Reading 1
Elijah went a day's journey into the desert,
until he came to a broom tree and sat beneath it.
He prayed for death saying:
"This is enough, O LORD!
Take my life, for I am no better than my fathers."
He lay down and fell asleep under the broom tree,
but then an angel touched him and ordered him to get up and eat.
Elijah looked and there at his head was a hearth cake
and a jug of water.
After he ate and drank, he lay down again,
but the angel of the LORD came back a second time,
touched him, and ordered,
"Get up and eat, else the journey will be too long for you!"
He got up, ate, and drank;
then strengthened by that food,
he walked forty days and forty nights to the mountain of God, Horeb.
Gospel
The Jews murmured about Jesus because he said,
"I am the bread that came down from heaven, "
and they said,
"Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph?
Do we not know his father and mother?
Then how can he say,
'I have come down from heaven'?"
Jesus answered and said to them,
"Stop murmuring among yourselves.
No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him,
and I will raise him on the last day.
It is written in the prophets:
They shall all be taught by God.
Everyone who listens to my Father and learns from him comes to me.
Not that anyone has seen the Father
except the one who is from God;
he has seen the Father.
Amen, amen, I say to you,
whoever believes has eternal life.
I am the bread of life.
Your ancestors ate the manna in the desert, but they died;
this is the bread that comes down from heaven
so that one may eat it and not die.
I am the living bread that came down from heaven;
whoever eats this bread will live forever;
and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world."
Reflection
Again and again, Jesus insists that He is food for us to eat, equating Himself to our most basic need as humans. He draws a direct parallel between Himself and the manna that came down from Heaven in the book of Exodus. But in today’s Gospel, He doubles down on the fact that He is so much more than food which keeps us alive on earth; Jesus is the Living Bread, which keeps us eternally alive. The Bread of Life is the necessary ingredient for a flourishing life, a life which supersedes mere “existence” and fills us with joy, purpose, and drive, now and forever.
By pairing today’s Gospel with our first reading, the Church underlines how helpless we are without the Bread of Life. Elijah preceded Jesus, but we can see in the first reading an image of what Christ said in the Gospel: we need Him if we are to live.
We can probably relate to Elijah. Holiness can seem impossible, and we feel as though we are “no better than [our] fathers.” Huddling under a broom tree can sound more appealing than continuing our journey of faith.
A Christlike life depends on the sustenance of God. Elijah, with no will to live, must feast upon the Lord’s food not once, but twice, before he can embark on his forty-day journey. We are incapacitated without God, and we too must repeatedly receive the nourishment God offers us.
We have a gift that is even greater than Elijah’s hearth cake and jug of water. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, summons us from our broom trees of helplessness and feeds us with our deepest need of all: the Bread of Life, Jesus Himself.
If we believe in Jesus and welcome Him into our lives, receiving Holy Communion regularly, we will live forever. With that Living Bread, we will receive the strength to walk “forty days and forty nights.” He will equip us to surrender our lives as a sacrificial offering of love.
Let us set aside our reliance on our own strength and embrace the nourishment of Christ.
Please be assured of my prayers for you before Our Lord, present in the Most Blessed Sacrament.
+ Bishop Schlert
