What surprises me each time I read it is what they said to him, what they asked him: “Sir, give us this bread always.”[1]

The story as John tells it: Jesus fed the multitudes just as Moses did in the desert, but then he gave them the slip just before they were about to make him king; this is why John follows with the story about Jesus walking on the water, to alert us to the theological fact that Jesus is no mere earthly king.[2]

And then begins today’s passage: wondering just what Jesus was doing getting out of the boat, especially since some must’ve have noticed that he didn’t get in the boat back on the other shore, they ask him, “Rabbi, when did you get here?” It’s a question—if you’re reading John’s Gospel well—loaded with mystery. But Jesus doesn’t dwell on it; he moves instead onto something a lot more interesting than little wonders like walking on water.

That is, he talks about bread. He wants them to remember the bread many of them had eaten back there in the wilderness. He wants them to reflect upon it. Jesus here is simply acting like a good teacher; now comes the lesson. He says in substance, “You’re here because of that bread you ate back there, but, really, that was just bread; like the bread Moses gave the Hebrews in the wilderness long ago, it was just bread.” But then—inviting them higher, deeper, into the mystery—Jesus says, “Do not work for food that perishes but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.”[3] He’s about to tell them about the bread of life, the bread which is his flesh, his blood too. He’s about to tell them about the Eucharist, about the same bread, the same body, we believe we are about to eat—like Dallas is a kind of Capernaum.

But I don’t want to get too far ahead in the story, because I want you to notice something, that thing that always surprises me, what they asked Jesus: “Sir, give us this bread always.” What they had experienced, what they had heard: you see, it brought them to a point where they were no longer just intrigued or interested, rather, they had come to a point of desire. Now they had come to want the bread Jesus was talking about; and they wanted this bread “always,” not merely to satisfy some fleeting hunger. I don’t know, it’s just I think it’s simply worth noticing that before Jesus opens to his listeners the mystery of the Eucharist, he brings them to a point of desiring the Eucharist. Desire comes before knowledge here; there’s something true about that; anyone who’s ever fallen in love knows that. But that’s another topic.

Simply, what I want us to think about is desire. What do I desire? What do you desire? Would you say you desire the Eucharist? Has that ever been part of your prayer: give us this bread always? Have you ever desired God, the Sacraments, like that, or desired them at all? At least that’s what I ask myself most times I come across this passage: Do I really desire the Eucharist? Or are my desires broken? Or, as Paul put it, have I been “corrupted through deceitful desires,” desiring things not nearly as beautiful, not nearly as satisfying?[4]

We are, of course, desiring animals. We always desire something—survival, food, reproduction or at least the means of reproduction, honor or at least praise. Beyond what is animal of us, however, as Aristotle said, humans desire to know; in Plato’s Symposium it was Diotima said that love is the desire to possess the good forever.[5] Now I don’t want to get philosophical here; my point is simply that we humans are always desiring things. Base things and great things, we just can’t get rid of desire, and so the question—maybe the most important question—is what do we desire? Are the things we desire good, beautiful, true? But then another important question: Why do you think Jesus brings his listeners to a point of desire—sir, give us this bread always? Maybe that’s the simple invitation: for you and me to transform our desires; to desire less those lesser things we normally desire, or that we’re addicted to, and instead to desire what God wants us to desire, which is himself in this sacrament we’re about to celebrate.

But that’s difficult. I remember reading some years ago a book by Ernest Dichter called The Strategy of Desire. Dichter was a psychologist, one of the founders of “motivational research” and really one of the fathers of modern advertising. He’s one of those people most people have never heard about but who nonetheless profoundly shaped the world we all live in. Anyway, Ernest Dichter’s “strategy” was simple; the way he put, he said, “the needs and wants of people have to be continuously stirred up.” Always leave people wanting not just more but the next new thing. He said people should really let go of their hang-ups about hedonism; “continuously stirred up” desire is a good thing, good for the economy at least if not for the soul.[6] I don’t think Ernest Dichter believed in the soul. Anyway, we now live in a world he created, and you and I likely spend more time on Amazon than at prayer—prayer we often find a bit boring, not desirable at all, for some strange reason.

Surely you see my point. We need obviously to transform our desires. I need to become the sort of person (you do too) that desires Christ—desiring him where he wants us to desire him, in the Eucharist. “Sir, give us this bread always.” That’s where our souls need to be, that place of desire. But how on earth can we even begin to do that? How on earth do we begin to transform desire?

I need to conclude, so I’ll simply tell you about an interesting person who I think was on the right track. His name was Carlo Carretto, an Italian. In the first half of the twentieth century, he was a Catholic social activist, famous really. But then in his mid-forties he decided to leave it all—the good work, the notoriety, all to join the Little Brothers of Jesus in Algeria; he left his work and his life for the desert. He’s lost the desire for what he was doing, good though it was; he needed something else.

And so, he was sent as part of his novitiate out into the Saharan Desert to meditate alone in a cave. He was left with the Eucharist there in his cave, just he and the Lord silent in the Host for an entire week. Later, of that experience, he wrote, “Silence in the desert, silence in the cave, silence in the Eucharist. No prayer is so difficult as the adoration of the Eucharist. One’s whole natural strength rebels against it. One would prefer to carry stones in the sun. The senses, memory, imagination, all are repressed. Faith alone triumphs, and faith is hard, dark, stark.” But then he said, “To place oneself before what seems to be bread and to say, ‘Christ is there living and true,’ is pure faith. But nothing is more nourishing than pure faith…”[7]

Now I don’t know if any of this makes sense to you. People complain about long homilies and short attention spans, brains ruined by TikTok and the like. Maybe I’ve already lost you. But maybe you get what I’m trying to say, that if we really want to follow Christ into the mystery of the Eucharist, then we’ll need to put ourselves through a grueling transformation of our own desires—those desires we call sins, sins of flesh and mind, but also those desires we don’t often consider, those addictions of the screens and the noises that make our world but at the same time make us so fearful of silence, so fearful of prayer, so fearful of the God who is found in silence, in bread given for you. The God who just wants you to want him. Amen.

[1] John 6:34

[2] John 6:1-21

[3] John 6:25-27 some paraphrased

[4] Ephesians 4:22

[5] Aristotle, Metaphysics 1.1; Plato, Symposium 206A

[6] Ernest Dichter, The Strategy of Desire, 260-263

[7] Carlo Carretto, Letters from the Desert, 11-13

© 2024 Rev. Joshua J. Whitfield