The Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time [B]
Proverbs 9:1-6  +  Ephesians 5:15-20  +  John 6:51-58

Praying each set of mysteries of the Rosary is like climbing a mountain.

The five mysteries of each set—whether you’re talking about the Joyful, Luminous, Sorrowful, or Glorious Mysteries—are not five random, unconnected mysteries.  The five mysteries of each set tell a single story, and they climb to a peak, which is reached in the fifth mystery.  In each set, the fifth mystery is set on a mountaintop.

For example, the fifth Sorrowful Mystery is literally and geographically set on a mountaintop.  The Fifth Sorrowful Mystery of the Crucifixion is set upon Mount Calvary.  Of course, it’s true that this mount is not on the scale of the Rockies or the Alps, but only 2,500 feet above sea level, less than half the altitude of Denver.

However, it wasn’t the physical climb of Mount Calvary, but the spiritual climb that was so steep for Jesus.  That ascent was not only the act of walking up the mount, but was also in the raising of His life to God the Father during the three hours that He was nailed to the Cross.  The ascent of Mount Calvary is steep because Jesus was steeped in the sins of every human person throughout history—past, present, and future—from Adam and Eve in the beginning to the last sinner to trespass against God before the Second Coming at the end of human history.  Atop Mount Calvary on Good Friday, the God-man Jesus Christ reconciled God and man by offering up His life in sacrifice, to God the Father, for the sake of fallen man.

In a similar way, the Fifth Joyful Mystery is also set on a mountain.  The fifth Joyful Mystery is the Finding of the Child Jesus in the Temple.  The Temple Mount, built upon what in the Book of Genesis is called Mount Moriah, was and is the holiest site in Judaism, because the Jewish Temple was built upon this mount.  It was within the Jewish Temple—more specifically, within the Temple’s Holy of Holies—that God descended to earth and manifested His divine Presence.  It was there that the Word made made Flesh—a mere boy of twelve—said to Mary and Joseph, “Did you not know that I had to be in my Father’s House?”

In a similar way, the Fifth Luminous Mystery is set on a mountain:  not geographically, but spiritually.  The Fifth Luminous Mystery is Jesus instituting the Eucharist at His Last Supper.  The Catechism of the Catholic Church, quoting one of the documents of the Second Vatican Council, declares that the Eucharist is “the source and summit of the Christian life” [CCC 1324, quoting Lumen Gentium 11].  This summit—this mountaintop—is the peak of the Christian life here on earth.  Nowhere on earth is Christ more powerfully present than in Jesus’ complete gift of Self, which He gave us as a sacrament on the night before He offered Himself on the Cross.  At the Last Supper, Jesus instituted the Sacrament of the Eucharist.

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This is the gift of Self that Jesus preaches about in today’s Gospel passage.  Jesus, in this sixth chapter of John’s Gospel, has been speaking about bread for some time.  But His intentions are constantly misunderstood.

The first confusion that Jesus has to clear up is the belief that Jesus is present in the crowd’s midst in order to fill their stomachs.  Of course, it’s true that Jesus did perform a miracle of feeding five thousand men with just five loaves.  But that miracle was a sign, pointing to something even greater.

The first words that He speaks in today’s Gospel passage are:  “I am the living bread”.  Now if Jesus had just stopped there, John 6 would have ended just fine (spoiler alert:  the end of John 6, as we’ll hear next Sunday, does not end just fine).  In any case, these first words that Jesus speaks in today’s Gospel passage are innocent enough:  “I am the living bread”.  That could mean just about anything you might want it to mean.  Many Christians can accept those words as referring to Jesus’ teaching, or more generally, to the Word of God.  But is that what Jesus is chiefly directing our attention towards in His Sermon on the Bread of Life?  Jesus’ declaration that He is “the living bread” are a sign, pointing to something even greater.

Jesus declares to the crowd:  “the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.”  This astounds the crowd.  But it hardly astounds Christians in our day and age, because to us it’s a clear foreshadowing of Good Friday.  It seems obvious that Jesus is foretelling His sacrificial death on the Cross when He declares, “the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.”  All Christians can accept these words in that way.  But Jesus does not stop there.  These words point us further, into an even deeper belief in Christ Jesus.  The chief meaning of His Sermon on the Bread of Life is still to come.  He has something more to give us.  Jesus through His preaching of this sermon is ascending a mountain, and He has to continue climbing, and continue to invite us to follow Him to the sermon’s peak.

When Jesus declares, “the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world”, His words are a sign that point to a sacrament:  the Sacrament of the Eucharist; the Sacrament of the Real Presence of Christ Jesus, which comes into our midst through the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.  Jesus speaks of this Most Blessed Sacrament when He preaches these words 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.”

Here at the mountaintop of His Sermon on the Bread of Life, Jesus is not speaking about bread that fills the stomach.  He’s not speaking about the bread that’s preached through the Word of God.  He’s not even speaking chiefly about the historical event of His impending Crucifixion, because the Crucifixion in an historical event, far back in the historical past.  He’s speaking about the Sacrament of the Eucharist, which makes His believers present at His Crucifixion, even if they live 2,000 years after the historical event that took place on Good Friday. This Sacrament makes us not just witnesses to the event of His Crucifixion, but invites us to partake of the Crucifixion by worthily eating the Flesh and drinking the Blood of the Word made Flesh.

