June 26, 2011 - Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ
Reading 1 - Dt 8:2-3, 14b-16a
Moses said to the people: "Remember how for forty years now the LORD, your God, has directed all your journeying in the desert, so as to test you by affliction and find out whether or not it was your intention to keep his commandments. He therefore let you be afflicted with hunger, and then fed you with manna, a food unknown to you and your fathers, in order to show you that not by bread alone does one live, but by every word that comes forth from the mouth of the LORD. Do not forget the LORD, your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, that place of slavery; who guided you through the vast and terrible desert with its saraph serpents and scorpions, its parched and waterless ground; who brought forth water for you from the flinty rock and fed you in the desert with manna, a food unknown to your fathers."
Responsorial Psalm - 147:12-13, 14-15, 19-20
R. (12) Praise the Lord, Jerusalem.
Glorify the LORD, O Jerusalem; praise your God, O Zion.
For he has strengthened the bars of your gates; he has blessed your children within you.
R. Praise the Lord, Jerusalem.
He has granted peace in your borders; with the best of wheat he fills you.
He sends forth his command to the earth; swiftly runs his word!
R. Praise the Lord, Jerusalem.
He has proclaimed his word to Jacob, his statutes and his ordinances to Israel. He has not done thus for any other nation; his ordinances he has not made known to them. Alleluia.
R. Praise the Lord, Jerusalem.
Reading II - 1 Cor 10:16-17
Brothers and sisters: The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? Because the loaf of bread is one, we, though many, are one body, for we all partake of the one loaf.
Gospel - Jn 6:51-58
Jesus said to the Jewish crowds: "I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world." The Jews quarreled among themselves, saying, "How can this man give us his flesh to eat?"
Jesus said to them, "Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him. Just as the living Father sent me and I have life because of the Father, so also the one who feeds on me will have life because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Unlike your ancestors who ate and still died, whoever eats this bread will live forever."
Reflection
Bread was the central food staple of Ancient Near Eastern society, with the majority of the population receiving the preponderance of their daily caloric intake from some form of bread. It was the domestication of wheat and the cultivation of fields that allowed the earliest civilizations to develop along the fertile riverbanks of the Nile, Tigris, and Euphrates. The introduction of agriculture and the ensuing ability to store and transport calories in the form of bread ushered in a new era of human history, as previously itinerant tribes of herders and hunters could harvest a consistent source of food from the soil. This more permanent sort of settlement gave rise to the first cities, which in turn resulted in kingdoms and empires, all along permitting a flurry of human activities, from visual arts to music to philosophy and science.
Put simply, because of bread—that is, because humans now could count on an assured source of nourishment and did not have to consume their entire daily existence with foraging and hunting simply to survive—all other aspects that we consider essential to a full human life, e.g. time with friends and family, opportunities for leisure and play, enjoyment of the arts, became possible.
The term “bread,” then, is and was shorthand for nourishment, sustenance, and life itself. Moroever, it represents the whole range of human experiences made possible by its availability. Having access to bread means that we are able not merely to survive, but to flourish in all that it means to be human. Thus, when Jesus instructed us to pray to God, “Give us today our daily bread,” a paraphrasing might be rendered, “Give us today that which we need to nourish us, to provide us with the opportunity to live fully human lives.” Thus, when Jesus tells us, “I am the Bread of Life,” He is claiming that He Himself is that which we need to live. He, Jesus, God become human, is the source of our daily sustenance, our ongoing nourishment that makes a fully human life possible.
The importance of bread to the life of the ancient Jews was unmatched, save for water. And yet, in the first reading from the Hebrew Scriptures, we see that God intentionally allowed the people to be deprived of this most basic necessity. The book of Deuteronomy recounts the agonizing experience of the people as they wandered through the desert, wondering aloud, “Did God lead us out of slavery in Egypt simply to let us die of hunger in the desert?” But if God loved His people so much and had gone to such great trouble to care for them, why would He allow them to suffer the pangs of hunger?
The cardinal sin of the Jewish people, as delineated throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, is that of pride. Indeed, the Christian Church continues to assert that the sin with which we struggle most ceaselessly as human beings is that of pride. Pride permeates our daily interactions and poisons even our accomplishments. This proclivity towards pride is epitomized in the production of bread, and it is this mundane item of human life that God uses to teach the people Israel—and us—a lesson about our relationship to God and the cosmos.
Before eating bread, the Jewish people say a blessing known as the Hamotzi. It goes, Baruch Atah Adonai Eleheinu Melech Haolam Hamatzi Lechem Meen Haaretz, or, “Blessed are You, Oh Lord, Our God, King of the Universe, Who brings forth bread from the earth.” (This is the formula upon which our own Catholic Eucharistic prayer is based, “Blessed are You, Lord God of all Creation, through your goodness we have this bread to offer, which earth has given and human hands have made, it will become for us the Bread of Life.”)
What is made unequivocally clear in the formulation is that it is God who brings forth the bread, and that humans are the recipients of God’s goodness and generosity in the form of nourishment. But the Jews had a tendency to forget this reality, much as we, today, often fail to acknowledge God’s role in providing the many good things in our daily life.
