"I AM THE BREAD OF LIFE."

19^th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B.  1 Kings 19:4-8; John 6:41-51.

AIM: To deepen the hearers’ appreciation of the two eucharistic tables. 

          An African priest studying in Paris was asked by the French priest with whom he lives and unable, because of illness, to celebrate his regular 4 p.m. Mass for nuns in a nearby convent, to substitute for him. When the African priest rang the convent doorbell at 3.55, the Sister who answered was surprised to see an unfamiliar face. Since he was not wearing a clerical collar, which in Paris as in most European cities is worn by relatively few priests these days, she thought the stranger was a street person asking for help. “I’m sorry,” she told him. “We’re just about to have Mass. We can’t help you now. Come back later.” Fifteen minutes later, the nuns called the rectory to ask where their priest was. Imagine their embarrassment when they learned that they had just turned him away.

          Why did these good Sisters go without Mass that day? It was not because they were bad people. It was simply because the priest who came did not look like the person they were expecting. That happened to Jesus repeatedly. His fellow Jews were expecting that God’s long awaited anointed servant, the Messiah, would come dramatically, descending from the clouds of heaven. Jesus was different.  And he was not dramatic. He was ordinary. When Jesus said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven,” they thought he must be crazy. “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph?” they asked. “Then how can he say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?”  

          Jesus’ people knew about “bread from heaven.” That was the manna with which God had fed their ancestors during their desert wanderings. But the prophets also spoke of bread as the spiritual nourishment which God gives to those who approach him in faith and try to do his will. Isaiah, for instance, portrays God telling his people: “Come, you who have no food ... Come to me and listen to my words; hear me, and you shall have life”(55:1-3). Another prophet, Amos, warns the people that if they persist in disobedience, God “will send a famine on the land, not hunger for bread ... but for hearing the word of the Lord” (8:11). And Sirach says that if a person keeps God’s law, wisdom “will nourish him with the bread of understanding”(15:3).

          So when Jesus said, “I am the bread come down from heaven,” he was using the language of the prophets, but giving it a deeper meaning. He was saying, in effect: ‘I am the life-giving bread of which Isaiah speaks. I am the one who satisfies the hunger for God’s word mentioned by Amos. I am Sirach’s bread of understanding and wisdom.’ Jesus’ people failed to understand him. Like the substitute priest ringing the convent bell in Paris, Jesus was too different, too unexpected.

          Do we really understand what Jesus tells us in today’s gospel? When Jesus says, “I am the bread come down from heaven,” and “I am the bread of life,” we read those words as a reference to the Eucharist. That is correct. Too often, however, we forget that there are two tables at the Eucharist: the table of the Lord’s body, but also the table of the word. The first part of the Mass, the liturgy of the word, is not merely a preparation for the “essential part”: consecration and communion. It is equally important, and equally essential. The Second Vatican Council said in 1965: “The church has always venerated the divine Scriptures as she venerates the body of the Lord, insofar as she never ceases, particularly in the sacred liturgy, to partake of the bread of life and to offer it to the faithful from the table of the word of God and the body of Christ” (Verbum Dei, 21). 

          The council was saying that we are nourished not only by the Lord’s body and blood in communion; we are nourished no less by hearing God’s word. In the same passage the Council says: “In the sacred books the Father who is in heaven comes lovingly to meet his children, and talks with them. And such is the force and power of the word of God that it can serve the church as her support and vigor, and the children of the church as strength for their faith, food for the soul, and a pure and lasting source of spiritual life.”

          Our first reading told how the prophet Elijah journeyed “forty days and forty nights” in the strength of the food God gave him through an angel. In the gospel Jesus speaks of how God strengthened the whole people during their wanderings in the desert through manna, bread from heaven. Though this bread gave them strength for their journey, it did not make them immortal.

          Jesus does not hesitate to claim, however, that the food he gives does impart immortality. “I am the living bread that came down from heaven,” he says. “Whoever eats this bread will live forever.” Jesus means that for those who eat the “living bread” which he gives, physical death will not be the end, but only a way station on the journey to eternal life.

          Jesus gives himself to us as this “living bread” here in the Eucharist. He does so in two closely linked ways: through his holy word, read and proclaimed in our midst; and through his sacramental body and blood, given under the outward forms of bread and wine. Unless we receive the food the Lord offers us at both tables, we risk being spiritually undernourished.

          When we do partake of both tables, however — listening devoutly to God’s word, and receiving the Lord’s body and blood with due preparation and reverence — we begin to realize that the words of today’s responsorial psalm are true:

“Taste and see how good the Lord is; blessed the man who takes refuge in him.”