CELEBRATE SUNDAY
WITH ST. MARY'S
EIGHTEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME
What Christ wishes to give us may be for a different reason than why we want Him.
EIGHTEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME
We spend our entire lives as Christians seeking after Christ. What we rarely ask ourselves, though, is the purpose of our seeking; do we desire Christ because of the comfort he might be able to give us in our most difficult periods in life? Do we seek after him because of what we might be able to gain from being his follower in eternal salvation? Do we seek after him because we cannot bear the thought of an existence that ends in nothingness? Or do we emulate the great Saint Thomas Aquinas, who when asked by God what he desired more than anything, said, “Nothing but you, Lord”? If you are seeking after Christ, learn from the thousands of years of example laid out by the crowds during his public ministry, his disciples, the many misguided Christians over the past two millennia, and the great saints of the Church on what Christ desires for us as we desire him.
READ THIS SUNDAY'S MESSAGE
The sixth chapter of John is perhaps one of the most important parts of Scripture because it serves as a turning point in the story of salvation. No longer are we being prepared or taught about the idea of Christ; now, he presents himself fully, first in the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and then in the passages that begin in this Sunday’s Gospel, which we call the Bread of Life discourse. Christ’s identity is the Son of God offering himself entirely to the world, yet no one understood that at this point in his public ministry. Instead, they rightly saw him as the Messiah, the Savior of God’s chosen people, but had formed an idea of this figure as a military or a political leader whose aim was to rid his people of the Romans occupying the Holy Land. Just as it is in the personal lives of all Christians, Christ is being pursued by everyone in this scene; interestingly, he runs away from them because they misunderstood his mission and his identity. The crowds rightly identified him as the Messiah because his miracle of the multiplication of the loaves pointed to the miracle of Manna in the desert when the Israelites were escaping Egypt. In this miracle, the crowds realized they were witnesses to a new Moses who came to offer them relief and nourishment. Christ, though, challenges them: they may have been seeking him out, but they were only seeking him out because of “food that perishes”. He instead came to offer them the Bread of Life.
We are not sure what exactly the substance of Manna was, and neither did the Israelites. In fact, the name is a transliteration of the literal Hebrew question ma meaning “what” and na meaning “this”, or “what is this?” Ironically, most Christians today treat the Eucharist the same way. As we go through the rest of this chapter, we come to realize just how crucial the Eucharist is to the expression of Christianity, as the real flesh and blood of Jesus Christ; instead, many Christians see it as symbolic only. Just as it is with the crowds in the Gospel, they go after Christ with an interior understanding of who he might be for them, while misidentifying precisely who he came to be for us, namely the bread of life. Only the Eucharist, the great Mystery of Christianity and the Source and Summit of our faith, can ensure us that we are not misidentifying Christ. What we receive is not merely a gift, or a transactional reward for our faithfulness. Rather, it is Christ in his entirety. Only this Bread from Heaven gives us Christ wholly and sincerely. Instead of being like the Israelites and the crowds looking at this bread and asking “what is this?”, we should instead receive the Eucharist with the same intentionality as Aquinas, that we are seeking after him for no other reason than to receive him alone.
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