Readings:
• Ex 16:2-4, 12-15
• Ps 78:3-4, 23-24, 25, 54
• Eph 4:17, 20-24
• Jn 6:24-35
“The sign of the feeding of the thousands,” wrote Monsignor Romano Guardini in The Lord, “shatters the narrowness that has been closing in on Jesus.”
What does that mean? Those in the crowds following Jesus viewed him through a cramped and selfish set of lenses. Having witnessed amazing signs, they wondered how they could benefit materially or politically, perhaps by setting Jesus up as king (Jn. 6:15). Having seen bread multiplied before their eyes, they could think only of getting even more, and of satisfying their physical hunger.
The shattering was, in today’s Gospel reading, going to become a sort of spiritual explosion, which would begin to destroy mere material ambitions and challenge the people’s understanding (or absence of understanding) of God’s ways. Although Jesus had compassion for the hungry crowds and fed them, he knew far more was needed.
The Son of God did not become man just to fill stomachs, but to awaken, save, and fill souls. “Our Lord made bread in plenty from just a little bread in the desert and changed water into wine at Cana,” wrote Ephrem the Syrian, “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.”
Just as he spoke of natural birth with Nicodemus and natural water with the Samaritan woman at the well, Jesus began, in this instance, with natural bread. But it was just a starting point, for he was intent on showing the people their spiritual starvation and their need for heavenly nourishment. And so he took a further step when he offered a stiff rebuke. “Amen, amen, I say to you,” he declared as he exposed their earthbound thinking, “you are looking for me not because you saw signs but because you ate the loaves and were filled.”
This is the first of the four “Amen, amen” statements made in John 6. Each builds on the previous; each is a profound pronouncement. The Hebrew word “amen” (sometimes translated “truly” or “verily”) indicated a solemn statement of truth and veracity. It was, in essence, a sacred oath. In this first instance, the rebuke was followed by an exhortation to not work for food that perishes, but “for food that endures for eternal life.” What is required? What is needed? Belief in the One sent by God.
The response to this call to faith was astounding: “What sign can you do …? What can you do?” They had seen him multiply five loaves and two fishes to feed thousands and they still demand a further sign, further proof! Their reference to their ancestors in the desert with Moses is, of course, quite ironic, for the Israelite community—as today’s Old Testament reading recounts—continually doubted and second-guessed the authority of Moses. Given manna—“bread from heaven”—the Israelites had asked, “What is this?” (Ex. 16:15).
Their descendants, likewise, failed to recognize the supernatural character of the Incarnate Word and the heavenly origin of the God-man. In order to comprehend where he was from, they had to be corrected about Who gave the bread from heaven. It was God the Father, not Moses, who sustained the people in the wilderness.
The woman at the well, not yet comprehending the spiritual nature of Jesus’ words, had said, “Sir, give me this water” (Jn. 4:15). In a similar manner the people in the crowd insist, “Sir, give us this bread always.” But they, like their fathers, still did not understand “that man does not live by bread alone, but that man lives by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord” (Deut. 8:3). Having eaten the bread miraculously multiplied before them by the hands of God, they still tried to force God into a box—a lunch box.
That box—the destructive illusion of selfishness, political schemes, and materialism—was shattered with a few simple words: “I am the bread of life.” The new manna was a man!
(This “Opening the Word” column originally appeared in the August 2, 2009, issue of Our Sunday Visitor newspaper.)
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Beautiful insight, Mr. Olson, thank you.
You’re touching on exactly how the coming of Jesus changed everything for every one of us.
I agree. A beautiful insight starting with the quote from the awesome theologian Msgr Guardini, which I could never understand part from your unpacking it for us.
I think the Eucharist will somehow save the Church. It will not be any pope now or even any new great saints who are being formed & nurtured somewhere in the world at this moment. I believe also in the Immaculate Conception. I believe in St Michael the Archangel & his angels. The Kingdom will save the Church from without, the Eucharist from within. Believers will be marked by their cross from without and by their baptism from within.
An old priest today in a church in Ireland said “bread eaten is soon forgotten”. He said the churches are empty. After 1500 yrs will this generation be the ones who fail to pass on the faith?
From Angelic Diet, by Hans Boersma
August 3, 2021
Excerpt:
When the Israelites looked out of their tents and saw the ground covered, they asked each other, “What is it?” In Hebrew, this question is: Mān hu? Our word manna is simply a transliteration of the question, “What is it?” Such a name veils more than it unveils. The Israelites, for all their grumbling, at least realized that they couldn’t comprehend what manna is.
I never could relate man to Manna but yes man is the Mannaof today. We feed each other with the Word of the lord and earthly Bread and specially at Communion—The Eucharist.
