18th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Cycle B) – August 2, 2009

Scripture Readings
First Exodus 16:2-4, 12-15
Second Ephesians 4:17, 20-24
Gospel John 6:24-35

Prepared by: Fr. Peter John Cameron, O.P.

1. Subject Matter
• The ways of divine Providence
• Putting on the New Self
• The Bread of Life is: given by the Father; gives life to the world; frees the follower from all
hunger and thirst

2. Exegetical Notes
• “The whole Israelite community grumbled against Moses: ‘You had to lead us into this desert
to make the whole community die of famine:’” “Given the grumbling mentioned, one would
expect that the sudden arrival of YHWH’s glory would involve a punishment of sorts for the
rebels. Instead, YHWH assures the people through Moses that their food needs will be met….
The tradition of God’s graciousness has thus been linked to a tradition about the sin of failing
to believe that the God of Israel can indeed accomplish the divine plan.” (The International
Bible Commentary)
• “You must no longer live…in the futility of [your] minds…. Put away the old self of your former
way of life,…and be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and put on the new self:” “Anything
will corrupt when it deviates from the order of its inner being. Man’s nature longs for what
accords with reason; and truth is reason’s perfection and good. Hence, when someone’s
reason sways toward error, and his desire is corrupted from this error, he is referred to as an
old man…. Adam introduced sin into all men, and thus became for everything the primary
source of oldness. Likewise, the primary source of newness and renovation is Christ.” (St.
Thomas Aquinas)
• “Jesus said, ‘I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever
believes in me will never thirst:’” “The saying about the food ‘which endures’ refers to the
personal bearer of the divine life, also to the saving gift of life which he conveys, and also to
the Eucharist in which this shared life and personal link with the mediator of salvation are
established in a special way…. This ‘I am’ collects together all the force off Jesus’ claim to
 divine authority…. This true ‘bread from heaven’ also ha a totally different force and effect
from the food in the wilderness. Since it really comes from heaven, from the domain of divine
life, it also has the power to give true, divine life, and not only to Israel, but to the whole
world.” (Rudolf Schnackenburg)

3. References to the Catechism of the Catholic Church

• 2119 Tempting God consists in putting his goodness and almighty power to the test by word
or deed…. The challenge contained in such tempting of God wounds the respect and trust
we owe our Creator and Lord. It always harbors doubt about his love, his providence, and
his power.

• 1094 It is on this harmony of the two Testaments that the Paschal catechesis of the Lord is
built, and then, that of the Apostles and the Fathers of the Church. This catechesis unveils
what lay hidden under the letter of the Old Testament: the mystery of Christ. It is called
"typological" because it reveals the newness of Christ on the basis of the "figures" (types)
which announce him in the deeds, words, and symbols of the first covenant. By this re-
reading in the Spirit of Truth, starting from Christ, the figures are unveiled. Thus the flood and
Noah's ark prefigured salvation by Baptism, as did the cloud and the crossing of the Red
Sea. Water from the rock was the figure of the spiritual gifts of Christ, and manna in the
desert prefigured the Eucharist, "the true bread from heaven."
• 2115 God can reveal the future to his prophets or to other saints. Still, a sound Christian
attitude consists in putting oneself confidently into the hands of Providence for whatever
concerns the future, and giving up all unhealthy curiosity about it. Improvidence, however,
can constitute a lack of responsibility.

