Fr John O’Callaghan OSB
A main theme of today’s readings is ‘bread’. From time immemorial, from manna in the desert to baguettes in Paris, bread has constituted the staple diet of millions around the globe. It is something known to us all and thus well suited to Jesus’ universal teaching. For Jewish listeners it had the added value of recalling their life in the desert.
Without manna they would have starved to death during those so-called ‘forty years’. It was at Moses’ behest that manna was provided for them after their escape from Egypt. However the manna gave only physical sustenance for a short while, and it had to be picked up every day! It was a solution of very limited kind.
Moses was also the mediator of the covenant made at Sinai between God and his people. But, we know, that covenant was only a first draft for the kind relationships that should prevail between God and the people of God. And thirdly Moses was the one who led the Israelites to the borders of the promised land. But that land was merely a physical territory, including Gaza! It didn’t mean: ‘life eternal’.
Great and all that they were, everything Moses did, to our eyes, was too small! It was only ‘a start’. His most important characteristic was in fact to be someone that could be improved upon! His greatest claim to fame was that he cast a profile which Christ would later fulfil on an incomparably grander scale and with universal scope. And the most important feature of the manna/bread was that it could prefigure the true ‘bread of life which comes down from heaven’.
Yes, today’s gospel the message is on that metaphysical level, deeper than Moses ever conceived of. John’s gospel plumbs the depths of a few isolated events: and today we see see Jesus filling out the profile of Moses, only better, as Messiah. For the Christian listener this gospel also signals something special about bread. There is a manifest allusion to the eucharist. Jesus was soon to declare that ‘He is the bread of life’. In a short while we will take bread, and wine, and under the influence of the Spirit, they will become the body and blood of Christ. The Holy
Spirit transforms the inner being of our gifts and Christ becomes present in our midst. By means of them Christ comes to us intimately and individually but he remains hidden. By means of this ‘bread’ Christ becomes one flesh with us, the members of his community, constituting us as his body the church, making us his presence in the world. Today’s gospel is a great prophetic text, fulfilling the past and promising the future, as regards the messiah and the manna.
And finally, let us not forget, from the first reading, the man who came bringing his first fruits to Elisha, ‘twenty loaves of barley and fresh ears of grain in his sack’. Let’s not forget the small boy in the gospel who had five barley loaves and two fish – just because he is small or has a small gift. It was the basis for great things – there is a lesson for us! The loaves were not multiplied out of thin air. In Jesus’ hands, what we are prepared to share, works miracles and satisfies!
Let us go and do likewise!