PROPER 13, YEAR B

Sunday 4 August 2024

Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church, Warwick, R. I.

 

Exodus 16:2-4, 9-15

Psalm 78:23-29

John 6:24-35

 

The dominant image in today’s readings is bread from heaven. In the reading from Exodus, the Israelites murmur against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. Despite their liberation from bondage and the gift of freedom, they complain that it would have been better to have died in Egypt, where they sat by the fleshpots and ate bread to the full, than to have been brought out into the desert to die of hunger.

 

The real crisis is not one of hunger, however, but of faith. The people’s grumbling bespeaks a lack of trust that the Lord who delivered them will continue to provide for them.

 

In response, God rains down from heaven a fine, flake-like substance that distills on the ground from the early morning dew. The word “manna” means “What is it?”—to which Moses replies, “It is the bread that the Lord has given you to eat.”

 

The miracle’s real purpose goes beyond satisfying the people’s hunger to building their faith in God’s power and loving care. As God explains to Moses, he’s providing this bread from heaven so that “you shall know that I am the Lord your God.”

 

Ever after, the children of Israel remembered the manna in the wilderness as a sign of God’s goodness and mercy. As Psalm 78 joyfully sings, “He rained down manna upon them to eat and gave them grain from heaven. So mortals ate the bread of angels; he provided for them food enough.”

 

The manna ceased after 40 years when the Tribes of Israel crossed the River Jordan into the Promised Land. Nonetheless, a belief grew up in later centuries that one of the signs of the coming of the Messiah, and the dawning of God’s kingdom on earth, would be a resumption of the manna, the bread from heaven. This belief just may lie in the background of today’s Gospel, where the crowd challenges Jesus: “What sign are you going to give us then, so that we may see it and believe you? What work are you performing? Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’”

 

What we then encounter in this reading is one of those wonderful dialogues of double meaning, so typical of John’s Gospel, where people focus on a word or image’s literal meaning, while our Lord plays on its spiritual meaning instead.

 

After the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand in the wilderness by the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, the people have followed Jesus back to Capernaum. Remarking that they seek him because they ate their fill of the loaves, and are perhaps hoping for more free meals, Jesus admonishes them: “Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life …”

 

Commenting on this verse around the end of the fourth century, Saint Augustine of Hippo says this:

 

It is as if he said to them, “You seek me to satisfy the flesh, not the spirit.” How many seek Jesus for no other objective that to get some kind of temporal benefit! One has a business that has run into problems, and he seeks the intercession of the clergy; another is oppressed by someone more powerful than himself, and he flies to the church. Another desires intervention with someone over whom he has little influence. One person wants this, and another person wants that. The church is filled with these kinds of people! Jesus is scarcely sought after for his own sake … Here too he says, you seek me for something else; seek me for my own sake. He insinuates the truth that he himself is that food … “that endures to eternal life.”

 

Then, in response to the crowd’s request for a never-ending supply of this true bread that comes down from heaven, Jesus declares: “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

 

Reflecting on this bold statement down through the centuries, the Church has discerned two ways in which Jesus is the Bread of Life: by Word and by Sacrament.

 

First, in his Word. Elsewhere in the Gospels, Jesus quotes the Book of Deuteronomy: “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” But Jesus is himself the Word-made-flesh, and we feed on his Word whenever we hear, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest the Holy Scriptures.

 

In addition to feeding us with his Word, Jesus gives us his sacramental Body and Blood as food and drink for eternal life. Just as ordinary bread and wine sustain and nourish us for the life of this world, so the Body and Blood of Christ sustain and nourish us for the life of the world to come.

 

So, Jesus admonishes us, “Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life …” Now, does that mean that it’s wrong to ask God for things in this life that fall short of God himself? Despite what Augustine says in the passage that I just read, the answer is: Not necessarily.

 

In another commentary on today’s Gospel, Augustine’s near-contemporary Saint Ephrem of Syria offers another take on the question. He says this:

 

Our Lord made bread in plenty from just a little bread in the desert and changed water into wine at Cana. He first sought to accustom their mouths to his bread and his wine until the time would come for him to give them his blood as well as his body. He allowed them to taste a superabundance of transitory bread and wine, so that he might excite them to a superabundance of his living body and blood … He gave us lesser things to entice us to come and receive this supreme [gift] … These lesser realities of bread and wine … were pleasing to the mouth, whereas that of his body and blood is of benefit to the spirit. He enticed us with … things that are pleasing to the palate to attract us to that which vivifies the soul.

 

I find that image that image too lovely for words: the Lord entices us by means of lesser gifts to desire the greater gifts! Many writers on the Christian spiritual life down through the centuries, such as St. John of the Cross, have also suggested that when God seems to be withdrawing the lesser gifts, such as the joys of the beginner’s life of prayer, it’s not because he’s punishing us but because he wants to draw us in deeper. Like the crowd in today’s Gospel, we want an unending supply of temporal loaves and fishes, but he wants to give us infinitely more, indeed, nothing less than himself—for he is the Bread of Life, and we who come to him shall not hunger, and we who believe in him shall never thirst.