Starting last Sunday for 5 weeks we will be proclaiming the Gospel readings of John 6 known as The Bread of Life Discourse. In today’s Gospel Jesus said: “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger and whoever believes in me will never thirst.” Hunger is a craving necessary to ensure we eat and get the nourishment we need to survive. We can also be hungry for other things but it doesn’t change the fact that we feel a deep down necessity for it, a craving that drives us.
What are you most hungry for? What is your primary goal in life that drives you from the core of your being, from the depths of your soul? A common answer is to be successful. The question is how does one define success? Are you seeking the praise of others or are you focused on the glorification of God? Where do you derive your strength from, what feeds and fuels your every thought and desire? Is it worldly things or Jesus, the Bread of Life?
At the Last Supper Jesus gave himself to us physically and spiritually through the institution of the Eucharist. Matthew 26:26 states; “While they were eating, Jesus took bread, said the blessing, broke it, and giving it to his disciples said, ‘Take and eat; this is my body.’” We are to be nourished directly from the Body of Christ.
Most of us today, like at every other Sunday Mass, will come up to receive the Eucharist. When you approach you will hear the words. “The Body of Christ”. You will then respond “Amen”. When you say Amen you are stating that you affirm with certainty that the Eucharist is in fact The Body of Christ. You will then take it and eat it. What does that truly mean to you?
If I asked everyone if you ever witnessed a miracle, I would assume most of us would answer no, but would love to see one. We hear the same desire from the crowd in the Gospel when they said to Jesus, “What sign can you do, that we may see and believe in you?”
How would it strike you if you were told that you have witnessed a miracle? Well, you have! A miracle occurs at the consecration of the Eucharist at each and every Mass. You are personally gifted by God to witness this miracle of the changing of bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus Christ and as amazing as it sounds also partake in it. It is the gift of Christ himself as food for our journey to help us achieve our goal of eternal salvation.
It is very common for things that we repetitively do to become routine and mechanical for us and over time lose sight of its true meaning. What do you actually believe when you take and eat the Eucharist? Do you truly believe that it is the body, blood, soul, and divinity, the whole and entirety of Christ?
Before we can believe that, we would need to first believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God. As Jesus said in the Gospel today; “This is the work of God, that you believe in the one he sent.” In order to believe we must get to know him. How are we doing that? What does our spiritual life entail?
There was a young boy that got deodorant in his Christmas stocking. He asked what it was for and his parents explained about personal hygiene. The boy said, you mean I have to do this every day?! One day his mother saw him applying the deodorant. He was slathering it on like there was no tomorrow.
She asked him why he was putting on so much. He said, I thought that if I put on enough I would just have to do this once a week instead of every day. She laughed to herself and explained how it doesn’t work that way. She told him he needed a fresh application every day so that it provides him a nice scent throughout the week.
As she thought more about her son’s misunderstanding of how to use deodorant, the Holy Spirit gently reminded her about her spiritual habits of giving time to the Lord through prayer only once a week expecting that it would be enough to last all week, but we need a fresh application of the Lord’s truth to help guide us – not just on occasion, but every single day.
Do you get hungry once a week or every day?
Do you change your clothes once a week or every day?
Do you sleep once a week or every day?
We feed our physical lives daily, but how often do we feed our Spiritual lives?
We of course have basic physical needs we must fulfill, but Jesus is telling us that we will never find harmony if we focus our lives on chasing the things of this world.
Jesus is trying to set us on the right path. He said; “Do not work for food that perishes but for food that endures for eternal life.” He is saying to not put all our energy into striving for things that will not last but to strive for what leads us to eternal life?
This is simply stated but enormously hard to realize. Everything in this world is perishable. Jesus is saying not to make the things of this world the center of your life. Put your spiritual energy into Christ. Christ is the food for eternal life embodied in the Eucharist, The Bread of Life, the real and eternal presence of Jesus. Everything else that we think we should strive for will fall into harmony around us if we feed directly off of him.
This is the greatest gift that Jesus has given us. The gift of himself. He alone is the path to eternal life, to an eternity of love, peace, and joy. When we put our focus on him, energized through feeding our spiritual health directly from the real presence of Jesus by eating the bread of life, we will be satisfied in a way that can never be fulfilled through material means.
The Eucharist has been gifted to us to spiritually nourish us. Christ did not give us only a piece of himself. He gave all that he was and is, so take and eat of the Body of Christ, believe in the miracle of the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist and that it is the source of food that endures for eternal life.