19th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Gospel Reading: John 6:41 - 51

41 Meanwhile the Jews were complaining to each other about Jesus, because he had said, 'I am the bread that came from heaven.'
42 'Surely this is Jesus son of Joseph’ they said. 'We know his father and mother. How can he now say, "I have come down from heaven?"
43 Jesus said in reply, 'Stop complaining to each other.
44 No one can come to me un­less he is drawn by the Father who sent me, and I will raise him up at the last day.
45 It is written in the prophets: "They will all be taught by God," and to hear the teaching of the Father, and learn from it, is to come to me.
46 Not that anyone has seen the Father, except the one who comes from God; he has seen the Father.
47 I tell you most solemnly, everybody who believes has eternal life
48 I am the bread of life.
49 Your fathers ate the manna in the desert and they are dead;
50 but this is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that a man may eat it and not die.
51 I am the living bread which has come down from heaven. Anyone who eats this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I shall give is my flesh for the life of the world.'

Meditation

In this passage, Jesus again draws lessons about life from the feeding of the five thousand.

I remind you that all teaching of Jesus recorded in the gospels is intended to speak to experience, and we must therefore appeal to our experience to discover its truth.

This can be difficult with passages like these: one reason is that the language is not the kind that we use ordinarily. Some expressions  such as ‘eternal life,’ ‘being drawn by the father,’ ‘living bread,’ ‘flesh,’ – you will have to bring down to earth for yourself, applying them to what you have lived yourself.

There is, however, a more important reason why we may find this passage difficult to relate to experience: it contains deep teaching, speaking of a level of experience that we seldom reflect on because we all tend to live at the surface of ourselves, In meditating on these passages then, you must remember deep experiences.

You will naturally think of deep conversion for example a retreat that changed your life, a Life in the Spirit Seminar or a prayer moment that you have never forgotten.

But you need not stay with prayer moments. You could think of other deep experiences - a movement, for example, or a leader who touched your life. The passage will help you under­stand these experiences and put them in the context of your growth as a person.

As always with gospel stories, you can focus on the person of Jesus, letting him remind you of someone very important to you and in the process, of the kind of person you yourself would like to be; or then you can focus on the journey the people were tailed to make, recognising a journey that you or people you love are making or have made.

Remember also that the fruit of your meditation is that you find yourself repeating the actual words of the passage prayer­fully and with great gratitude to God for his grace.

It is not possible to meditate deeply on a passage like this all together - divide it up and take one section at a time. You will usually find that one section is all you can go into over a week, although you may be able to connect the other sections after a time.

I would suggest dividing the passage as follows;

• Verses 41 to 44 describe a journey that Jesus invites the peo­ple to make.
• In verses 41 and 42 they are 'complaining': their lives are so ordinary that God could not possibly be with them. All they can see is 'the son of Joseph7 whose father and mother 'they knew'.
• In verses 43 and 44 Jesus asks them to look beyond that
  same ordinary reality and recognise two things: a) that the meet­ing with him is not by chance but by God's grace; and b) that it is a meeting that has great significance, not merely here and now, but for all eternity           

What encounter in your own experience resulted in your making that kind of journey? What kind of leader is able to chal­lenge people to make such a journey?

• Verses 45 and 46 speak of a similar journey, this time as one of 'hearing' or 'being taught' or 'learning'. We can know right teaching, but in an abstract way; when we come to Jesus, we learn God's lessons personally as if he had taken us aside and given us individual tutoring. Identify a moment when you made that journey and who was the Jesus you 'came to'. Verse 46 makes an interesting comment on the process: we don't have to have seen God, only the one who came from God.
• Verse 47. Take this verse by itself, as a reflection on a fact of life. 'Believes' is left vague, and so you are free to take it in as wide a sense as you want, of any act of faith. On the other hand, you can also take it to refer to real faith.

Think of people who have risked their lives, their careers or friendships for the sake of non-violence or for the liberation of oppressed people, or for honesty.

Remembering them, you gradually discover the meaning of 'having eternal life' and you will feel a kind of awe as he reflected on the power of that kind of faith, 'I tell you most solemnly'.

