One of the issues with passages of writing that we know well, and that have a famous line near the end, is that we are inclined to automatically jump forward to those well know words. In the process we can skip over some rather important words that come before. We find such words near the start of today’s Gospel.
Our Lord and the disciples have escaped the crowd, but they have caught up with him and ask him when he came to the place. Yet it is his response to this question that stands out clearly: ‘I tell you most solemnly, you are not looking for me because you have seen the signs but because you had all the bread you wanted to eat.’
The crowd are dancing around the question they really want to ask: “Will you keep feeding us?” And so, Jesus goes right to the heart of the matter. We might, in our comfort, think that the people are shallow, just worrying about their stomachs. But they are poor people, hunger is a real issue for them. All the same, Jesus has come not to satisfy that physical hunger, but a much greater one. He has come to them to offer his own self – the true bread, the one who will satisfy their ultimate need. And we know that this ultimate satisfaction comes because Our Lord is God himself, and it is in God that all desire finds its ultimate fulfilment.
But that recognition should challenge us to consider our own true need. All too often our priorities don’t take into full consideration that the fulfilment of our desires can only be found in God. We so often put all kinds of other things – other needs, desires, and so on before God, even to the extent that they can take over, even rule our entire lives. We do this for many reasons, but usually because we seek the tangible, short term realm of pleasurable things of various kinds, failing to put them in their proper place, and failing to allow God to be God, the centre of our lives. In doing so we go down a path of unhappiness and disappointment; or even worse, self-destruction. So, we need to be alert to the ways in which we allow the ordinary things of life to take over to the extent that we can no longer see God as the goal of our lives.
To avoid such problems, or to set us back on the right path, we should not underestimate the great power that comes to us through prayer and the sacraments. We are refined by God when we spend time with him in prayer, especially when in prayer we can admit to the Lord that things are not as they should be, that we want things to be different, and that we want the help of his grace to desire him above all else. Confession gives us the means to renew grace within us when we acknowledge to the Lord those things that we have put before him in our lives; the things which we have valued more than we should have, or which have not been in their proper place. And, of course, we have our reception of Christ’s body and blood in the Holy Eucharist, where receive him who is the bread of life, who alone can satisfy our deepest longings.
Fr Chris Denham
