Homily for the Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (B)

I’ll be moving to my new assignment in New York later this week, but before school starts for me in early September, I’m going to spend a few weeks with my Mom and Dad on Staten Island.  While I’m home it’ll be easy for me to relax and unwind, and I’ll slip easily into the old familiar patterns and schedules of life at home.  Undoubtedly, one of the most important elements of such a routine revolves around food and eating.

Think for a second about your own home life as a family.  How much time, energy, and thought do you end up committing, each and every day, to food: to planning, preparing, eating, and then cleaning up from the meals we need to sustain ourselves.  It’s likely a considerable amount of time.

In my family we joke that we even end up spending a lot of time talking about food!  One of the most consistent questions asked at some point during almost all of our dinnertime conversations, is what we’re going to have for dinner the following night! 

In part, that’s because it really does take some forethought to prepare a meal; to decide what things go well together, what makes for a healthy meal, and then to gather the proper supplies.

But in fairness, it’s also because we can sometimes have a hard time deciding what we want, what we really have a hankering for.  We know we’ll be hungry again by then, but what is it that we’ll really want? What do we think will fill our hunger, not just for physical sustenance – in which case any old calories would do – but also for taste and pleasure.

After all, none of us want to eat the same old thing over and over again.  We all get bored easily and we grumble that we’re tired of the same old things.  We watch the Food Network, and we read the food section of the paper in search of new, and better, and more exciting recipes and restaurants to satiate our hunger, again, not merely for food – to be physically filled – but for the complete experience of a truly satisfying meal.

Friends, I’d like to suggest that if we think about it, this distinction between types of hunger, and our constant desire for something different and new, are in fact potent symbols for what is being spoken about in today’s readings.

Our Gospel picks up the story after last week’s miraculous feeding of the five thousand.  In today’s segment of John’s Gospel, the crowds follow after Jesus and He recognizes that they are only following Him because they have had their fill of the loaves.  The crowd is happy to have a free meal and they are hoping Jesus will continue to fulfill their very human need for physical, bodily nourishment.

But Jesus instructs them that they should work not for “food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life.”  He wants them to hunger not just for bodily sustenance but for the “bread that comes down from heaven” – which is to say the food that will fulfill the much deeper and more important desire for meaning, for wholeness, and for eternal life.

It is easy to provide for our physical, bodily need.  But we are not merely physical creatures.  We are spiritual beings who experience a much deeper type of existential hunger and longing.  If we do not seek to satisfy that deeper, spiritual hunger, then we will in fact never meet our deepest need or become our fullest selves.

Jesus explains to the crowd that He is Himself “the bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”  This is the spiritual food that will satisfy our deep, abiding spiritual hunger.  And we, of course, understand that Jesus gives us His very self as food and drink in the Eucharist precisely to give us such life and to sustain our spirits. 

But frankly, brothers and sisters, in our weakness we can sometimes become bored with this food.  Like the Israelites in the desert we grumble about still being unsatisfied.  Just as the Israelites longed to go back into Egypt, where they were slaves, but at least had decent food, we too can feel as if “the bread of life” hasn’t fully satisfied and that we still long for something else, something different, something new. 

In the end, though, the problem isn’t that God hasn’t provided, it’s that we don’t trust God enough to truly provide for our deepest needs and desires.  Instead, we hedge our bets.  We don’t fully give ourselves over to God.  We decide that we’re still in control, still capable of satisfying all our hungers by sating our appetite for all sorts of things: possessions, pleasure, power, or prestige.

But just as God brought the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt and asked them to submit to the Law, so too God has brought us into a new type of freedom from sin, provided we accept a new type of submission in which He alone is our God. He asks us to turn over every part of our lives to Him, to trust in His plan for our lives and in His desire and ability to provide for all we need.

We only find ourselves unfulfilled and unsatisfied because we are constantly rebelling and grumbling against such surrender to God’s control of our lives.  We are still hungry because like the crowds in the Gospel we come to God asking for the wrong thing, still looking to satisfy our physical, bodily hunger rather than our truest spiritual needs.

Friends, that’s why in our second reading from the Letter to the Ephesians St. Paul admonishes: “put away the old self of your former way of life corrupted through deceitful desires” – in other words, put away desires that deceitfully lead us not toward Him who truly satisfies, but toward dead ends! 

Instead, St. Paul wants us to fully become the “new self” that is “renewed in the spirit … and created in God’s way in righteousness and holiness of truth.”  St. Paul is trying to remind us that the fullness and the newness of life for which we long really is found in the “bread from heaven” which, as Jesus says, is to “believe” – to have faith and trust – “in the one who sent Him.”

So perhaps we should take time to ask ourselves what it is we most hunger and long for, what we devote our time and energy towards, in what or whom we put our faith and trust.  What it is that gives us a feeling of satisfaction and fulfillment, of joy, peace, consolation, and excitement?  And in contrast, in what ways do we long for Egypt by clinging to things that lead, in the end, only to “division, desolation, embarrassment, and regret?”

Do we hunger most for success in our career, for financial security, or for material possessions?  Do we seek our fulfillment in how we recreate and vacation, how we vote, what we eat or drink, the clothes we wear, the car we drive? 

Or do we hunger most for, and find our satisfaction in, the time we spend with our loved ones and families, in the time we devote to prayerful communion with God, in the service we offer to those in need?

Do we have faith and trust in our own ability to secure fulfillment, happiness, and peace, or do we yield our lives to God and trust His plan for our lives, His ability to provide for all our needs?

Brothers and sisters, if we give over as much time, energy, and attention as we do to searching out the meals that will satisfy our bodily hungers, should we not give over at least as much time, energy, and attention to seeking out Him who can provide the “bread of life” which satisfies the deepest longings of our lives?

At this Mass, like the crowd in today’s Gospel, our prayer is: “Sir, give us this bread always!”  And in this Eucharist we are given the assurance that the Lord does indeed rain down bread from heaven, He sends us food in abundance, He satisfies our most abiding hunger.