19th Sunday in Ordinary Time

I love bread.  Not just any bread, but freshly baked bread from the local, neighbourhood bakery in Dublin where I grew up.  When I was a small boy I would stand outside the bakery just to smell the baking bread.  One of my favourite errands was to run to the bakery to pick up bread for my mother.  That bakery is still there.  The last time I was in Dublin my sister and I walked by the bakery and we both stopped automatically just to take in the delicious scent of the baking bread.  The only problem with the bread from the bakery was that it never lasted very long.  In my big family all food disappeared quickly but the bread really went fast.  And, of course, as a growing boy, I never got what I thought was enough.

In today’s gospel from John 6:41-51, St. John continues Jesus' discourse on the Bread of Life.  Like the manna that sustained the Israelites on their journey through the dessert, the bread Jesus offers us comes from heaven.  Unlike manna, and unlike the fresh bread from my local Dublin bakery, the bread Jesus offers does more than feed our physical hunger.  Whoever eats the living bread Jesus gives us “will live forever” because the bread Jesus gives us is his “flesh for the life of the world" (John 6: 51).  The people who ate the manna in the dessert died in the dessert. “Everyone who listens to [God the] Father and learns from him,” everyone who believes in Jesus and believes that God the Father sent Jesus to us “will have eternal life.”

Jesus is the Bread of Life.  This bread sustains us through the good times and the bad times.  In our first reading from 1 Kings 19:4-8 God provided Elijah with heavenly bread to strengthen him for his journey of “forty days and forty nights to the mountain of God, Horeb.”  The bread Jesus gives us strengthens us as we journey through life.  I often wonder how people without faith in Jesus  survive the traumas of life.  Without food for our souls, we could fall into the trap St. Paul warns us about in the second reading, Ephesians 4:31-32 and become filled with bitterness, fury, anger, shouting, reviling, and malice.

Jesus is our soul food.  Like fresh bread from the bakery, Jesus is our comfort food.  When we receive the Eucharist, we receive   Jesus, “the living bread that came down from heaven.”  We are united with him in his suffering and in his overwhelming love.  The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches us “in the Eucharist the sacrifice of Christ becomes also the sacrifice of the members of his Body.  The lives of the faithful, their praise, sufferings, prayer, and work, are united with those of Christ and with his total offering, and so acquire a new value. Christ's sacrifice present on the altar makes it possible for all generations of Christians to be united with his offering” (CCC 1368).

God, Father of life,
your Son Jesus is our living bread
come down from you to give life
to us and to our world.
Let him restore our strength and courage
as we journey with him through life,
and give us the will and love
to share our bread with those who need it,
for in them Jesus cries out his hunger.
We ask this in the name of Jesus the Lord.

Amen.