• 274 "Nothing is more apt to confirm our faith and hope than holding it fixed in our minds
that nothing is impossible with God. Once our reason has grasped the idea of God's almighty
power, it will easily and without any hesitation admit everything that [the Creed] will
afterwards propose for us to believe - even if they be great and marvelous things, far above
the ordinary laws of nature."
• 2715 Contemplation is a gaze of faith, fixed on Jesus. "I look at him and he looks at me": this
is what a certain peasant of Ars in the time of his holy curé used to say while praying before
the tabernacle. This focus on Jesus is a renunciation of self. His gaze purifies our heart; the
light of the countenance of Jesus illumines the eyes of our heart and teaches us to see
everything in the light of his truth and his compassion for all men. Contemplation also turns
its gaze on the mysteries of the life of Christ. Thus it learns the "interior knowledge of our
Lord," the more to love him and follow him.
• 2861 In the fourth petition, by saying "give us," we express in communion with our brethren
our filial trust in our heavenly Father. "Our daily bread" refers to the earthly nourishment
necessary to everyone for subsistence, and also to the Bread of Life: the Word of God and
the Body of Christ.
• 2837 The Bread of Life, the Body of Christ, [is] the "medicine of immortality," without which
we have no life within us.
4. Patristic Commentary and Other Authorities
• St. Ambrose: “By this bread the souls of the prudent are fed and delighted, since it is fair and
sweet, illuminating the souls of the hearers with the splendor of truth and drawing them on
with the sweetness of the virtues.”
• Origen: “Consider what Paul calls ‘futility of mind.’ This occurs when someone has a mind but
dos not use it for contemplation, instead surrendering it to captivity under Satan.”
• St. Jerome: “If anyone has indeed heard and learned Christ, he would already have practical
knowledge, since his ignorance would have been dispelled, his darkness illuminated, and
every blindness lifted from the eyes of his heart.”
• St. Jerome: “The Word of God kills in such a way as to make the dead one come alive. He
then seeks the Lord whom he did not know before his death. He does not corrupt but kills the
old man. As the outer man decays, the inner man is renewed.”
• Theophylact: “This bread, being the Son of the living Father, is life by its very nature, and
accordingly gives life to all. Just as earthly bread sustains the frail substance of the flesh and
prevents it from falling into decay, so Christ quickens the soul through the power of the spirit,
and also preserves even the body for immortality. Through Christ resurrection from the dead
and bodily immortality have been gratuitously bestowed upon the human race. For when
everything had been reduced to a condition of spiritual death, the Lord gave us life through
himself, who is bread.”
• Alcuin: “When, through the hand of the priest, you receive the Body of Christ, think not of the
priest which you see, but of the Priest you do not see. The priest is the dispenser of this food,
not the author. The Son of man gives Himself to us, that we may abide in Him, and He in us.”
• Bl. Elizabeth of the Trinity: “O my God, Trinity whom I adore, help me forget myself entirely
so to establish myself in you, unmovable and peaceful as if my soul were already in eternity.
May nothing be able to trouble my peace or make me leave you, O my unchanging God, but
may each minute bring me more deeply into your mystery! Grant my soul peace. Make it your
heaven, your beloved dwelling and the place of your rest. May I never abandon you there,
but may I be there, whole and entire, completely vigilant in my faith, entirely adoring, and
wholly given over to your creative action.”
• Fr. Antonin Gilbert Sertillanges, O.P.: “The supreme task of the moral conscience is to take
hold of itself, explore its contents, consider its objectives. Once more to become ourselves
deliberately after the dispersal effected by our instincts, to be the self of ourself, that is the
whole of our work….Spending my life in the pursuit of what pleases me is an aberration.
Wisdom consists in being pleased with what Providence confers upon me or what I have
freely and wisely chosen. Absolute desires can only refer to absolute values. To be attached
at all cost to what is ephemeral, mortal, is to die incessantly.”
• Fr. Maurice Zundel: “In order that each one of us may not be an impersonal number, in order
that our life may be of worth and be recognized as such, Jesus has revealed this secret to
us: greatness lies in generosity. What tears man away from his prefabricated self is the love
that severs him from himself to make a gift of it. The Divine Presence becomes efficacious,
radiant, thanks to the ‘yes’ given to it when it was already there. This is an immense
deliverance because, henceforth, God is an experience which coincides with the encounter
 with man himself. Both the discovery of God and of one’s true self become the same event.
Man reaches his self when he discovers God.”
• Fr. Thomas Merton: ““The function of faith is not only to bring us into contact with the
‘authority of God’ revealing; not only to teach us truths ‘about God,’ but even to reveal to us
the unknown in our own selves, in so far as our unknown and undiscovered self actually lives
in God, moving and acting only under the direct light of his merciful grace….Faith…embraces
all the realms of life, penetrating into the most mysterious and inaccessible depths not only of
our unknown spiritual being but even of God’s own hidden essence and love. Faith, then, is
the only way of opening up the true depths of reality, even of our own reality.”
• Msgr. Luigi Giussani: “It would be impossible to become fully aware of what Jesus Christ
means if one did not first become fully aware of the nature of that dynamism which makes a
person human. Christ proposes himself as the answer to what ‘I’ am, and only an attentive,
tender, and impassioned awareness of my own self can make me open and lead me to
acknowledge, admire, thank, and live Christ. To be conscious of oneself right to the core is to
perceive, at the depths of the self, an Other.”

