Working for the Food that Endures to Eternal Life, 3rd Monday of Easter, April 16, 2018

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Monday of the Third Week of Easter
Memorial of St. Bernadette Soubirous
April 16, 2018
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, we saw 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. 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 all they were concerned about were 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 our lives working in to put food on the table, to nourish themselves and our 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 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 three 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, “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 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 three of these interpretations, of course, go together in the celebration of the Mass. We begin with God’s word, 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 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.
• Today we can focus just on two witnesses who shows us what it means to strive for the food that endures to eternal life. The first is 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. 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 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.
• Our second witness is St. Bernadette Soubirous a great, humble saint who died 139 years ago today. The Blessed Virgin Mary appeared 18 times to her in 1858 in Lourdes. I had the great joy to invoke her as the patroness of my last parish. She was one who labored for the food that endures to eternal life. Because she was illiterate and couldn’t read her catechism, she still hadn’t made her first Holy Communion by the time the Blessed Virgin started appearing to her when Bernadette was 14. Once it became clear to her pastor, however, that Mary was favoring her in this way, he was somewhat ashamed that he hadn’t done his duty in preparing her for Holy Communion, so he asked the parochial vicar to get her ready to receive Jesus. After she had made her first Holy Communion, a woman named Mademoiselle Estrade asked her, “What made you happier, Bernadette, first Holy Communion or the Apparitions?” Bernadette replied, “The two go together. They cannot be compared. I only know that I was very happy on both occasions.” With her simple wisdom, Bernadette points all of us to something really important. St. Bernadette is famous today because God chose her to be the recipient of Mary’s apparitions, but she was clearly indicating that the gift each of us receives in Holy Communion is just as important. (I actually think it’s even more important to receive Jesus, the Son of God, than his mother, but insofar as both were special gifts of the same divine Giver, it’s acceptable to equate them). She shows us to treat the reception of Holy Communion each day as a gift as valuable as a rare apparition of the Blessed Mother that would make us famous 139 years after our death? Later in life, St. Bernadette wrote about how God had made her great, not so much through the apparitions, but through the Eucharist. “I was nothing and of this nothing God made something great. In Holy Communion I am heart to heart with Jesus. How sublime is my destiny!” How sublime is all of our destinies! Today on her feast day, we recognize how sublime is our destiny, to labor for the food that endures to eternal life and to receive the fulfillment of Jesus’ labors, giving himself to us. This is the means by which we can learn how to “live as Christ did” and “through the healing paschal remedies [are] confirmed … to [Christ’s] nature,” as we prayed in the Opening Collect, this is the means by which we are “conformed to the mysteries of [God’s] mighty love,” as we will pray over the gifts, and this is the means by which God will “restore us to eternal life in the resurrection of Christ” and “increase in us the fruits of this paschal Sacrament … and the strength of this saving food” as we’ll pray at the end of today’s Mass.

The readings for today’s Mass were: