+ 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 more unfulfilled,
incomplete and far from joy then we were in the first place – 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 radically affect our every thought and
action – so that we can be his Body, his Hands, his Feet, his Mouth, his Heart
and so transform the world – including our soul sick governing bodies, into
God’s glorious kingdom!
The
Lord gave them bread from heaven.
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