Homily for 19th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Homily for the
19th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Aug. 8, 2021
John 6: 41-51
Holy Name of Jesus, New Rochelle, N.Y.
St. Anthony, Bronx                                                                         

“I am the bread of life” (John 6: 48).

From November till 2 Sundays ago, we’ve been reading continuously from St. Mark’s Gospel, Sunday after Sunday.  On July 25, 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 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 predawn hours, 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 were last Sunday and where we are this morning. Jesus continues the teaching he began last week, asking the people why they’re pursuing him, what is it that they’re looking for.  And he urges them to work for bread that endures toward everlasting life.

He’s been leading his audience in the synagog from an experience of his divine power—the miracle of multiplying the loaves and fish—to a teaching that in him God provides his people with a manna that’s more substantial than the manna Moses provided for the Hebrews in the desert many hundreds of years earlier.  In Jesus God nourishes his people with divine teaching:  “Everyone who listens to my Father and learns from him comes to me” (6:45).

Now, at last, he comes to the point to which he’s been leading his listeners:  “I am the bread of life,” a bread that has not only come down from heaven but that also gives eternal life (cf. 6:50).  This bread isn’t a metaphor but a reality:  “the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world” (6:51).

from church of Sta. Maria sopra Minerva, Rome

God’s only Son came down from heaven and assumed our flesh:  “for us men and for our salvation,” we profess every week in the Creed, “he came down from heaven, and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate [made flesh] of the Virgin Mary, and became man,” a human being.  He did that to give us life, to give us salvation.  His flesh and blood is life-giving, and he promises us his life-giving flesh in the form, under the appearance, of bread.

Unfortunately, our reading of John 6 will be interrupted next Sunday, when we’ll celebrate the feast of Mary’s Assumption.  In the 9 verses that we’ll skip over (6:51-59), Jesus emphasizes that he will truly give us his own flesh to eat and his own blood to drink, and this gift will bring us eternal life.  If we don’t partake of the Eucharistic meal, we won’t have eternal life.

In John’s Gospel, Jesus doesn’t explain exactly how this will be.  “I am the bread of life” alludes to what he’ll make clear at the Last Supper, as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Paul tell us, and as we repeat at every Mass:  “On the night he was betrayed, he himself took bread, and, giving thanks, he said the blessing, broke the bread and gave it to his disciples, saying: Take this all of you, and eat of it, for this is my body, which will be given up for you.”  Likewise, he gave them the cup of his precious blood to drink.

So at every Mass we do as Jesus commanded.  We take bread and wine, and by his power (not our own) change them into his true body and blood.  We take and eat his body and blood—not bread, not wine, but his very body and blood, soul and divinity, under the deceptive appearance of bread and wine.  It is as St. Thomas Aquinas wrote in the 13th century in the hymn “Adoro te devote”: 

                                Seeing, touching, tasting are in thee deceived;

                                How says trusty hearing?  that shall be believed.

                                What God’s Son has told me, take for truth I do;

                                Truth himself speaks truly or there’s nothing true.

Our Eucharist is not a symbol.  It really is the Lord Jesus’ flesh and blood given for us, that we might become the body of Christ ourselves, that we might receive a share of his divinity, that we might be made worthy of eternal life.

What a marvelous gift from our Lord Jesus!

If Jesus becomes part of us as we consume him, and we become the body of Christ—we are what we eat—it follows, then, that we must be what we are.  We must live as members of Christ.  We must act like Christ, speak like Christ, even think and desire like Christ.  St. Paul urges us this morning:  “All bitterness, fury, anger, shouting, and reviling must be removed from you, along with all malice.  And be kind to one another, compassionate, forgiving one another as God has forgiven you in Christ” (Eph 4:31-32).

That, of course, is a tall order.  It’s a call for us to continue to be converted into Christ.  Receiving the Eucharist in faith, hope, and sincerity, we may grow in charity until we do become more perfect images of our Lord Jesus and enter eternal life along with him.