Homily: 18th Sunday in Ordinary Time
August 4, 2024
My dear brothers and sisters, the first reading, the responsorial psalm and the gospel reading of today all focus on the theme of the Holy Eucharist. We know the Holy Eucharist is a sacrament that is at the center of the life of the Church. The Catholic Church has always accorded special importance to this sacrament of the Holy Eucharist. The Fathers of the Second Vatican Council described the Eucharist as the source and the summit of the Christian life.
All through the Sundays in this month of August, the Holy Mother the Church presents to us gospel readings taken from John chapter 6 which treated elaborately the bread that came down from heaven which gives life to the world. Even from last Sunday, we began reading John chapter 6, this chapter started with the miracle of the multiplication of loaves of bread and fish. Jesus in a very mysterious way fed thousands of persons with 5 loaves and 2 fish. These people fed were not able to explain how it happened, but the fact was that the food gave them sustenance. Without it they would have perished in the desert. Jesus used this miraculous feeding of five thousand men to introduce what the divine food can do for us.
In the first reading of today, we saw how God fed the Israelites with Manna and quails in the wilderness. The Israelites made a journey to the promised land. Their sustenance through the challenging difficult journey in the wilderness came through the strength from this miraculous heavenly food from God. Without the bread from God, they might not have reached the promised land, they might have all perished in the wilderness. My dear brothers and sisters, God is unchangeable. This Old Testament Manna in the wilderness is juxtaposed today with the New Testament bread of life in John chapter 6 to show us that God has never left his children without a sustaining food. Manna was the food of sustenance for God’s chosen people to be able to reach the promised land in the Old Testament, in the New Covenant, the Holy Eucharist, the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ became the food of substance for us to be able to reach the everlasting Promised Land.
Just as physical food is needed for the sustenance of our life, food helps us to repair lost energies and make us to grow, so also the divine food, the Holy Eucharist is needed to sustain our spiritual life, repair our lost spiritual energies and make us grow in grace. In some of the war-torn regions of the world, there is this disease that children suffer because of lack of food and malnutrition normally called Kwashiorkor, which makes their belly protrude as if they are pregnant children. If we say no to Jesus in the Holy Eucharist, we will suffer from spiritual kwashiorkor, that is spiritual malnutrition, lack of Jesus and the resultant effect is spiritual death. The level of hostilities in different part of the world is an evidence of this lack of spiritual nourishment which Jesus alone can give.
Brothers and sisters, we are called to come to Jesus in the Eucharist. We are invited to receive this bread of life for the nourishment of our soul. We are encouraged to receive Him and receive Him well. In the Old Testament, when God fed the Israelites with Manna, some were very greedy, they did not receive it well, they gathered more than they needed for a day against the instruction of Moses and in the morning, it bred worms and became foul. Let us come to receive Jesus and receive Him too well in a state of grace and not in mortal sin, so that our soul will always be spiritually nourished.