5. Examples from the Saints and Other Exemplars

• St. Ignatius of Antioch was totally transformed by his communion with Christ in the
Eucharist. He wrote, “I want the bread of God, which is the flesh of Christ who is the seed of
David; and for drink I want his blood, which is incorruptible love.” He experienced
unshakeable courage and conviction in going to his martyrdom by recognizing his personal
identification with the eucharistic Christ. His words reveal the New Self he had put on: “I am
God's wheat and shall be ground by the teeth of wild animals. I am writing to all the churches
to let it be known that I will gladly die for God if only you do not stand in my way. I plead with
you: show me no untimely kindness. Let me be food for the wild beasts, for they are my way
to God. I am God’s wheat and shall be ground by their teeth so that I may become Christ’s
pure bread. Pray to Christ for me that the animals will be the means of making me a
sacrificial victim for God. No earthly pleasures, no kingdoms of this world can benefit me in
any way. I prefer death in Christ Jesus to power over the farthest limits of the earth. He who
died in place of us is the one object of my quest. He who rose for our sakes is my one
desire.”

6. Quotations from Pope Benedict XVI

• “No one becomes a Christian by his own unaided power. No one can make himself a
Christian. It is not within the human being’s power to shape himself as it were into a great-
souled person and finally into a Christian. On the contrary, the process of becoming a
Christian begins only when a person sloughs off any illusion of independence and self-
sufficiency; when he or she acknowledges that human beings do not create themselves and
cannot bring themselves to fulfillment but must open themselves and allow themselves to be
led, as it were, to their own true selves. To be a Christian, then, means first and foremost
that we acknowledge our own insufficiency and allow him—the Other who is God—to act in
us.”
• “Man comes in the profoundest sense to himself not through what he does but through what
he accepts. He must wait for the gift of love, and love can only be received as a gift…And
one cannot become wholly man in any other way than by being loved, by letting oneself be
loved. For his ‘salvation’ man is meant to rely on receiving. If he declines to let himself be
presented with the gift, then he destroys himself.”
• “Christian belief is…obedience and service: the outstripping of oneself, liberation of the self
precisely through its being taken into service by something not made or thought out by
myself, the liberation of being taken into service for the whole…..Jesus’ being itself is service.
And precisely because this being, as a totality, is nothing but service, it is sonship….He who
surrenders himself completely to service for others, to complete selflessness and self-
emptying, clearly becomes these things….This very person is the true man, the man of the
future, the commixture of man and God…. Christ is the infinite self-expenditure of God.”
• “Egoism is often due to one’s own inner strife, to the attempt to create for oneself a different
I, whereas the proper attitude to one’s I grows spontaneously in an atmosphere of freedom
from self. We might well speak here of an anthropological circle: to the degree that we seek
only for ourselves, try to realize our own potential, and are concerned solely with the success
and fulfillment of our I, to that same degree this I becomes disagreeable, irritable, and
repugnant. It disintegrates into a thousand forms and in the end there remain only a
dissatisfaction with self that leads to flight from oneself and a turning to drugs or one of the
many other forms of a self-destructive egoism. Only the yes that comes to me from a you
makes it possible for me to say yes to myself in and through this you. The I realizes itself
through a you. It is true, moreover, that only when we have accepted ourselves can we
address a genuine yes to anyone else. To accept, to ‘love’, oneself presumes the existence
of truth and requires that we never relinquish our quest for that truth.”
• “We often have the oppressive feeling that the manna of our faith will be enough only for the
present day—but God gives us that manna new each day if we allow him to do so.”
• “People expected that in the messianic age the miracle of the manna would be repeated.
The Messiah, so they believed, would prove his identity in that everyone would have enough
