With the words Jesus has just spoken to you and me this morning he begins his discourse on the Bread of Life in the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel. Jesus presents here in the Gospel of John his teaching on the sacrament of the Most Holy Eucharist, his flesh and blood, as true food and true drink to everlasting life.

He will extend this discourse over the next few Sundays. And I encourage you to go home, dust off your Bibles, and yes, actually read the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel as a preparation for the celebration of the Eucharist on these coming Sundays. Read it yourself, read it in your family and read it to your children. 

In particular, we ought to keep in mind here at the very beginning of this discourse, the concluding portion of the same discourse which we are going to hear on Sunday, August 25th.

“Many of his disciples who were listening said, ‘this saying is hard. Who can accept it?’” Who can accept what he is saying about himself as the true bread of life? And the text goes on to say, “as a result of this, many of his disciples returned to their former way of life and no longer accompanied him.” 

I bring these concluding words to our attention today as we hear the beginning of this discourse, because I think we need to ask ourselves whether we might be in the number of those who find Jesus’ words too hard to accept and thus no longer accompany him, whether we publicly acknowledge that fact or not. 

It is well that we are challenged by Jesus words in these days. In recent weeks, as you perhaps know, the church in the United States celebrated a National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis. The fact that 40 to 50,000 Catholics came together over several days, that four separate pilgrimages, processing with the Blessed Sacrament towards Indianapolis from distant points in the country, found welcome and attention in the towns and cities through which they processed, did not, unsurprisingly, get reported in the media. It doesn’t fit their narrative. 

The Eucharistic Congress and the reception it received seems to indicate, in spite of recent reports to the contrary, that we Catholics do in fact acknowledge that the Eucharist is the true sacrament of Jesus’s body and blood, something the church has professed from the beginning. What we seem to wish is more teaching and more explanation of the reality and the meaning of that faith that the church you have just received.

But the first instruction on the Eucharist you have just received, from Jesus himself. And hence I request to you to read chapter six of John’s Gospel this week. Jesus tells us today this is the work of God: that you believe in the one he sent. His listeners immediately respond, “What sign can you do that we may see it and seeing it believe in you?” 

They had, of course, just seen a great sign. We heard it told in last Sunday’s gospel. Jesus multiplied the five barley loaves and two fish to feed 5000 people with 12 baskets of fragments left over. Not an insignificant sign. That is, in fact, why the people have followed Jesus today to the other side of the Sea of Galilee. But they didn’t recognize the sign. Jesus rightly tells them, “You are looking for me not because you saw signs, but because you ate the loaves and were filled.” They want more. 

Even in their reference to their ancestors who ate manna they betray themselves, for neither did their ancestors understand the sign of the manna. After witnessing the signs worked by Moses, by God’s power after the Passover, and the death of the firstborn of the Egyptians, after their marvelous escape through the parted waters of the sea, as today’s reading tells us, the whole Israelite community grumbled against Moses and Aaron. It just wasn’t enough. In spite of the deliverance they had experienced, they tell Moses, “You had to lead us into this desert to make the whole community die of famine.”

They don’t trust. Even after God fed them with manna, the bread from heaven, still, they fail to trust in God. And you can read that part of the Bible too. The crowd in today’s gospel are truly like their ancestors, and we are truly like the crowd in today’s gospel. 

I think to look for a sign presupposes that we believe a sign is possible, that there is something more than the limits of this material world, and that there is someone to give us such a sign. Could it be that way? So deeply immersed in the materialist culture which surrounds us, I think we doubt even the possibility that a sign could be given. 

We have been given the sign of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. But do we really believe that? Does it inform our actions, our thoughts and the way we look at the world?

It is, of course, dangerous to ask for a sign, because if we accept the sign, we know we will be confronted with the choice whether or not to conform ourselves to the message the sign gives us. According to the story of our beginnings, the story of Adam and Eve, they were surrounded with abundant signs of God’s goodness, but they chose to ignore them.

And we often are like that. Like the crowd in the gospel today, we’re willing to follow Jesus when he gives us what we want, when he pleases us. When we have our fill of bread, as it were. But when his message turns to taking up his cross, to repenting of our sins, to live according to Jesus’ teaching rather than the values promoted by the world, when Saint Paul reminds us, as he did just now, as “truth is in Jesus, you should put away the old self of your former way of life, corrupted through deceitful desires, and be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and put on the new self created in God’s way of righteousness and holiness of truth,” well, then that gets to be just too much!

We are far more comfortable with our deceitful desires than we are with signs from Jesus. Could it be that we do recognize the signs, especially those signs in the deepest longings of our hearts, but we choose to ignore them because we don’t want to change our way of life? And so we have to be open to that possibility of faith.

It seems to me a problem both for Jesus’ listeners and for us as well. A problem of trust and obedience. It is a difficulty of faith and our doubt whether the conviction of faith can lead us to real truth. Although at this point in the gospel, Jesus’ listeners could not have had faith in Jesus as God’s only begotten son. He had not yet been raised from the dead. But in their reference to the manna, they did acknowledge their belief that God could intervene in their lives even more. Just the previous day, they had been fed by Jesus through the amazing multiplication of the loaves and the fish. 

But they’re hesitant to trust. They want one morsel and likely one more after that, like we do. It is in this respect that we are heirs to the crowd in today’s Gospel. We think that if we can get just one more sign, then we will trust. But one more would be even better. 

We have received, as I said, the word of the sign of Jesus’ resurrection. We have the sign of the enduring faith as a church through the centuries. We have the signs of holiness in the lives of the saints, both those represented in the windows and those we have lived with. We have the sign of our deep yearning for lasting truth, goodness, and beauty, and we have the sign of God’s revelation to assure us that both the world and all its complex splendor, and our own lives in their complexity, have a true meaning and a purpose.

But do we believe these signs? I fear that, as I said, overwhelmed by the culture in which we live, which holds material creation to be the only source of truth and which holds our power, pleasure and fame as the only real good. We struggle with faith in Jesus and with the community of his disciples. Jesus has some nice things to teach us, but we weigh them as just another teaching among the many values in the marketplace of life. We struggle to believe and put our trust in Jesus as the Son of God, as our Lord and our Savior. 

And so, like the people of today’s gospel, we don’t trust the signs. 

But the sign Jesus holds up for us today is nothing less than himself as the food which endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. The good news of the Gospel is not simply that God loves us and that God cares about us. The good news of the gospel is eternal life for which we were created, and which God intended for us from the beginning. The good news of the Gospel is that the sorrows, the trials, and the deaths of this life will one day pass away, and all the good things we have experienced will be preserved in a way surpassing our understanding.

Jesus himself is the sign for us in his own dying and rising from the dead. That is precisely why we are gathered here in this basilica this Sunday morning to celebrate his dying and rising in this Eucharist, not just to see a sign, but to be changed by Christ himself. We will have to change and to become truly his disciples.

Jesus himself will bring us safely through to eternal life if we but trust in him, and he will give us the strength we need to change from our former way of life, corrupted by evil desires. Foremost among these helps, which he gives us again and again, is true body and blood as our food and drink, that he himself may live in us.

So, may our meditation on Jesus’ words and these next Sundays lead us to trust him, to renew our faith in the great sacrament of his Body and blood, and our trust in Jesus as our true Lord, the Son of God, the Savior of the world. May God preserve us from being among those who say, “This saying is hard, who can accept it?” For “as a result of this. Many of his disciples return to their former way of life and no longer accompanied him.” 

 

John. Chapter six.