Our
readings today speak of “hunger and thirst” – the
kind of hunger and thirst that all people have – the kind that is just “built
in.” We ultimately hunger for truth, fullness, justice, completion, peace, love
and joy! And in our hunger and thirst for these things - in our searching - we
often find ourselves on the wrong track, looking in all the wrong places, and
ultimately unfulfilled, incomplete and far from joy – we are unhappy, and we
make everyone around us unhappy!
Jesus came precisely to feed our hunger, to quench our thirst. Nothing
man-made can “do the trick,” only something God-made can do it: and so God
gave us “food and water” – many times prophetically in scripture - beginning
with the manna in the desert, and the water from the rock; but did these not
foretell of the time when the Very Bread
of Angels would become the Food of
Men; and water from a Pierced Heart, the sacramental life of a whole viable
and authentic religious way of life?
Jesus in the gospel passage
today tells the people to work
spiritually for the true bread that gives life to the world – both here and
hereafter – and that bread is his very
Self: for He is the bread of life:
and whoever goes to him will never
hunger, and whoever believes in him will never thirst again! This is not a
metaphor, it is a fact!
All it takes, as Jesus again
says in the gospel passage, is to believe
that this is so: to believe that
Jesus is God, and that he can be
Bread and Drink if he says he is. The grumbling of the disbelief of both
ancient times and that of Jesus’ own day had to be laid to rest; and the taunts
of disbelief of our own day need to be dismissed. Jesus still is very much who
he said he was, and he is who the Church has proclaimed he is for 2000 years –
may we this day make our act of faith in him; and may we thank him so very much
for continuing to distribute loaves and fish, and refreshing waters to us – who
are as in need as is anyone else.
May we become truly holy
today, because we have eaten the holy heavenly bread, and then let it affect
our every thought and action.
The
Lord gave them bread from heaven.
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