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18th Sunday in Ordinary Time (B)

August 04, 2024

Fr. John Colacino C.PP.S.

Introit

Kyrie

Gloria

Collect

Draw near to your servants, O Lord,
and answer their prayers with unceasing kindness,
that, for those who glory in you as their Creator and guide,
you may restore what you have created
and keep safe what you have restored.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
God, for ever and ever. Amen.

First Reading Ex. 16:2-4,12-15

The whole congregation of the Israelites complained against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. 3 The Israelites said to them, “If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.” 4 Then the Lord said to Moses, “I am going to rain bread from heaven for you, and each day the people shall go out and gather enough for that day. In that way I will test them, whether they will follow my instruction or not. 12 “I have heard the complaining of the Israelites; say to them, ‘At twilight you shall eat meat, and in the morning you shall have your fill of bread; then you shall know that I am the Lord your God.’” 13 In the evening quails came up and covered the camp; and in the morning there was a layer of dew around the camp. 14 When the layer of dew lifted, there on the surface of the wilderness was a fine flaky substance, as fine as frost on the ground. 15 When the Israelites saw it, they said to one another, “What is it?” For they did not know what it was. Moses said to them, “It is the bread that the Lord has given you to eat.” 31 The house of Israel called it manna.

Responsorial Psalm Ps 78:3-4,23-24,25,54

Second Reading Eph 4:17,20-24

Now this I affirm and insist on in the Lord: you must no longer live as the Gentiles live, in the futility of their minds. 20 That is not the way you learned Christ! 21 For surely you have heard about him and were taught in him, as truth is in Jesus. 22 You were taught to put away your former way of life, your old self, corrupt and deluded by its lusts, 23 and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, 24 and to clothe yourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.

Alleluia Mt 4:4b

Gospel Jn 6:24-35

When the crowd saw that neither Jesus nor his disciples were at the place where Jesus had given the bread, they themselves got into the boats and went to Capernaum looking for Jesus. 25 When they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him, “Rabbi, when did you come here?” 26 Jesus answered them, “Very truly, I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. 27 Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For it is on him that God the Father has set his seal.” 28 Then they said to Jesus, “What must we do to perform the works of God?” 29 Jesus answered them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” 30 So they said to him, “What sign are you going to give us then, so that we may see it and believe you? What work are you performing? 31 Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness: as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’” 32 Then Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. 33 For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” They said to him, “Sir, give us this bread always.” 35 Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

Catena Nova

Our Lord refers to himself as the true bread not because the manna was something illusory, but because it was only a type and a shadow, and not the reality it signified. This bread, being the Son of the living Father, is life by its very nature, and accordingly gives life to all. Just as earthly bread sustains the frail substance of the flesh and prevents it from falling into decay, so Christ quickens the soul through the power of the Spirit, and also preserves even the body for immortality. Through Christ resurrection from the dead and bodily immortality have been gratuitously bestowed upon the human race (Theophylact).

Christ, who came down from heaven for all people and to the level of each one, attracts everything to Himself through His inexpressible goodness; He does not reject anybody and He receives all who wish to repent. He gives all those who receive Him, the most delicious taste. He is the only one who can fulfill all our desires… and, He adapts Himself in different ways, to one and the other, according to the tendencies, the desires and the appetites of each one… Everyone finds in Him a different taste…. This bread has a sweet taste because it delivers one from all worries, it heals sicknesses, it eases trials, it assists one’s efforts and strengthens one’s hopes…Those who have tasted it hunger for it, those who hunger, will be satisfied (Baldwin of Canterbury).

Pierce, O most sweet Lord Jesus, my inmost soul with the most joyous and healthful wound of Your love, and with true, calm and most holy apostolic charity, that my soul may ever languish and melt with entire love and longing for You, may yearn for You and for Your courts, may long to be dissolved and to be with You. Grant that my soul may hunger after You, the Bread of Angels, the refreshment of holy souls, our daily and supersubstantial bread, having all sweetness and savour and every delightful taste. May my heart ever hunger after and feed upon You, Whom the angels desire to look upon, and may my inmost soul be filled with the sweetness of Your savour; may it ever thirst for You, the fountain of life, the fountain of widsom and knowledge, the fountain of eternal light, the torrent of pleasure, the fulness of the house of God; may it ever compass You, seek You, find You, run to You, come up to You, meditate on You, speak of You and do all for the praise and glory of Your name, with humility and discretion, with love and delight, with ease and affection, with perseverance to the end and be You alone ever my hope, my entire confidence, my riches, my delight, my pleasure, my joy, my rest and tranquility, my peace, my sweetness, my food, my refreshment, my refuge, my help, my wisdom, my portion, my possession, my treasure; in Whom may my mind and my heart be ever fixed and firm and rooted immovably. Amen (St. Bonaventure).

