August 4, 2024

Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time Cycle B

Exodus 16:2-4, 12-15; Ephesians 4:17,20-24; John 6:24-35

A man one day was late for an appointment. As he got into the parking lot for the office, there were no parking spaces left. After driving around for a few minutes, nothing opened up. The man prayed: God, if you get a space for me, I'll put $50 in the collection this Sunday. Nothing opened up, and five minutes later, the man prayed, “OK, I'll put in $100.” Still, nothing opened up. Finally, while waiting for another ten minutes, the man said: “I really need this. I'll put $500 in the collection if you will just find me a place to park.” Just then, someone started to back out of a space. The man was relieved, and then said: “Never mind, Lord. I found something myself.”

Now of course this is a joke, and not something that actually happened – I hope – but unfortunately the underlying attitude that it displays reminded me of the people in the Gospel reading today. Now, if you remember from last week, these same people had just witnessed Jesus feeding over five thousand people with five barley loaves and two fishes [John 6:1-15]. The setting for our Gospel this morning (afternoon) is the very next day. In essence these people who wanted to make Jesus king yesterday after the first miracle were telling Jesus now, “Show us another miracle, and we'll believe.” They pointed to Moses: he didn’t just feed the Israelites one time. They had access to manna for the whole forty years of their journey to the Promised Land. But Jesus knows better. He knows that their example from Exodus actually works against them: sure, God gave them manna, but even with this daily miracle, the Israelites still continued to not believe. God was still giving them manna when they later built the golden calf, that great monument to unbelief.

Jesus knows that miracles don’t result in faith. They will reinforce a faith that is there, but they won’t cause it, at least not a lasting faith. I often have people tell me that I should talk more often about Eucharistic miracles and Marion apparitions in my homilies. While I am not against doing so, I know that they rarely do what I think the people asking for them want to happen: cause belief where there was no belief before or show proof of our religious tenets. And the reason is demonstrated by the crowds in today’s Gospel: they are not looking to God for faith; they are looking for self-gratification. There is an initialism in English that sums this us: WIIFM. Pronounced Wif-em. What’s In It For Me? And Christ is offering the crowd something, but it’s not what they are looking for. They want food for the body. They want full bellies. Instead, Jesus offers food for the soul. He offers himself as the bread of life.

This is timely, since we are wrapping up the two years of the National Eucharistic Revival that the US Bishops started. And what better way to end it than to read from chapter six of John’s Gospel, what is know as the Bread of Life Discourse. Starting last week and going through the end of August, we will have our Gospel Mass reading from this teaching of Jesus. Today we hear the beginning of the discourse with its lesson to have faith in Christ, or as Jesus tells the crowd, “This is the work of God, that you believe in the one he sent” [John 6:29b NABRE]. Right now, Jesus is not talking specifically about the Eucharist – he will talk about that later in the discourse when he describes the necessity of eating his body and drinking his blood. Now he is talking about his feeding of our souls, which includes the Eucharist but also includes all aspects of his teachings.

And it is important that we understand what he means when he says believe in him. It is an intellectual concept of Western philosophy that having belief or faith is just a thought exercise: I believe in Christ the same way I believe that the sky is blue. To a first century Jew, belief or faith in someone was not just an intellectual activity. It meant that you followed that person’s teachings and whole-heartedly aligned your life to those teachings and example of that person. It is the same thing that Saint Paul refers to in the second reading when he tells the former pagans in the church at Ephesus about taking off the old self and putting on the new self, “created in God’s way in righteousness and holiness of truth” [Ephesians 4:24]. Father Bill Leonard likened one who has true faith to one that sees the world differently, through what he calls “faith eyes.”

So our challenge today is to take stock of how we look at the world: is it a “what’s in in for me” manner, or do we look at it as God sees it, through “faith eyes.” The crowds today were looking to God as a caterer, providing food. The man in the opening story was looking to God as a valet, providing services to make his life easier. How do we look at our relationship to God?

Our belief in Christ should be that he is the Son Of God, the Word of God who creased the universe and everything in it, including us in his own image. We believe that Jesus therefore knows us better than we know ourselves. He is teaching us today that we can look inward, look at our own needs, fill our bellies, satisfy our own wants, do what we think will make us happy. Or we can follow The Way: we can turn outward, we can love God and love one another, we can transcend our self-centeredness and find true joy. The irony is that, if you still want to look at the “What’s in it for me” angle, modern scientific research in the area of psychology actually demonstrates in multiple studies that the happiest people are those that are more concerned with loving others and God than they are in loving themselves. Jesus knows us better than we know ourselves.

Today he asks us to believe in him, to put on our new baptismal selves and bring joy to others, and in the process bring true joy to ourselves. During the Gospel in a few weeks, at the end of the Bread of Life Discourse, we will hear that many of the disciples that heard this message will walk away from discipleship, saying “This saying is hard; who can accept it?” [John 6:60b]. In the search around the parking lot of life, trying to find true joy, they said: Never mind, God. I can find it myself. Are we too going to say this, or are we going to believe, really believe?

As we continue with our Mass, may the bread and wine we receive in the Eucharist be the sacramental presence of Christ within us, pushing our thoughts outward instead of inward. May we make the Bread of Life Discourse a fundamental part of our belief in God and in his Church. In a few minutes we will have a few minutes of adoration of the Blessed Sacrament: as we look upon the Lord, may we align ourselves to his will and answer the question “who can accept it” with a faithful response: “I can.”