convinced from both personal and pastoral experience that one of the real proofs of whether we recognize that the Eucharist really is Jesus, and whether we truly love the Lord, can be seen in our attitude toward daily Mass. Even if a Catholic cannot physically be present every day at Mass because of other pressing responsibilities, our hearts should always be longing for this encounter. That should be our great hunger. “Sir, give us that bread always” and “Give us today our supersubstantial Bread!” should be our most persistent aspirations. And our gratitude to God’s answering that prayer by raining down for us each day this true Bread from heaven should know no bounds.
• “Do not work for the food that perishes but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.” This Sunday, and each day this week, we have a chance, with gratitude and God’s help, to do so.

The Gospel passage on which the homily was based was: 

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