Homily for Wednesday, Week 3 of Easter

Homily for Wednesday
3d Week of Easter

John 6: 35-40
May 7, 2025
Salesian HS, New Rochelle, N.Y.

Christ teaching & healing
(Cosimo Rosselli)

“Jesus said to the crowds, ‘I am the bread of life’” (John 6: 35).

Jesus has fed a huge crowd with bread and fish that he multiplied miraculously.  People have come looking for him because they want more.

Jesus offers them a different kind of “more,” viz., himself.  “I will not reject anyone who comes to me,” he tells them (6:37).  He offers them—in the name of God the Father—hope.  He offers acceptance.  “It is the will of the one who sent me”—God the Father—“that I should not lose anything” (6:39), that Jesus should not lose any person.  God loves and desires everyone.  He wants to forgive all our sins, draw us into his own eternal life, so that Jesus “should raise [us] on the last day” (6:40).  This is the kind of bread that Jesus is, bread that feeds with forgiveness, hope, and life everyone who comes to him.

There was a subtle hint in the 1st reading about the extent of God’s desire to save everyone.  We heard, “Saul was trying to destroy the Church; entering house after house and dragging out men and women, he handed them over for imprisonment” (Acts 8:3).  Even so terrible a man as Saul can be touched by the grace of God and be saved.  Thru Jesus, God will do that a few chapters later in Acts of the Apostles and turn Saul into St. Paul, a great apostle and preacher of the very Gospel he had tried to destroy.  No one is beyond God’s love and power to save.