The repeated offense of the ancient Israelites—and our contemporary ubiquitous tendency—is to fail to recognize that all good things come to us as freely given, unmerited gifts from God. Bread, which is the result of sun, rain, and soil, had come to be viewed as a human creation, the product of human ingenuity and industry. After all, humans planted the seeds, humans tilled the soil, humans harvested the grains, humans ground the flour, and humans baked the loaves. God didn’t spend 14 hours behind the plow, and God certainly didn’t knead the air bubbles out of the dough. So bread, understandably, came to be viewed as something humans produced. And, in a sense, of course, they were right—bread was the result of much human labor, and inasmuch as God invites us to be co-creators and stewards of the earth, humans can justifiably boast of their accomplishment.
But it is important to remember that no amount of tilling will make up for a lack of rain, and no strain of seed will prove fruitful if a parasite blights the crop. Bread, though it be the work of human hands, is undeniably the product of factors entirely outside human control, and the very possibility of cultivating the earth at all is itself a testament to the goodness of God. As was the case so very often throughout the life of the people Israel—e.g. when they had gained peace, stability, and wealth in their kingdom by way of conquest, then had quickly forgotten that it had been God who made possible their success—the Prophet, in this case, Moses, reminds the people that all good things come from God, as tempting as it is to see them as products exclusively wrought about by human effort.
Thus because the people had become self-satisfied and proud, God chooses to deprive them of the bread they took for granted in order to demonstrate to them the reality that they were, in fact, wholly dependent on God for their existence. To hammer the point home, when God eventually does feed them, it is not with bread, but with an un-earthly substance called manna that literally drifts down from Heaven. There could be absolutely no mistaking where this sustenance came from—the people did nothing to cultivate or harvest it; it quite literally dropped from the sky, a physical (edible) manifestation of God’s grace.
The message is every bit as much intended for us as it was for the people in the desert. All that we have, and all that we produce, is possible only through the grace of God. We are not, despite our ardent wishes, the masters of our own destiny. So often, over the course of our successes, we gradually de-emphasize the role of God in the goodness we attain. The top-rated surgeon may come to see the results of his procedures as primarily the product of his great talents, his years of hard study, and his countless hours spent perfecting his craft. How quickly he forgets that his intelligence was given to him by God, and that all the hours of study in the world would have been for naught had he not been endowed the brain to handle this undertaking. How easily he overlooks the fact that his ability to wield a scalpel and see the monitor are gifts from God while so many lack the dexterity (or even limbs) to manage such movements and countless others lack the eyesight necessary for such precision. All of which is not to mention the fact that the organs of his patients continue to hold life only by the will of God, and that he could do every thing in his power to perform a successful procedure—and still lose the patient.
Again, an elite athlete may come to see her success as the result of innumerable hours honing her skills and training her body. And while this is unquestionably true, it is also the case that she has been gifted a genetic makeup that allows her to train for hours on end, not to mention the unmerited opportunity to be born in a country where women are permitted to participate in sports and the chance to compete is even a possibility, while many young women her own age spend those same hours toiling away in the windowless factory of a developing country.
God may choose, at any moment, to deprive us of some good thing in order to remind us that, for as hard as we work, and as much as we “deserve” the good things in our life, we are not, ultimately, the source of this goodness. Nor are we nearly so in control as we may like to think. The surgeon’s eyes could fail, and the athlete could be in a car accident rendering her unable to walk, much less compete. Such personal afflictions can serve to bring us closer to God, for people are rarely so eager to pray and willing to acknowledge God’s power over the cosmos as when they have suffered some major setback.
The point of saying grace before a meal, of crossing oneself after hitting a home run, or of reciting a Hail Mary before surgery, is to acknowledge, for ourselves and in front of God, that as hard as we work and as much effort as we put in, all such things are possible only because of God’s goodness. We may never have food float down from Heaven, but grace works the same way—it is an unearthly substance sent by God that we might live, and we have done nothing to earn it. All we have to do is acknowledge where it, like all good things, comes from. In celebrating Jesus as “The Bread of Life,” we attest that He is the “daily bread,” God’s grace become human and offered to us as nourishment for our survival and flourishing. And for this we say, “Blessed be God!”
Reflection Questions
1) What sorts of things do you see yourself as need to survive? What sorts of things to live a full life and flourish (which is more than mere survival)? What role do you play in procuring these things, and what role does God play in providing them?
2) Do you ever struggle to see what God is trying to teach you at a given point of suffering or affliction in your life? Are there any times when you feel that you have been deprived of some basic good, and you have cried out to God asking, “What is going on here?” Was it resolved? How do you view the experience?
3) What does it mean to you, personally, to say to God, “Give us each day our daily bread?” What is YOUR daily bread? What do you, uniquely, mean when you say those words to God? Are you getting your daily bread?
4) What does it mean to you when Jesus says that He is the Bread of Life? How does that, in a strictly practical sense, work for you?
