Homily for 18th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Homily for the
18th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Aug. 1, 2021
John 6: 24-35
Our Lady of the Assumption, Bronx

“Amen, amen, I say to you, you are looking for me not because you saw signs but because you ate the loaves and were filled” (John 6: 26).

Floor mosaic, church at Capernaum

Since November we’ve been reading continuously from St. Mark’s Gospel, Sunday after Sunday.  Last weekend, however, we came to a 5-week interruption in that cycle, partly because Mark’s Gospel is considerably shorter than Matthew’s or Luke’s for filling out our Sunday readings, and partly because the 6th chapter of St. John’s Gospel is so fundamentally important, and these 5 weeks are the only time in our 3-year cycle of readings when we hear that chapter.

That 6th chapter opens with the story of how Jesus multiplied 5 loaves and 2 fish and fed thousands of people. That’s remarkable in itself.  It’s also so important to the Christian Gospel that it’s one of the very few stories from Jesus’ public life reported in all 4 of the gospels.  The chapter continues with the apostles embarking in their boat while Jesus goes up on the mountain alone, presumably to pray.  When the disciples have difficulty rowing the boat across the Sea of Galilee against the wind, Jesus comes to them in the middle of the nite, walking on the water, and suddenly they arrive on the opposite shore.  Our selections from John 6 skip over that and bring us directly to shore, to the town of Capernaum, where Jesus has made his home during his public ministry.  That’s where we are this afternoon.

The crowd that followed Jesus to one side of the lake and now has come back looking for him ask in wonderment when, and how, he got there.  Jesus doesn’t answer that question but goes to the point:  why are they chasing him?  What is it they’re looking for?  He tells them, solemnly—that’s what the double “amen” means—that they’re following him for the wrong reason.

Yes, he fed them:  “you ate the loaves and were filled.”  Is that the only reason to come to him, to cadge a meal?  He tells them they didn’t see the sign.  In fact, they’re so dense that they ask him, “What sign can you do, that we may see and believe in you?” (6:30).  They just saw a great sign without seeing it.  They saw the miracle of the loaves, and its meaning went right over their heads.

Jesus tries to explain that the loaves were just perishable bread.  He has come from his Father to offer them “the food that endures for eternal life” (6:27), the bread “which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world” (6:33).  He means himself and his teaching; for as John’s Gospel makes abundantly clear, he has comes down from heaven, has taken on human flesh, and offers us the words of eternal life.  Moses led the Hebrews to the Promised Land.  Jesus will lead his people to the Father’s land.  The earthly bread with which he fed the crowd is a sign of the spiritual nourishment he offers to humanity for our journey.

If we are to believe what various polls report, many Catholics still miss the sign.  They see the bread and wine of the Eucharist, and they come to receive the Eucharist, without recognizing this Eucharistic meal as the sacrament that it is:  as the real, true, actual body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.  The appearance of bread and wine, the taste and the smell of bread and wine are a sign of the deeper reality, the presence of Christ:  the Christ who suffered death on Calvary and who rose from death 3 days later and now lives eternally; the Christ who offers us communion with himself, a share in his immortal body and blood so that we, too, can live in and with him in eternity.

The bread and wine that we receive in the Holy Eucharist are no longer bread and wine.  As one of St. Thomas Aquinas’s hymns says, the Word made flesh turns the bread of nature into his flesh, tho our senses detect no change; what they perceive isn’t the sacramental reality.  The bread and wine have been transformed by the power of Christ into his own body and blood, regardless of their outward appearance.

This sacrament has the power to transform us.  Christ gives us his body and blood in the Eucharist that we might be transformed into what we eat and drink:  transformed into himself.  We eat the body of Christ that we might become the body of Christ; that we might be empowered to act, as St. Paul states in the 2d reading, “in the righteousness and holiness of truth” (Eph 4:24), empowered to live like Christ in our daily lives:  in our families, at our jobs, at school, on vacation, in our relaxation and recreation.  If we are eating the body of Christ, if we are communing with Christ, we can’t “live as the pagans do,” St. Paul says, “corrupted thru deceitful desires” (Eph 4:17,22).  The pagans live selfishly, cheating and stealing and lying, engaging in sex outside marriage and other perversions, despising others because of their color, gender, or national origin, damaging people’s reputations thru gossip, closing our eyes to the killing of unborn human beings.

When we come to the Eucharist, are we looking for a Jesus who gives us loaves of bread, who makes us comfortable with ritual?  Or do we see the sign that he gives us?  Do we see what the Eucharist really is, what it makes us to be, how it calls us to live?