Fr Christopher Dillon OSB
“This is working for God: you must believe in the one he has sent.” “That you believe in the one that He has sent”. That is about the most concise summing up possible of the essence of Christianity; and it is a statement ascribed by the gospel writer to Jesus himself, the very one who was sent. And the heart of that summing up is the activity of believing, for activity it is and very hard work. The work is that described in the Second Reading in the words, “Your mind must be renewed by a spiritual revolution, so that you can put on the new self that has been created in God’s way, in the goodness and holiness of
the truth.”
Where are we to begin with all this? We are on holiday; it is the beginning of August. Well, you begin here and now, as you allow these words and their challenge to touch you. “You must give up your old way of life”, whatever that is and whatever that giving up, that revolution, involves. The reality is that many, even most, of us will duck the challenge, for now, anyway. It is too much to take in, too much to take on, on a Sunday morning during the summer holidays. The pity is that God does not do holidays, nor does “the one whom He has sent”.
On the other hand, you may well be thinking, “But I do believe; that is why I am here.” In that case, the challenge is easier to take on; but you still have to make a new beginning. That is how this activity of believing works; it means starting again, every day, re-affirming your belief, your trust, in Jesus as the one sent by the Father to show us the Father, as the ONE whose very being is expressed in His giving of Himself in and to the Son. We see something of what this means in the giving of himself by the Son to the Father in the whole drama of the Cross; this is love which costs everything, love from which we are invited to learn, a love to imitate in our own lives. It is for this purpose that the Son has been sent; it is for this reason that the Father admonishes us to listen to the Son, as the voice from the cloud spoke to Peter, James and John, on the occasion of the Transfiguration which we shall celebrate in two days’ time.
Listening to His voice and receiving the bread from heaven are but two ways of speaking of the same thing. While the voice suggests the word from which we learn, the bread suggests the food, the daily bread, by which we live, the manna which lasts for only a day; the imagery is as basic as it is urgent. But are we hungry enough for it to appeal to us?
Believing in the one whom the Father has sent and listening to His voice are integral to being Christian. This, we are being reminded today, is what our life as Christian human beings is really about. At a practical level, it means being familiar with Holy Scripture, chiefly the Gospels as the obvious place where we will hear Jesus’ voice, which is why the Gospels were written. Gathering this food can be hard work, if we take it seriously. After that, the question is, “Do you want this life? Is it worth it? Will you work for it?” Only you can answer.