Our Deepest Hunger

Michiel Peeters - Today’s Gospel is the continuation of last week’s, when Jesus, seeing the crowd, had asked: “Where can we buy enough food for them to eat?” 

Then, all had eaten “as much as they wanted,” and Jesus had withdrawn to the mountain alone. At night, he had gone to Capernaum, where, the next day, they find him again, for they have not gotten enough of what they have experienced with him. 

Then Jesus decides to teach them: yesterday you experienced something that moved you, but you have not understood yet what it is that you have experienced. It was a sign. 

The hunger you felt was a sign of the great hunger that lies at the bottom of your hearts: hunger for justice, for happiness... The bread you ate was the sign of an incipient satiation of this hunger.

That would be the right and full-fledged reason for your effort to come here. Look into your experience and see if deep down you are not looking for a different kind of food than yesterday’s bread! That different kind of food would be worth the efforts of your life! And that food I can give you, because I am from God.

Yesterday’s bread was a sign of that! His hearers—like us—have been raised so much with the idea that they have to do something to receive something, that they ask: “What can we do to accomplish the works of God?” Even “the works of God,” of which they saw a great example, in their view must be obtained, accomplished, by themselves. “What can we do?” “This is the work of God, that you believe in the one he sent.” 

This is what the Mystery suggests you “do”: recognize me as the exceptional presence I am, full of promise for your life. It is not difficult to recognize that. At the same time, it is the way to grow, to begin to experience the works of God, to participate in them. They surely did pay little attention the previous day: “What sign can you do, that we may see and believe in you? … Our ancestors ate manna.” As in: we ate plenty but did not see food literally come down from heaven; so Moses seems greater than you.

But Jesus stresses: “It was not Moses who gave the bread from heaven; my Father gives you the true bread from heaven,” then and now. “For the bread of God is that which … gives life to the world.” This is the true bread of heaven, food that does not perish: that which gives life to the world, gives life and makes the world a kosmos, ordered, more beautiful.

Look, each of us, if in our experience we have tasted such bread that does not just prolong our biological existence but makes us live, and—through that life—changes the world for the better. When they hear him speak like this, they feel that this is the bread they really want: “Sir, give us this bread always.” 

Then Jesus says this sentence that he repeats to us in this very moment, inviting us to verify it: I am this bread of life, this bread for life, this life-giving food. 

Whoever comes to me will be fed at the level of their deepest hunger. And I will always give this bread, because I will always be there, until the end of days. 

We celebrate this Holy Mass for Wim, whom the Lord called to Himself exactly five years ago. He already sees fully what we are talking about now. But we are already called here to verify that the present Christ—“always”—is the bread of life, food for our lives, and through our lives, for the life of the world.
The author has not revised this text translation. By Fr. Michiel Peeters, Tilburg University - 18th Sunday in Ordinary Time B.
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