Let’s identify in our readings this weekend not only the miraculous provision of food for the elect people of God, but also the preparation that was required for them to receive it. This was not an easy story at all, miracle or not, and it still isn’t an easy lesson to learn. Let me make the comparison I usually make with the Israelites emerging from Egypt. The usual picture we get from this procession into the desert under the guidance of Moses and Aaron is that the people were free – free!! – from slavery. But… were they really free? The comparison is this: when we Christians, especially as adult converts, prepare for baptism or reception into full communion by rejecting the world and the devil and all their empty promises, etc., we are in a very real way coming out of Egypt. The comparison is made in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
And what is the great temptation of the first few months and years after baptism or reception, or indeed throughout our lives as Christians? You see it in the first reading this weekend; the temptation is to go back to our vomit, to return to the physical comforts of Egypt, unable to deal with the stringency of the rule of God in the community of the Church. Those of us old enough to remember will know that Catholic life was even more demanding before the 1960s. The more demanding the Church is, the more tempting it is to return to the world. ‘Why can we not return to Egypt, instead of suffering with God in the desert? Why can we not rely on the provision of human society, instead of placing our trust on a divine providence that may never come.’ But will it come? This is a matter of faith, and it is the strength of that faith that draws forth a miracle. But even the miracle is a test.
“It was now the fifteenth day of the second month since they had left Egypt, and the Israelites, one and all, there in the desert, were loud in their complaints against Moses and Aaron. ‘It would have been better,’ they told them, ‘if the Lord had struck us dead in the land of Egypt, where we sat down to bowls of meat, and had more bread than we needed to content us. Was it well done to bring us out into this desert, and starve our whole company to death?’ But the Lord said to Moses, ‘I mean to rain down bread upon you from heaven. It will be for the people to go out and gather enough for their needs day by day; and so I shall have a test, whether they are ready to follow my orders or not.'”
Book of Exodus 16: 1-4 [link]
In this first reading from Exodus, the people who don’t yet know the God of their ancestors Abraham, Isaac and Jacob must be taught faith, and they’re not learning the lesson very well. If you read through the Exodus narrative, they keep on grumbling against God, against Moses, against Aaron, against their apparently foolish mistake in leaving Egypt behind. In this state of trembling between belief and unbelief, God arrives with a sigh and the bread falls from heaven. Filled up again, will they now seek to follow His direction for them? We see a continuation of this story in the gospel reading, where the same God is now standing as a man in the place of Moses, and He has a mind to further the teaching of Moses.
“Jesus answered them, ‘Believe Me, if you are looking for Me now, it is not because of the miracles you have seen; it is because you were fed with the loaves, and had your fill. You should not work to earn food which perishes in the using. Work to earn food which affords, continually, eternal life, such food as the Son of Man will give you; God, the Father, has authorised Him.’ ‘What shall we do, then,’ they asked Him, ‘so as to work in God’s service?’ Jesus answered them, ‘This is the service God asks of you, to believe in the Man whom He has sent.’ So they said to Him, ‘Why then, what miracle canst Thou do? We must see it before we trust Thee; what canst Thou effect? Our fathers had manna to eat in the desert; as the scripture says, He gave them bread out of heaven to eat.’ Jesus said to them, ‘Believe Me when I tell you this; the bread that comes from heaven is not what Moses gave you. The real bread from heaven is given only by My Father. God’s gift of bread comes down from heaven and gives life to the whole world.’ ‘Then, Lord,’ they said, ‘give us this bread all the while.’ But Jesus told them, ‘It is I Who am the Bread of Life; he who comes to Me will never be hungry, he who has faith in Me will never know thirst.”
Gospel of S. John, 6: 26-35 [link]
At the beginning of this chapter six of the gospel of S. John, five thousand hungry men were fed with a few loaves and fishes, not unlike when the bread fell from heaven for Moses and his people. Like the Israelites of old, the Jews of the gospel have their minds fixed on the needs of this world – bread and fish, and water. He Who had earlier told them to seek first the Kingdom of God and righteousness, and everything else will arrive in due course – He Who had said this now asks them to look beyond the physical needs of their bodies to their spiritual good – to the food that comes from heaven that feeds not their bodies but their souls.
But they cannot see that far. ‘Moses gave us the bread from heaven,’ they say, ‘what can you do?,’ forgetting in a way that He had just fed at least five thousand of them with practically nothing. And He says to them, What you need is Me! The Gospel of S. John says this over and over again. God Incarnate says to pharisees and scribes and herodians and Romans, What you need is Me! Obey my commandments, show that you love me, here I am, I am yours, take life which is yours to be had… This chapter six of the Gospel of S. John, is the invitation to Holy Communion. I AM the real food, God says, the true bread, and you who eat of me will live eternally, for the life of God flows through me, and you shall have that life.
And S. Paul will tell us in our second reading what the result of Holy Communion should be: we cannot return to Egypt, to live the type of aimless life of the unbelievers, we must give up the old way of life, set aside the old self which is so easily corrupted especially with bodily impurity, we must be constant renewed and reconverted to God, walking boldly into the desert, for He will not let us die there.
“This, then, is my message to you; I call upon you in the Lord’s name not to live like the Gentiles, who make vain fancies their rule of life. Their minds are clouded with darkness; the hardness of their hearts breeds in them an ignorance, which estranges them from the divine life; and so, in despair, they have given themselves up to incontinence, to selfish habits of impurity. This is not the lesson you have learned in making Christ your study, if you have really listened to Him. If true knowledge is to be found in Jesus, you will have learned in His school that you must be quit, now, of the old self whose way of life you remember, the self that wasted its aim on false dreams. There must be a renewal in the inner life of your minds; you must be clothed in the new self, which is created in God’s image, justified and sanctified through the truth.”
Letter of S. Paul to the Ephesians: 4: 17-24 [link]
Catholic Louth and Mablethorpe 