Getting Up to Eat the Bread Christ Gives For Our Life and the Life of the World, 19th Sunday (B), August 11, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Chapel of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
August 11, 2024
1 Kings 19:4-8, Ps 34, Eph 4:30-5:2, Jn 6:41-51

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

The following text guided the homily: 

• In today’s first reading, we have a dramatic scene of Elijah’s praying for death. The evil queen Jezebel had made a vow, sending a messenger to Elijah to announce, “May the gods do thus to me and more if by this time tomorrow I have not done with your life what was done to” the prophets of Ba’al, whom Elijah had just humiliated and had put to death. So Elijah fled for his life to Beersheba, 113 miles from Mt. Carmel where he had defeated the 300 priests of Ba’al. Once there, he left his servant and went a further day’s journey alone into the desert, where, like the ancient Israelites who had wandered in the desert pursued by an evil ruler, he experienced profound desolation and much like Moses (Num 11:15), prayed for death. “Enough, O Lord!,” he cried out. “Take my life for I am not better than my fathers.” Out of exhaustion and depression, he fell asleep under a broom tree but was awakened twice by an angel. The angel instructed him, “Get up and eat, else the journey will be too long for you!” Elijah did as the angel had commanded. He was given there in the desert bread the shape of a cake like a host and a jar with water, evocative of the jars of water in Cana that Jesus would convert into wine as a prophecy of how he would later convert wine into his blood. Strengthened by the food and drink in a way that no ordinary food could do, he was able to journey through the desert for 263 miles more over the following 40 days and nights. He trekked to Mount Horeb on the Sinai Peninsula, where the Lord would speak to him in a gentle whisper like a breeze, console and strengthen him, and then send him 450 miles north to Damascus where he would have the privilege to anoint Elisha as his successor. I cite the big numbers of his journeys — 113, 263 and 450 miles — to give some indication of the type of hunger we’re supposed to have for divine nourishment and the type of potency what God gives contains.
• “Get up and eat, else the journey will be too long for you!” Those words that the angel of the Lord said to Elijah Jesus himself effectively says to all of us. We are now in the third week of Jesus’ five-week course on the mysterious reality of his body and blood in the Eucharist, which Jesus taught for the first time in the Synagogue of Capernaum and renews for us live every third summer. Two weeks ago, we had the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fish, which was a foreshadowing of the multiplication of the meal of the Last Supper throughout every land and time in order to feed the spiritually famished human race. Last Sunday Jesus urged us not to work for food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life that he would give us, lest the journey of life prove too much for us!
• As we saw last week, in response to the crowds’ asking him to one-up Moses in the desert who gave them manna from heaven every day for 40 years, Jesus told them that it wasn’t Moses who rained down from heaven each morning like dew on the ground fine flakes like hoarfrost, with the appearance of bedellium, tasting like wafers from coriander seed mixed with money. It was God Himself, Jesus said, who not only gave them that bread but was planning to give them the true Manna. In today’s continuation of Jesus’ words, Jesus emphasizes that he is that true manna, the nourishment God the Father provides for us in the desert of life until we reach the eternal Promised Land. He tells us, “I am the bread that came down from heaven,” and, later, “I am the bread of life.” Just as God through the angel gave Elijah hearth cakes and water, just like God through Moses gave the Israelites manna, quails and water from the rock, so as the culmination of both of these prophetic miracles, God the Father wants to give us Jesus as the true Manna, the bread that is alive that comes to bring us fully alive. It’s a basic truth of nutrition that we become what we eat, by assimilating the nutrients we consume. In the Eucharist, something even greater happens: Jesus incorporates us into himself. He tells us that when we consume him, we become one with his life, and, since he is eternal, to consume him is to enter somehow, even now, everlasting life. Jesus astonishingly tells us, “Your ancestors ate the manna in the desert but they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven so that one may eat it and not die. … I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever, and the bread I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
• This is an awesome mystery that exceeds human comprehension. Jesus tries to help us to understand a little what he wishes to do later in the dialogue. By analogy, he states, “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him. … Just as the Father who has life sent me and I have life because of the Father, so also the one who feeds on me will have life because of me.” Just as Jesus draws his life eternally from God the Father, so he wants us to draw our whole life from him. We’re able to do that by remaining in him and he is us through eating his flesh and drinking his blood. Through that holy communion, his life becomes the principle of our life, his living Bread brings us alive, and since his life is eternal, death for us will be just a passage into a new and permanent form of life in communion with him who has triumphed even over death.
