Working for the Food that Endures, 18th Sunday (B), August 1, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Shrine of Our Lady of Martyrs, Auriesville, New York
Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
August 1, 2021
Ex 16:2-4.12-15, Ps 78 Eph 4:17.20-24, Jn 6:24-35

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

The following text guided the homily: 

• Today we enter together into the second week of Jesus’ five-week course on the mystery 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. Last week 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-infamished human race.
• At the beginning of today’s Gospel, we see that those who received that free meal were looking for another one. When they realized Jesus and his disciples were no longer with them on the northeastern side of the Sea of Galilee, they got into boats and rowed against the wind to Capernaum, where Peter, Andrew, James and John had had their fishing business, and had become, in the mind of Jesus’ disciples, his home base. They tried to make small talk about when and how Jesus had arrived there, but Jesus wanted to focus on far important things. “Amen, I tell you,” he said, “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. 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.”
  • 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. Jesus says that we must be striving for him as our food, hungering for him more than ravenous boys long for hamburgers and French fries, and exerting ourselves full-time to come into communion.
• All four of these interpretations 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 even more one with his will and faithfully accomplish it in the world.
• The main point for us, however, 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, direct our efforts toward this as our goal, as our reward, as our desire. In the reading from the Letter to the Ephesians today, St. Paul tells us, “You must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. That is not how you learned Christ. [Rather] … you should put away the old self of your former way of life, corrupted through deceitful desires, be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and put on the new self, created in God’s way in righteousness and holiness of truth.” We Catholics are supposed to live differently than all the rest. We need to put away our former ways and become a new creation. Whereas so many in the world strive for riches, fame, power, pleasure, security and safety, we Christians seeks Jesus Christ, choosing him as the pearl of great price over all the riches of the world, choosing to be despised with him over being praised by worldly opinion makers, choosing to suffer with him rather than have a life of comfort, choosing to be accounted weak him with him rather than a worldly mover and shaker. We strive to attain Christ in faith, in his word, in his will, and most especially in the Holy Eucharist.
• How much do we work for Jesus as the Food that endures to eternal life? At the end of today’s Gospel, there’s a dialogue that helps bring things into greater relief. The crowds who had followed Jesus and the disciples across the Sea of Galilee, still obsessed about food and free meals, 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.’” Today’s first reading focuses on the story of the manna. The Israelites 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 white gum-like 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. They said to him, “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.”
• It’s an extraordinary dialogue with a very important lesson. 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, whether we’re genuinely laboring for the food that endures to eternal life, 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 duties or because of a shortage of priests offering daily Mass in their area, 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.

• This love for the Lord each day characterized the life of the North American Martyrs and Saint Kateri. As soon as it was explained to Saint Kateri that the Eucharist is not a thing but Jesus Christ, she began to spend as much time before him as she could. After she had escaped this area to go to Kahnawake in Montreal, she used to go to head out very early in the morning to adore Jesus, even kneeling outside in the snow before the Church was opened, and coming back to the chapel as often as she could during the day when she had finished her work. And she sought to receive him at Mass first thing in the morning as often as she could. All of Saint Isaac Jogues’ missionary work can be summed up by his desiring to labor for the food that endures to eternal life and to bring others to experience that same celestial food. Because he had had his thumbs and index fingers bitten off here lest he be able to pull the trigger of a gun, he was unable to celebrate Mass for 17 months, because the rubrics at the time said that the priest had to hold the Eucharist in these digits. Without having any other priests around, he was starving for Jesus in the Eucharist. Eventually he was rescued by the Dutch in Albany and eventually returned to France. He disembarked and looked for the closest Catholic Church and was able to receive the Lord at a Mass celebrated by another priest. He eventually wrote about the experience: “It was then that I began to live again.” He knew the power of Jesus in the Holy Eucharist and how Christ wants to feed us with a life that will know no end, to bring us into a communion with him that will triumph even over death. Jesus wants all of us to come similarly alive and that’s why he gives himself to his people every day as the true manna. Jesus will say later in this Eucharistic discourse, “Just as the living Father sent me and I have life because of the Father, so also the one who feeds on me will have life because of me!” To have life because of Jesus. To live off Jesus. That’s the ultimate way we “put on the new self, created in God’s way in righteousness and holiness of truth.”

• In response to God’s generosity in raining down manna for the Israelites each day, they prayed in the Psalm we heard, “What we have heard and know, and what our fathers have declared to us, we will declare to the generation to come the glorious deeds of the Lord and his strength and the wonders he wrought. He commanded the skies above and opened the doors of heaven; he rained manna upon them for food and gave them heavenly bread. Man ate the bread of angels, food he sent them in abundance. And he brought them to this holy land, to the mountain his right hand had won.” If they could say that then about basically coriander seed, how much more ought we to explode with gratitude over the real Manna, Jesus himself, the true panis angelicus, that we “poor and humble sinners” have the awesome privilege to consume! How much we must declare to the generations to come the glorious deeds of the Lord and the wonders he continues to give.
• Jesus tells us, “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.” Today, helping each other, preparing to receive this heavenly manna, let’s get down to this most important work!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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