18th Sunday - B

My brothers and sisters,
When Jesus talked about himself as the bread of life, the Jews were thrown into confusion. They quarreled among themselves saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” This would be cannibalism. Jesus’ disciples also didn’t understand this until the last supper, when Jesus performed the first Eucharist. Today, we have no difficulty to understand what Jesus meant when He said that He is the Bread of life; we know that He is the Eucharist.
Now let us look more carefully what Jesus said in the Gospel about this. First, He says that He is the bread from heaven. This is evident since we know and we believe that Jesus is the Son of God. He comes from God. So He is truly the bread from heaven, He is a heavenly food. Second, He is the bread that gives life to the world. We have to understand the bread not only as our ordinary food, but also as our spiritual food. As you know we need food or bread to make this body live, so also the bread from heaven will make our soul and our spirit live for eternal life. This is what we call salvation done by and through Jesus. But this is not done automatically. Because Jesus said, “This is the work of God, that you believe the one he sent.” So the Eucharist or the celebration of the Eucharist or the receiving of Holy Communion will not automatically save us. It is the work of God that will save us, and the work of God is that we believe in Jesus whom God the Father sent. In other words, it is the faith that will save us. Because of faith we believe that the bread and the wine in the Eucharist celebration become the body and blood of the Christ Jesus. To receive the Holy Communion means to receive Jesus in faith.
Talking about faith, it is like a coin with two faces. The first face is an expression and the second one is its realization. If we say that we have faith, on the one hand, we have to express it in our prayer, in our devotion, in this mass celebration and so on. But faith is not enough to be expressed only. On the other hand, faith needs to be realized in our daily lives.
There is a story of two ladies which can explain this. The first one loves praying. She goes to church everyday; she prays the rosary twice a day. She prays the angelus at every six o’clock and divine mercy at every 3 pm. But one day her cat ate her fish on the table and then she punished the cat by keeping it in the basement until it starved to death. The other lady is a prostitute. One day she had an accident and she found herself lost in a dessert. Then she met a dying dog and she gave the dog her last supply of water. When the two ladies die, who will enter heaven?
The lady who loves praying is rich in expression of faith, but zero in its realization. She has no love even for her cat. This was what Jesus hates in Pharisees. The other lady who did bad things during her life, whatever her reason for choosing to be a prostitute, showed in her critical situation her real self as a woman full of love. This is what I mean by realization of faith: love and compassion.
Maybe you can make a conclusion that to have a realization of faith is more important than to have its expression. That’s true. Because love is the greatest of all from: faith, hope and love. But we cannot say: So it is not necessary to pray or to go to church if we have love for others that will be enough. No, this is not true. We have to express our faith, by going to church or praying personally in order that our faith can grow. We need the expression of faith to raise the faith. We can compare going to church or praying as a man charging his battery in order that he can give light to the world. Going to church is like as if we feeding ourselves with energy of love that enables us ready to share that love in our daily lives.
In this sense we understand that when we receive communion, we received the bread from heaven which gives us life. We receive energy for life, not the energy from the bread itself but from Jesus whom it represents. The energy is Jesus’ energy of love, for the Eucharist is Jesus’ self giving to us as a proof of his love.
Mother Teresa from Calcutta said, “How we can support ourselves bowing to serve the dying from early in the morning until late at night, if we don’t bow first in front of the Holy Eucharist.” Mother Teresa acknowledged that she and her sisters get the energy to serve from the source of the power of love in the Eucharist. They find Jesus’ love in the Eucharist.
The last thing that Jesus says in today’s gospel about the bread is: whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst. This doesn’t mean that after the mass we don’t want to go to El Ranchito anymore or we need not eat anymore. But spiritually we will be satisfied. Jesus is enough. Jesus makes us full of joy and hope. That’s why St. Paul said, when he found the Christ Jesus in his life, he thought of others things as garbage. He found the most precious thing in his life; therefore he did not need other things. This is the criteria for us if we come to church to celebrate mass, we find Jesus or not, we can see ourselves if we are satisfied or not. It doesn’t depend on the priest who gives the homily; it depends on our relation with Jesus. It depends on our heart, on our faith and our love for Him.
I remember a story of an old farmer who always stopped at the church before he gets to work in his farm. He puts his tools outside the church and spends a couple of minutes in silence. One day the priest of the church asked him about the petition that he prayed every time he visited the church. The old farmer said, I ask nothing, I just look at Jesus in the Tabernacle and Jesus looks at me. He said that he asked nothing but what he did is a profound prayer, because he expresses his deep relation with Jesus. Deep relations do not need many words, because they are full of understanding.
May we grow in such a relation with Jesus, that we can find Him present in the Eucharist and in our daily lives. May He satisfy us so that we will grow in faith, hope and love.