• When Jesus first said these words, they were met mainly by incomprehension and doubt. In today’s Gospel, the crowds murmured, “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph? Do we not know his father and mother? Then how can he say, ‘I have come down from heaven?’” To them, Jesus was basically a peripatetic preaching construction worker from Nazareth, and they felt justified to question his credentials. As we’ll see next week, after Jesus doubles down — rather than waters down — his words on the centrality, indeed the necessity, of holy communion to have his life in us, the crowds renew their objection, exclaiming, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” Eventually, as we will see in two weeks, most of his disciples, his followers, his friends, were persuaded more by the doubts of the crowds than by trust in him and his words, as they complained aloud, “This saying is hard; who can accept it?”
• We shouldn’t dismiss these objections and these questions. Jesus’ teaching on the Eucharist is hard and the questions they asked flow logically from the brains he has given us. To gnaw on someone’s flesh and drink someone’s blood sounds, at first glance, the fare of cannibals. To Jews who couldn’t touch blood without becoming ritually impure, to drink blood sounded not just downright Draculan but sacrilegious. None of this would make sense until exactly a year later, during the next Passover, when Jesus would take bread and wine into his hands during the Last Supper in the Upper Room, totally change them into his Body and Blood and say, “take and eat” and “take and drink.” We need to confront these questions the crowd had, even the disciples had, because they echo and foretell many of the questions our hyper-empirical, scientistic age still very much has.
• Jesus responds to them in today’s Gospel, not by arguing according to their categories, trying to explain a mystery in rationalistic terms and reduce the infinite to the finite. He, rather, tries to open them — and us — up to the working of grace without which we’ll never be able to understand or enter into the mystery. He told the crowds, “Stop murmuring among yourselves. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him,” and then adds, “It is written in the prophets: ‘They shall all be taught by God.’ Everyone who listens to my Father, and learns from him, comes to me.”
• Today we give thanks that God the Father has indeed drawn us to Jesus, that he has spoken to us and taught us that Jesus is his beloved Son with whom he is well-pleased and called us to listen to him. We give him thanks for helping us to recognize that Jesus is far more than a carpenter, the son of Mary and the putative son of Joseph, and to trust in him, even and especially when he speaks to us in challenging ways, like he does about his Real Presence in the Eucharist and how we need to eat his flesh and drink his blood to have life. We thank him for this gift of docility, this capacity to be stretched beyond our human categories, to stake our whole life on what Jesus says and gives. Jesus’ listeners at the time did not realize that God the Father was right then and there, in the Capernaum synagogue, drawing them to his Son and that he was attempting to teach them at that moment through Jesus, if only they would listen and learn. But the hearts of most — not just or principally their ears and minds — were not open to this dramatic upgrade of faith. We give God thanks, however, for giving us that gift, so that rather than murmuring about the difficulty of Jesus’ words, we can respond with praise, gratitude, amazement, trust, hope and love for the grace that allows us to take the leap of faith. We thank him for drawing us to his Son in the Eucharist so that through him we might continue to listen and learn from God as we listen and learn from his definitive Word-made-flesh. We thank him specifically for how Jesus seeks to help us live a Eucharistic life, drawing our life from him in the Eucharist, as he seeks to nourish us each day as our true Manna, lest the journey be too much for us.