It is Your will that we proclaim Your Death in the eating of the Bread of Life. What more could You give to us, who deserve to die through the eating of the forbidden fruit, than life through the eating of the Bread? O Food of Life, nailed to the Cross, who can grasp the bountiful gift which You offer – the gift of Your very self as food? Here is generosity beyond all measure, when the Giver and Gift, are one and the same. O Food, which truly nourishes and satisfies, not our flesh but our soul, not our body but our spirit. O Memorial, worthy to be cherished in our inmost soul, to be deeply engraved on our mind and, lovingly preserved in the tabernacle of our heart. Its remembrance is a joy forever and a cause for tears that well up from a heart filled with overpowering joy. Amen (Nicholas of Cusa).

This is no bit of magic on Jesus’ part – to accomplish it He looks toward heaven, toward His Father, with both petition and thanksgiving (eucharistia): “Father, I thank you for hearing me.” (Jn 11:42) His lavish giving away of Himself in the loaves, will be a sign of the way the Father’s love utterly lavishes His Son on the world. Then He blesses the bread, for the Father has left everything to the Son, including the bestowal of heaven’s blessing. He breaks it, which points both to His own brokenness in the Passion and to the way His gifts will be limitlessly multiplied by the work of the Holy Spirit in every Eucharistic celebration. Thus, through this visible image, we realise that truine Love itself, becomes present in the Eucharistic self-giving of Jesus. (Hans Urs von Balthasar)

The process of Jesus attempting to lead his hearers beyond scandal is shown in John 6. There Jesus attempts to bring his hearers on from their understanding of his miraculous feeding of the five thousand, an understanding rooted in food and a kingly messiah, towards his own subversion of the Passover and the Manna in the desert as pointing to himself as the authentic bread from heaven. During the discourse, the eager listening of his audience is gradually turned into furious questioning, linked by allusion with the murmuring of Israel against Moses on its way to the Promised Land. Finally even many of his disciples find it hard to take, and Jesus asks them if this scandalizes them (Jn 6:61). The scandal is what prevents people perceiving the unity of Jesus and the Father (v 62), and for John the flesh is precisely the human condition locked in scandal, while the spirit is what leads people beyond scandal into a belief in Jesus as revealing the Father, and the Father as he who sent Jesus into the world (vv 63-65). Many of the disciples are caused to stumble, but Peter and the other eleven stay, having perceived that Jesus has words of eternal life: that is, they have overcome the scandal, at least to some extent (James Alison).

All those people discovered that hunger for bread has other names too: hunger for God, hunger for fraternity, hunger for encounter and a shared feast. We have become accustomed to eating the stale bread of disinformation and ending up as prisoners of dishonour, labels and ignominy. We thought that conformism would satisfy our thirst, yet we ended up drinking only indifference and insensitivity. We fed ourselves on dreams of splendour and grandeur, and ended up consuming distraction, insularity and solitude. We gorged ourselves on networking, and lost the taste of fraternity. We looked for quick and safe results, only to find ourselves overwhelmed by impatience and anxiety. Prisoners of a virtual reality, we lost the taste and flavour of the truly real. Let us not be afraid to say it clearly: Lord, we are hungry. We are hungry, Lord, for the bread of your word, which can open up our insularity and our solitude. We are hungry, Lord, for an experience of fraternity in which indifference, dishonour and ignominy will not fill our tables or take pride of place in our homes. We are hungry, Lord, for encounters where your word can raise hope, awaken tenderness and sensitize the heart by opening paths of transformation and conversion. We are hungry, Lord, to experience, like that crowd, the multiplication of your mercy, which can break down our stereotypes and communicate the Father’s compassion for each person, especially those for whom no one cares: the forgotten or despised. Let us not be afraid to say it clearly: we are hungry for bread, Lord: the bread of your word, the bread of fraternity (Pope Francis).

Homily

Much like the Hebrews in the desert who grumbled against Moses and Aaron over their lack of food, so Catholics have grown accustomed to much quarreling over the true bread from heaven (G) they eat in the Eucharist. The best reason for the wrangling is what's at stake, namely, the "source and summit" of the church's life in the Second Vatican Council's memorable phrase. The worst reason is a hidebound resistance to the same Council's reform of the liturgy.

Perhaps both sides of the divide should acknowledge that their hunger might just be fed by something unexpected like the manna and quails did for the ancient Hebrews in their own desert. It might also be a good idea to listen once again to the pioneers of the liturgical movement – those who like Moses took note of the grumbling of many people about the limitations of the former liturgy and sought to answer the hunger of many people for a more palatable liturgy. Such voices – many no longer known or appreciated for their seminal work – like Prosper Guéranger, Ildefonso Schuster, Odo Casel, Gregfory Dix, Pius Parsch, Aemiliana Löhr and Virgil Michel deserve a new hearing from both camps. I find them often to have a far better and more profound grasp of the deeper issues surrounding the liturgy than many of the discordant voices today who seem mostly interested in “technique.” Nor were they afraid to express gentle and respectful critiques of the former rite along with hopes for reform they could not even imagine at the time but which have now become commonplace — one of which concerns the place of Scripture in the Mass.

