Speaking of Moses and the manna given in the desert all those years ago, Jesus said, “You know, the bread your fathers ate in the desert didn’t last. They all died.”[1] It was, although miraculously delivered, just ordinary bread. And then he began to speak about his heavenly Father and the bread that he gives—not ordinary bread. He said, “The bread my Father gives is the true bread, and it gives life to the world.”[2] And when the people asked him for this bread he was talking about (“Give us this bread always,” they said), Jesus said this: “I am the bread of life. No one who comes to me will ever hunger; no one who believes in me will ever thirst.”[3] And in that same revelation he said, “my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink.”[4] Different from Moses, this Jesus didn’t just pray for the provision of God; he didn’t go to God in prayer and beg like Moses did for a miracle. This Jesus, Son of the Father with whom he is one,[5] is himself the provision—I am the bread, my flesh is food. God provides by becoming the provision itself. The Father sent the Son, and Jesus talks about being bread for us to eat in this sinful and starving world.
And it is because of this, because Jesus is himself the bread, we can talk about being fed by him today. Because Jesus himself is the bread, we know that on the night before he died, with bread in his hands, when he said, “This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me,”[6] he was giving to his disciples his very self forever in the bread and wine. This is no mere memorial; that is, when Christians gather around the altar to receive the bread and wine they are not simply remembering a scene. The Eucharist is no mere skit. When we gather around the altar and receive the bread and wine, what we are doing is receiving the body and the blood of Jesus. This is what Paul taught. “The blessing-cup, which we bless,” Paul said, “is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ; and the loaf of bread which we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ?”[7] When we come together, and when I put the sacred Host into your hands or on your tongue, you are receiving Jesus, body, soul, and divinity—Jesus himself. You are meeting your God. Like a vulnerable lamb, Jesus will rest in your hands, and you will consume him in sacrifice. This God provides for you just as he has always provided. Never wonder where your God is. He is here. “Oh what joy!” Saint John Vianney said, “On rising from the holy table [the Christian] goes away with all of heaven in his heart.”[8] This is true. God always provides. He gives us his Son in the bread and wine made body and blood.
This is the gift of the man from Nazareth who fed those thousands, thousands of years ago. It was a gift then, and it is a gift now. It was a miracle then, and it is a miracle now. But of course, we must never forget that this gift of Jesus in the body and the blood is no mere private or sentimental consolation. The provision of God is no shallow comfort or mere emotional sentiment for the private individual. The feeding that God provides is real and substantial. The Eucharist is meant not only to do away with your spiritual hunger, it is also meant to do away with physical hunger. But how?
One way to answer the question is to say this: it is frankly obscene when Christians dare to feed on God while neglecting to feed God’s children. It is significant, no accident at all, that Jesus’s teaching on the Eucharist at Capernaum begins with a miracle of material feeding.[9] Bodily hunger and spiritual hunger are indeed tied together in the mystery of charity. The Eucharist is meant to feed the world. It is meant to be the source of plenty for the entire world. Christians should know this, how theses hungers of soul and body relate to one another, how these two hungers hunger together. “You give them something to eat,” Jesus said; this command is still true today.[10] We should be able to understand the Lord here.
But how do we live this out? How does the Eucharist help us help the hungry and the poor? We can find our answer in the witness of people like Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Speaking to her sisters, she said, “as soon as we receive Jesus in Holy Communion, let us go in haste to give him to our sisters, to our poor, the sick, the dying, to the lepers, to the unwanted, and the unloved.”[11] For Mother Teresa, when we receive Jesus in the Eucharist, “he gives us his hunger,” she said.[12] That is, when we receive this bread of life, this Jesus in the body and the blood, we are at once satisfied and made hungry. We are satisfied spiritually by the intimate union of our souls with Jesus himself; by this gift of the Eucharist, we receive the provision and fullness of God, yet we are also made hungry for the souls and bodies of those fellow men and women who hunger spiritually and physically.
Closer to home—for Mother Teresa can sometimes feel so heroic and so far away—we see how this mystery of charity works in our parish’s St. Vincent de Paul chapter. If you only knew the full scope of the good they do, the help they give those strangers in our parish boundaries who are in need, no matter who they are. They first call them “friends,” and then they meet them face-to-face, and then they help them—maybe it’s a month’s rent to keep a family from being evicted, maybe it’s some food, so a family can eat. It’s beautiful. Remember I asked you for food donations last week? That’s for that, for the work of St. Vincent de Paul. Thank you. I’m afraid, though, I also need to ask you also for money for St. Vincent de Paul; for a lot of people are in need, and they need that money to help the poor; the poor within our parish boundaries are right now crying out for help. Our sisters and brothers in St. Vincent de Paul are telling me this, asking for help, asking us for help, so I’m sharing this need with you.
So, what do we do gathered around this altar? Jesus, in the Eucharist, should make us crave the welfare of our fellow human beings. It is this hunger that makes us good Christians, that makes us search for our Lord in the least of humanity, hungry to clothe the naked and hungry to feed those without. It is the hunger of the Eucharist which finally enables us to do what Jesus said we must do to fulfill the greatest commandment—to love God and our neighbors as ourselves.[13] “You give them something to eat,” Jesus said; that haunts me sometimes, that command of his.[14] Anyway, haunted or not, come this altar, eat and be fed, but go away hungry and do your part to feed the world. Amen.
[1] John 6:49 paraphrase
[2] John 6:33 paraphrase
[3] John 6:34-35
[4] John 6:55
[5] John 10:30
[6] Luke 22:19
[7] 1 Corinthians 10:16
[8] Saint John Vianney, Sermons 2, p. 246
[9] John 6:1-15
[10] Mark 6:37
[11] Mother Teresa: Total Surrender, p. 21
[12] Ibid., p. 23
[13] Matthew 22:34-40
[14] Mark 6:37
© 2024 Rev. Joshua J. Whitfield