• In the Reponsorial Psalm we prayed, “Taste and see the goodness of the Lord,” and in the holy Eucharist, God the Father wants us not just to only to taste and see the Lord’s goodness but consume the good Lord himself! As we do so, not only will we bless the Lord at all times and never let his praise escape our lips, but we be helped to take our refuge in him as we consume him. This is the means by which, to draw on what St. Paul wrote the Christians in Ephesus in today’s epistle, we will not grieve Holy Spirit but please Him who has been sent by the Father to draw us to Jesus in the Eucharist. The means by which God helps us to become true imitators of Him as beloved children is by becoming one sons and daughters of God in God the Son. This is how, too, we will fulfill the prayer the Holy Spirit inspired St. Paul to make, that we will live in love as Christ loved us, because in the Eucharist, we receive that love outpoured for us in Jesus’ sacrificial offering. That’s how we interiorly listen and learn from God how to offer our own bodies as a holy and acceptable sacrifice, united to his, the only worship that makes sense (Rom 12:1-2).
• Over the course of the 65-day National Eucharistic Pilgrimage I was able to make during the last few months with my intrepid fellow pilgrims on the Seton Route, we had a chance to ponder a great deal today’s readings, especially the journey of Elijah and Jesus’ words in the Bread of Life discourse. They would come up regularly in the votive Masses of the Holy Eucharist we would often celebrate. The pilgrimage as a whole was meant to show how the whole of our Christian life is dynamic because the Church is a pilgrim Church on earth. We, the Bride and the Body of Christ, move together with the Bridegroom and Head, who never tells us “Stay where you are!” or “Don’t move,” but always bids us, “Come!,” “Follow me!,” and “Go!” This pilgrimage of Christian is ultimately a Eucharistic procession on which Jesus wants to us each day not just on the outside but on the inside as our daily Manna. The Lord sends his angels, in fact his ministers, to us each day to startle us from somnambulating through life and feeds us not with hearth cakes and water but what they point to: Jesus’ own body and blood. Jesus the true Manna rained down from heaven above each day helps us on each day’s journey through the desert until we finally come to God’s mountain and the promised land. Each day, Jesus comes to us as our “viaticum,” from the Latin expression, “with you on the way.” This word has traditionally been used to refer to the last time we receive Holy Communion on earth, as we’re preparing to die, so that the Eucharistic Jesus might be with us on the passage to eternity where we await his everlasting embrace. But just as St. Teresa of Calcutta wanted placed in all the sacristies of the chapels of Missionaries of Charity throughout the world the instruction for priests to celebrate Mass like it were their first Mass, their last Mass, and their only Mass, so each of us every day should approach receiving Jesus in Holy Communion like viaticum, like our first Holy Communion, like we would want to on our death bed, and like we would if, similar to Blessed Imelda Lambertini, we would only receive him once on earth. Jesus’ love for us is so great that, to strengthen us on the journey of life lest it be too much for us, he doesn’t just feed us once or twice and send us on our way for 40 days, he doesn’t just want to nourish us once a week, but desires to strengthen us from within each day, so that, regardless of who is hunting us down, or how hot the sun is, or how long the journey may be, we will know that we never confront those problems alone, but that we do so in loving communion with the Creator of the world, the Savior of the Human Race, and the living Bread who has conquered even death itself.
• It’s key for us never to lose this sense of the Eucharistic pilgrimage. Sometimes it can be tempting, with a chapel in one’s convent, to think that the journey to Jesus and with Jesus after having received him might be short and relatively easy. The National Eucharistic Pilgrimage was meant to communicate that it was worth a journey of many miles a day, even thousands of miles and more. This point was underlined for me this morning as I was exchanging text messages with one of the Seton pilgrims who is in Scotland for a wedding. She got up early to walk over an hour each way to Mass. She sent me a photo of a path through a field she needed to traverse, the grass was well over a basketball player’s head and the path almost not discernible. Yet with faith and love for the Eucharistic Lord she walked through it. When she texted me the image, she wrote, quoting Robert Frost, “The road less traveled!” And I texted back, “Which will make all the difference!” Sometimes to experience the difference the Eucharistic Jesus makes, we need to be willing to take that road less traveled, as Marina, this pilgrim, did. Sometimes we need to be willing to journey 3.5 miles through fields for an hour in a foreign country. Sometimes we need to sacrifice sleep and convenience to grasp a little bit more easily the incredible gift offered to us each day on the journey of life and come to seize that treasure, each day, as the pearl of great price.
