NINETEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME B

[cappie]

We can begin today with a familiar verse from Deuteronomy; it’s not in today’s lectionary readings, but it lies behind this whole series we’ve been hearing from John’s gospel. Moses is giving the Law to Israel, and Moses says to the people that God “humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna, with which neither you nor your ancestors were acquainted, in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.”

What God gave Elijah and the people in the wilderness, and what Jesus gave the crowd in John’s gospel, was bread. Manna was bread, or enough like bread to make no real difference. Elijah got ordinary bread.   

The key to all of this is that God gave Israel and Elijah – and Jesus gave that crowd – bread in such a way that it was obvious that the bread was pure gift. They didn’t make it, they didn’t work for it, they couldn’t pay for it – it was just there. So they had the chance to look at bread,  and to see beyond that thing,  to see it as  a sign of God’s love and of God’s call to relationship with them. Since clearly a gift, they were able to see that the thing, the bread, meant more than what it was all by itself.  

But if the manna, if the bread on the hillside, if the stuff that God gives is given to us, not just to keep us alive, but also to draw us to God and to life with God, then we do not, and we cannot, live by bread alone. So, oddly, the only gift that can really show us that we do not live by bread alone is free bread.  

We see this with special clarity at the altar, where the bread we receive is clearly not about itself alone; but is hooked to something much greater. So we can look with awe and reverence upon something as simple as this thin, tasteless wafer, because we know it to be sign, symbol and presence of something much greater than flour and water.

Part of the point of this bread, the bread of the Eucharist, is to teach us that we do not live by bread alone.  It’s all given to us as a sign, symbol and occasion of God’s love. It’s here to draw us past itself and past ourselves, so that we, seeing both the gift and the giver, will respond to the giver in love and in service. Creation, all of creation, is sacramental in this sense.

Here is one way into this. There’s an old rabbinic admonition that insists, of anything and everything, “If you don’t give thanks for it, it’s bad for you.” The food you eat, the clothes you wear, the air you breathe, the people and the things of your life, if you don’t give thanks for it, it’s bad for you.

So, if you have enough to eat, and the strength to go on for another day, and people who care about you, if you have all of that and you don’t give thanks for it, then it’s bad for you – all of it. It’s poisoning your soul, and shrinking your life. Really.

That’s because giving thanks for something puts it in its proper place, it places the thing as part of our relationship with God and God’s relationship with us. That’s where things, all things, properly belong. Anything, especially bread, is understood properly only when it is understood in relationship to God.

On the other hand, if we do give thanks for it, then it can be good for us. If we give thanks for it, then every part of our lives can draw us toward the only source of meaning and hope that makes any sense.

It’s very easy to forget this. It’s very easy to value the things of creation and of our lives for themselves, to take them outside the context of a relationship with God. When we do this, when we see only what is right in front of us and no more, then we are impoverished, we are barely living on the surface of our lives and of our world.

That’s what it means to live by bread alone. To live by bread alone means to see no farther than the things themselves, and so to miss the presence and the love and the call of God that are really a part of every piece of bread we have. It’s to miss the gift, and the love behind the gift.

So God gave Elijah and Israel bread, and Jesus gave the crowds on those mountainsides bread, and God gives us bread – God gives us all we need for life – so that we may be drawn beyond all of these and see more than we would see otherwise, so that we might understand that we do not live by bread alone.