More than it seems

Tuesday, May 2, 2017

From today’s Gospel (John 6:30-35)

“I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst.”

John likes to use images that are easily misunderstood and that often have symbolic and metaphoric meanings, especially when Jesus speaks. You might remember from school that symbols are things that point to a greater reality, and today’s symbols do exactly that.

First we have the I AM declaration. To a Jew, those were the sacred words that God had used to identify himself to Moses when he spoke to him from the burning bush. By copting those words and using them to refer to himself, Jesus is telling his listeners that He is God in no uncertain terms. The Pharisees were scandalized by this, accusing him of serious blasphemy. There weren’t able to grasp the simple reality of what He was telling them.

How about us? Perhaps we could use it in our own prayer and meditation, thinking of Jesus not in physical or practical terms, but rather as mystical reality. In your mind and heart, picture Jesus saying to you I AM, and grasp that He is pure Being.

But then he uses another symbol: I AM the bread of life. A good symbol, because it refers to something we need on a regular basis. Remember the prayer He taught us: Give us today our daily bread. What is this bread? What does it mean to you? Can it somehow be related to the Eucharist itself? How does it feed us? How does He feed us? Do we eat the bread often enough?

And then he makes a statement which doesn’t make any sense if we take it literally: “whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst.” Once again we have to consider the words as symbols which point to a greater reality. Hunger and thirst: what do they mean to you. What is the hunger, what is the thirst that Jesus continually satisfies? These statements remind me of two things in particular:

First, the lines from Psalm 37: Take your delight in the Lord, and He will grant your heart’s desire.

And secondly, the passage from the Catechism of the Catholic Church which states that “we are made by God and for God and only in God will we ever find the peace and happiness that we never stop searching for.” (¶ 27)

We are very fortunate, my friends, because the circumstances of our lives have led us to the Source of the peace and happiness that we are meant to have, a peace and happiness that have nothing to do with the material things of this world; a peace and happiness that very often have little to do with the actual circumstances of our lives. Jesus has given us this gift. Those who have not reached the Source often lead lives of quiet desperation, always seeking to satisfy those needs in ways that fail to deliver, fail to satisfy. And sometimes even we, who have been given such a gift, are prone to forget and then re-enslave ourselves to a quest which can never be fulfilled.

Read the verse from the Gospel again, and see if it can take on more life and more meaning for you at this point.

God bless you!