The mountaintop of the Sermon on the Bread of Life is in invitation from Jesus to His disciples to believe in His Real Presence in the Eucharist, and to worthily partake in this Sacrifice.  Next Sunday we will hear about the disappointing fallout that occurred 2,000 years ago when Jesus first preached this sermon.  Today, you and I have to decide whether to accept Jesus at His Word, and accept the Gift of His very Self in the Eucharist as His means of our abiding in Him, and living our lives with His very strength inside us.

The Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time [B]
Exodus 16:2-4,12-15  +  Ephesians 4:17,20-24  +  John 6:24-35

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

Today is the second of five Sundays when we hear from the sixth chapter of Saint John’s account of the Gospel.  In this chapter, St. John the Evangelist records both the miracles and the teaching of Jesus that point towards the Eucharist.  Last Sunday we heard Jesus miraculously multiple five loaves of bread, and as a consequence of this sign, the crowd wanted to carry Jesus off to make Him their King.  In spite of their desire, last week’s Gospel passage ended when Jesus, surely frustrated by the crowd misunderstanding His miracle, fled to a mountain alone.

Before we reflect on this Sunday’s passage, stop and consider Jesus’ flight to the mountain.  Please consider that Jesus might at times act towards you as He acted towards that crowd.  Consider that Jesus might flee from you for the same reason that He fled that crowd.  If we don’t take this personally, we won’t appreciate fully the rest of John 6.

First of all, we ought to recognize that everything that Jesus did and does is loving.  Even when Jesus spoke strictly to others, it was with love in His heart for the one to whom He spoke, and with a desire for that person to turn over his or her life fully to God.  Likewise, when Jesus at the end of last Sunday’s passage fled the crowd for the mountain, it was a loving action.  But, we might wonder, how could leaving someone be a loving act?  Consider just two reasons from the spiritual and moral life.

In the spiritual life, one of the causes of what sometimes is called “spiritual dryness” or “spiritual desolation” is that God wants your desire for Him to grow.  The old saying “Absence makes the heart grow fonder” applies to the spiritual life.  At times, God will absent Himself from the Christian’s soul to make her longing for Him grow stronger.  This type of God leaving us in no way implies that there’s anything wrong with the state of our soul.

However, the other type of God leaving us does implies that we’ve done something wrong.  I’m not talking here about someone committing mortal sin, in which case all grace in the soul is gone.  Instead, I’m talking about God choosing to leave the Christian’s soul because of what that Christian wants from God:  that is, because of the Christian’s desires.

This is why Jesus fled for the mountain alone at the end of last Sunday’s passage.  In this Sunday’s passage, Jesus speaks to this point also.  God wants us to want Him for the best possible reason, not just to fill our stomachs, or heal our illnesses.  As each of us grows in the Christian life, we have to allow God to purify our motives and desires.  We have to ask God to help us to love Him only for His sake, and not for our own sake.  Only the disciple with a pure heart shall see God, and only the disciple with a more pure heart shall have God abide within his soul.

So with that as a backdrop, consider what we heard today from John 6.

When the crowd saw that neither Jesus nor His disciples were at the place where Jesus had eaten the bread, they went looking for Him.  We see this crowd hungering for something.  In last Sunday’s Gospel passage, the crowd hungered for bread.  This Sunday, we see the crowd hungering for Jesus.  They want to learn from Jesus how never to hunger again.

In this passage, we hear the crowd speak to Jesus four times.  The first three times they ask questions; the fourth time they make a request.  The first question they ask is, Rabbi (meaning, “Teacher”), when did you come here?  The crowd is confused about the origin of Jesus, but Jesus confronts them with the fact that they are only concerning themselves about their physical hunger.  He tells them, as He tells each of us, You should not be working for perishable food, but for food that remains unto life eternal, food which the Son of Man will give you.  Jesus shifts attention from the physical hunger He satisfied through the miracle He offered to them shortly before, to the spiritual hunger He will meet through the Sacrifice of His Body and Blood which He will offer to them some time later.

Well, this seems all right to the crowd.  They want in on the deal, so they ask Jesus their second question:  What must we do to perform the works of God?  Jesus’ response is brief and to the point.  This is the work of God:  have faith in the One He sent.  In other words, they do not themselves have the means to satisfy this spiritual hunger:  there is no spiritual refrigerator, supermarket, or field for them to go to.  Their spiritual hunger is not only for something to fill the emptiness inside their souls, but also for something to fill the emptiness around them.  For there is nothing around them capable of sustaining them eternally.

But the response of the crowd at this point is to demand a sign from Jesus, so that they’ll know He is worthy of their faith.  They’re looking for a sign like the one their ancestors received in the desert during the Exodus, when bread rained down from Heaven.  Jesus explains, however, that while this sort of physical bread can sustain one during one’s days in this world, it only has meaning in this world.  The daily bread Jesus offers from God the Father, a spiritual bread, is the food that is capable of making the Exodus from earth to Heaven.

In any case, we have during these five weeks the words and deeds of Jesus recorded in the sixth chapter of Saint John’s Gospel account, and I encourage you to spend time in meditation on what Jesus wants us to want most during our earthly days.  The Most Blessed Sacrament of the Eucharist fulfills the deepest need we have.  If, like the crowd in the Gospel, we continue to have a hard time believing that truth, Jesus will nonetheless continue to invite us here.  He will continue to teach us throughout our earthly days that our lives find real meaning only through His life.  He’s continue to teach us that all the earthly things that we think are important, and for which we hunger, are important only inasmuch as they lead us to love God and others more deeply.