Remember world-famous people, but don't limit yourself to them: remember members of your own family or your village community.

A negative way of appreciating this powerful verse would be to reflect on the emptiness of a life without faith.

'If a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live'
(Martin Luther King).

• In verses 48 to 50 Jesus speaks of himself as bread. This is a metaphor that is quite frequent in the bible to describe the teaching of a leader. Jesus makes a distinction between two kinds of teacher or leader. There are those who when they find people in the wilderness are content to give them manna after which they die. Jesus is a different kind of teacher: through his teaching people are set free from within themselves so that they live, His teaching gives unlimited depth to a person's life.

• In verse 51 the teaching is repeated but Jesus makes a new nt which he will make clearer in the following passage: the ad he gives is his flesh. Make sure you bring this expression i to experience. 'Flesh' in Bible language means various things. Here it clearly stresses that Jesus is a source of life by giving himself, not abstract teaching but his own self-sacrificing love. The word goes deeper and says that Jesus did not give himself in power but in weakness, and this of course is a tremendouslesson about giving life to others.

Prayer

Lord, we often complain about

- our bad health, our failures
- the friends who let us down, our parish community
- society today with its materialism, its selfishness, its crimes. How can anybody say that you are with us? But Jesus tells us to stop complaining; unless you were drawing us we would not be where we are.

The people we live with, the situations we find ourselves in, all are your gift to us and they can raise us up to your presence. In fact they can raise us up on the last day.

'Our prayer has had a beginning because we have had a beginning. But it will have no end. It will accompany us into eternity and will be com­pleted in our contemplation of God.'
Carlo Carretto

Lord, we thank you for moments of deep prayer; we can only come to them because you draw us there and we know that they will take us beyond the last day.
Lord, we thank you, those of us who preach the Word, for calling us to be part of this mystery.
People are there, listening to us as they listen to other speakers, but they cannot really come to us unless you draw them.
On the other hand, those words of ours, poor though they may be, can raise them up so high that they are beyond the reach of death and of all that can harm them.
Lord, we have known Jesus all our lives, but for a long time he was someone far away who taught abstract truths.
Then, one day, we experienced conversion and it was as if we understood iife for the first time.
We understood, then, what was written in the prophets:
"They will all be taught by God.'
Teachings that had seemed abstract we now heard addressed personally to us, and we really learned from them.
That is what it means to come to Jesus.

We know that no one has seen you,
but we have met the one who came from you and has seen you.

'Gandhi's impact is not measured over two years, or four years or twenty years; the ideas he has given us are imperishable.'
Adisciple of Gandhi

Lord, how true it is that one who believes has an eternal life.
When we put our trust in absolute values - truth, justice, the equality of all men and women, the care of little ones - we are taken out of ourselves, out ofour present history  and become part of eternity.
Lord, many people take it for granted
That their destiny is to be inferior to others;
they are convinced that
- they will always fail,
- they will never overcome their faults,
- they will remain forever in bondage.
There are leaders who encourage this attitude, content to give people bread in the wilderness and let them die there.
Lord, send us leaders, spiritual guides, like Jesus who will give us a different kind of teaching, feeding us with another kind of bread, one that comes from you, and help us to experience that we have it within us to be free and creative, that we are born not to die in bondage but to live forever.
Lord, our culture leads us to think that people can only help others by their power, their wealth or their achievements,       
We have even come to think that Jesus helped people like that,
But the bread that he gave others to eatwas his weakness, his flesh:       
- he made himself vulnerable to children
- he asked the woman at the well for water and Zacchaeus for hospitality
- on the cross he was so human, so much 'flesh' that the good thief could speak words of encouragement to him. It is by sharing our weakness that we give life to others.
Lord, we thank you for our mothers: they gave us thci r flesh that we might live.
Lord, our churches are big and beautifully decorated, with imposing statues,
But the heart of all is Jesus under the form to simple bread. It is still true that he gives his flesh for the life of the world.
Lord, we pray for our leaders, in the church and in the state. Teach them that they cannot give life to others by their words, but only by giving their flesh.