to eat and bread would once more come down from heaven. Jesus’ intention is to transfer
this manna miracle onto a different plane. And to do it with the Eucharist. With the bread in
which he gives himself, and in which accordingly the multiplication of loaves takes place
henceforth throughout history, down to our own day. He can, in a certain sense, be shared
with others to an infinite extent. In this sharing of bread, Jesus is making an advance with this
renewed manna miracle, in that he repeats the old manna but also leads to a quite different,
shall we say more humble, and at the same time more demanding, form. In its profundity this
is a far greater miracle. And also in that bread does not just fall down from heaven; but
sharing human togetherness, mutual giving—things that do not just fall down from heaven—
are also made part of it.”
• “The manna in the desert was to show that man can live only in dependence on God. Man is
to learn to live by God, for then he really lives, then he has eternal life, for God is eternal.
Anyone who lives with him and in dependence on him is already in that real life which
reaches out beyond death. Living in dependence on God means not being one’s own master,
not wanting to take charge of the world oneself; it means saying good-bye to the dream of
autonomy and of being one’s own boss, recognizing that we cannot do it on our own and
learning to accept our life day by day from his hands, without anxiety and full of confidence.
 This core meaning of the manna (what, we might say, it actually is), namely, that we are to
live in dependence on God, not on ourselves, becomes utterly concrete. We can live by God
because God now lives for us. We can live by God because he has made himself one of us,
because he himself, as it were, has become our bread. We can live by God because he
gives himself to us, not only as the Word, but as the Body that is given up for us and is given
to us, ever new, in the sacrament. Believing means living by the God whose Body is in the
Church; it means being nourished by this embodied God who encounters us in the
sacraments and who has ultimately become so incarnate that in the Eucharist he gives
himself to us as Body, so that we can enter into his life: just as he lives for us, so we live by
him and for him.”
• “Jesus He anticipated his death and Resurrection by giving his disciples, in the bread and
wine, his very self, his body and blood as the new manna (cf. Jn 6:31-33). The ancient world
had dimly perceived that man’s real food—what truly nourishes him as man—is ultimately the
Logos, eternal wisdom: this same Logos now truly becomes food for us—as love. The
Eucharist draws us into Jesus’ act of self-oblation. More than just statically receiving the
incarnate Logos, we enter into the very dynamic of his self-giving.”

7. Other Considerations
• The Israelites are beset. Their hunger is real, but it is not the “most real” thing in their life.
The most real thing in their lives is the fact that God has heard their cries, has sent them a
liberator, has rescued them from slavery, has miraculously delivered them from hostility of
Pharaoh and the entire Egyptian army, etc. But they have lost sight of this all-important fact—
they have forgotten God. The fail to stay in front of the Event that happened to them originally
and that continues to change their lives, moment by moment. Insolence and ingratitude
aside, their grumbling is a grace, because it makes them aware of their need for God—a
need that goes beyond their own abilities…a need that has to be voiced out loud. The
question for us today is: Do we need God? We are so adept at feeding ourselves, providing
for ourselves, relying on ourselves, finding sufficiency in ourselves. What is God’s place in
our lives? Something in us cries out for what is greater than ourselves, for we are made for
the Infinite. The more we return to our original hunger and thirst, the more we cling to Christ
as the Bread of Life. Life without this Bread is life not worth living.

Recommended Resources

Benedict XVI, Pope. Benedictus. Yonkers: Magnificat, 2006.

Biblia Clerus: http://www.clerus.org/bibliaclerus/index_eng.html

Cameron, Peter John. To Praise, To Bless, To Preach—Cycle B. Huntington: Our Sunday

Visitor, 1999.

Hahn, Scott:
http://www.salvationhistory.com/library/scripture/churchandbible/homilyhelps/homilyhelps.cfm.

Martin, Francis: http://www.hasnehmedia.com/homilies.shtml