“and they did not understand” and do we understand? We eat the flesh, blood, SOUL AND DIVINITY of Christ the Lord and God. The Eucharist is also the soul and divinity of God. One God, one heart, one will. We eat God, but we have to make it real by the awareness of it. “May Christ find a dwelling place through faith in your heart”
Yes, the new manna is a man. A Man intrinsically [hypostatically] united to the Godhead. That union, so concomitant that the human nature, the body, and the Divine Word are inseparable. So much so that we cannot speak of the Man, Jesus of Nazareth without that absolute, eternal link.
Aquinas comments on that union between body and soul in ST 3a 76 ad 1, that after the crucifixion and the temporary distancing between Christ’s two natures we could not consecrate the bread and wine. For example, if an Apostle decided to offer the Eucharist prior to the resurrexion the bread and wine would remain simply bread and wine. Not until he rose from the dead would the consecration confer the body and blood, soul and divinity of our Savior.
Another teaching of St Thomas Aquinas in that section is that the bread could not contain the entire body due to dimensions of the bread. Perhaps that is supported by a scientific examination of an alleged sample of blood and tissue taken from a consecrated host that was discarded and retrieved, placed in water to dissolve, that the findings indicated heart tissue.
Our faith does tell us that the real presence of the Son of Man is a miracle of his love for us.
Further exploration of the meaning and purpose of the Man Christ, is that Christ’s humanness conveys to us the divine nature, the Godhead. That we are able to perceive in the humanness of Christ that unsurpassable good that is God the Father.
For example, Aquinas will say that we venerate Christ’s human nature, his humanness, and worship his divine nature, the Godhead. An indication of this is at the resurrection. Mary Magdalene throws herself at his feet seeking to embrace him. Christ responds, Do not cling to me. I have yet to ascend to my Father. Similarly another account has the two women doing the same with Christ giving the same response. The women are drawn to the Man, Christ teaches by inference of implication that their adoration is to be completed in the Father. That in the Man Christ, we contemplatively excavate to find all the riches of the Father.
A point of faith in the real presence of the Holy Eucharist is explained here by Aquinas within the Summa Theologiae on the real presence 3a question 76 how Christ exists in this sacrament. It’s been denied by some that Christ’s human presence is not in the consecrated bread and wine. St Thomas Aquinas in 3a 76 1 quotes Ambrose, that Christ is in this sacrament. Aquinas in His Reply: Our Catholic Faith makes it absolutely necessary to profess that the [whole Christ] is present in this sacrament.
Moving forward to 76 6 he adds that insofar as a corresponding relationship of Christ to the sacrament, it is a relationship to the species [bread and wine]. While to the human mind it’s likely something that exists due to its observation – in the species the relationship is real. The rationale for this is the concomitant relation between Christ body and his divinity. Consequently, it is an error to hold that Christ’s human nature does not exist in the sacrament.
Thomas Aquinas on Holy Eucharist, in his early writings:
….. in this Sacrament there is that which is the Sacrament alone, sacramentum tantum, that is, the species of bread and wine; and that which is known as the res sacramentum, that is, the true Body and Blood of Christ; and that which is the res tantum, that is, the unity of the Mystical Body, the Church which this Sacrament both signifies and causes.
The Catechetical Instructions (Sinag-Tala, Manila 1939 -Nihil/Imprim)
Thanks Elias.
Thank you Fr.
We often forget that Christ has laid a claim on us. That claim must be the point of all remembering. But I too confess, I often neglect the Lord when it is even not hard to be recollected with him.
I think some of may complaints about my lacks are not bad; also the complaint not knowing what to do about them. And the idea that God has all that in hand, I find can leave me TOO MUCH AT PEACE.
On sacramentum tantum, Christ chose these humble elements to be his to multiply the Paschal culmination he wrought and carry down through time into eternity its saving witness and effects: bread, his flesh for the life of the world and wine, his sacrificial outpouring, in gift, in covenant.
On res sacramentum, he lays bare his own soul in his works to which we are to be conformed and his Divinity, through which we are reclaimed and redeemed to the Father.
On res tantum, he establishes his new promises, the old is no more, it is he who prefigures and predestines the consummation to come now made known through him, with him and in him.
Spiritual Communion Prayer
As a Catholic Eucharistic Minister, I have used this prayer for years for patients in a hospital and residents in a retirement home.
I am currently in a retirement home, and I use it in a TV Mass by Heart of the Nation. I believe it is great and like the version by
Saint Alphonsus Liquori.
The crowds’ primary relationship was with the bread rather than Jesus and His message. This can also happen with spiritual consolations in prayer. The person can end up forming a relationship with the consolations, taking the focus away from God. In a long term prayer life people can have periods of spiritual aridity, people who are in it for God will persist in prayer. St. Teresa of Calcutta is a heroic example of this spiritual aridity. Her spiritual aridity was supposed to have started around the time she started her work for the poor and continued to the end of her life.