• Someone who lived the way today’s readings summon us to live is the great saint we celebrate today, Saint Clare of Assisi, the celestial patroness of our beloved Sister Clare Roy, MC. Saint Clare desired to live in the manner of the holy Gospels and left the world to unite herself to the Eucharistic Lord in his poverty, chastity, obedience, in his suffering and love to the extreme. She lived at a time in which religious were permitted to receive Jesus in Holy Communion only seven times a year, but she got her life from that pure living Bread and always sought to make the most of each reception. Over the last 28 years of her life, from her sick bed, she embroidered corporals for the celebration of Mass and sent them to the Churches all over the Spoleto valley. She’s the patron saint of television because, 700 years before the invention of TV, she was granted the grace to be able to see what was happening in the chapel in a vision on the wall of her cell. As St. John Paul II wrote about her in a letter 31 years ago today marking the 800th anniversary of her birth, “In reality Clare’s whole life was a eucharist because, like Francis, from her cloister she raised up a continual ‘thanksgiving’ to God in her prayer, praise, supplication, intercession, weeping, offering and sacrifice. She accepted everything and offered it to the Father in union with the infinite ‘thanks’ of the only-begotten Son, the Child, the Crucified, the risen One, who lives at the right hand of the Father.” He described in that letter her confidence in the power of Christ in the Eucharist and how she entrusted not only her life and the life of her fellow Poor Clares but also the fate of Assisi to the Eucharistic Jesus when in 1240 the Saracen troops employed by Emperor Frederick II were trying to invade San Damiano Convent. Jesus spoke to her from the Eucharist saying that they “will be defended by my protection.” John Paul II underlined, “Although she was very sick, [she] prostrated herself with the help of two sisters before the silver ciborium containing the Eucharist, which she had placed in front of the refectory door that the Emperor’s troops were about to storm.” Christ kept his promise. The troops were thoroughly intimidated by him and the courage the sisters drew from him, and repelled. We ask her on her feast day to intercede for us so that we might have a similar faith in Christ’s Real Presence, in his power, his love and his protection.
• Today, as we prepare to receive the True Manna, we don’t murmur like the ancient Israelites in the desert when for the first time they found the heavenly bread rained down like the dew, “Man-na?” or “What is this?” We don’t have to say “What is this?” because we know what, or better Whom, the True Manna is. And we come her today to see him, to taste him and to be changed by him. Inspired by what the Lord did for Elijah, by the faith of St. Clare, and by the reality of our Christian pilgrimage, we can cry out with the words of St. Thomas Aquinas, when it seems that earthly leaders are against us like Jezebel and Ahab were against Elijah, “Bella premunt hostilia; Da robur, fer auxilium.” Even though “hostile wars press on,” we turn to God to “give strength, offer aid,” confident that this is what he always does. When we look at the journey of our life and how much of it, and how many obstacles, seem still in front of us, we turn to Jesus in the Eucharist and exclaim, “Ecce panis Angelórum, Factus cibus viatórum, vere panis filiórum.” “Behold the Bread of Angels, having been made the food of pilgrims, the true bread of God’s beloved sons and daughters.” He is the one who has become our food for the journey as much-loved children of God. And in response to the questions of every age that wonder about the Son of God’s incarnation and the way he seeks to continue that miracle in the sacrifice of the altar, we proclaim, “Panis angelicus fit panis hominum; dat panis caelicus figuris terminum; O res mirabilis: manducat Dominum pauper, servus et humilis.” “The bread of angels has become the bread of men and women. … O what a mind blowing reality! A poor and humble servants eats the Lord!” This is what — more precisely He is the One Who — makes our journey not just too much for us, but doable and delightful! And today the Lord himself comes to nourish these humble and servants with himself!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

So be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love,
as Christ loved us and handed himself over for us
as a sacrificial offering to God for a fragrant aroma.

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