It's hard to believe, but prior to the reform the same readings were heard on the same Sunday year after year (in Latin and then often read in the vernacular before the sermon). There were, moreover, only two readings, the first typically from Paul's epistles and then the gospel. So when the Council asked that, "In sacred celebrations there is to be more reading from holy scripture, and it is to be more varied and suitable" (Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy 35) the Roman Lectionary came into being with its 3-year cycle of 3 Sunday readings emerged, later to be adapted by many other Christian denominations as the Common Lectionary.

With respect to the Liturgy of the Word, however, the sheer abundance and variety of Scripture comes with a potential problem — exacerbated by poor reading and poor homilies — and that is the issue of listening. So allow me to resurrect another one of those voices I mentioned from the heady days of the liturgical movement prior to the Council, that of Romano Guardini, taken from his Meditations before Mass which I have been reading in recent months (https://www.ecatholic2000.com/guardini/mass.shtml). They have to do with something we should all take more seriously, namely the role of silence. He writes,

We cannot take stillness too seriously…. If someone were to ask me what the liturgical life begins with, I should answer: with learning stillness. Without it, everything remains superficial, vain. Our understanding of stillness is nothing strange or aesthetic. Were we to approach stillness on the level of aesthetics of mere withdrawal into the ego we should spoil everything. What we are striving for is something very grave, very important, and unfortunately sorely neglected; the prerequisite of the liturgical holy act.

To a large extent the Liturgy consists of words which we address to and receive from God. They must not degenerate into mere talk, which is the fate of all words, even the profoundest and holiest, when they are spoken improperly. In the words of the Liturgy, the truth of God and of redeemed man is meant to blaze…. They must be broad and calm and full of inner knowledge, which they are only when they spring from silence. The importance of silence for the sacred celebration cannot be overstressed - silence which prepares for it as well as that silence which establishes itself again and again during the ceremony. Silence opens the inner fount from which the word rises.

The word of God is meant to be heard, and hearing requires silence….To have ears to hear requires grace, for God's word can be heard only by those whose ears God has opened…. All this is possible only when we are inwardly still. In stillness alone can we really hear. When we come in from the outside our ears are filled with the racket of the city, the words of those who have accompanied us, the laboring and quarrelling of our own thoughts, the disquiet of our hearts' wishes and worries, hurts and joys. How are we possibly to hear what God is saying?

Now these words are, in a way, ironic since the Mass Guardini knew was almost entirely silent from the sermon on. He would perhaps be chagrined to learn the pendulum has now swung almost entirely in the opposite direction. Or has it? The General Instruction of the Roman Missal, by my count, encourages moments of silence at 9 points in the liturgy noting in particular:

45. Sacred silence also, as part of the celebration, is to be observed at the designated times. Its purpose, however, depends on the time it occurs in each part of the celebration. Thus within the Act of Penitence and again after the invitation to pray, all recollect themselves; but at the conclusion of a reading or the homily, all meditate briefly on what they have heard; then after Communion, they praise and pray to God in their hearts.

Even before the celebration itself, it is commendable that silence to be observed in the church, in the sacristy, in the vesting room, and in adjacent areas, so that all may dispose themselves to carry out the sacred action in a devout and fitting manner.

56. The Liturgy of the Word is to be celebrated in such a way as to promote meditation, and so any sort of haste that hinders recollection must clearly be avoided. During the Liturgy of the Word, it is also appropriate to include brief periods of silence, accommodated to the gathered assembly, in which, at the prompting of the Holy Spirit, the word of God may be grasped by the heart and a response through prayer may be prepared. It may be appropriate to observe such periods of silence, for example, before the Liturgy of the Word itself begins, after the first and second reading, and lastly at the conclusion of the homily.

And so, like most things liturgical, if we did as instructed, I think a lot of our grumbling would be silenced, so to speak.

Intercessions (Joe Milner; The Sunday Website)

For the Church: that in Christ, we may find the fulfillment of the deepest hungers of our hearts and nourishment for our life’s journey.

For a deepening of trust in God’s providence: that we may live in the present and be freed from the compulsions to hoard or stockpile.

For all who are experiencing the wilderness in their life’s journey: that they may encounter Christ in their loneliness, a new vision in times of confusion, and renewed energy when the path ahead seems endless.

For freedom from grumbling and complaining: that we may be transformed by Christ and come to a new understanding of the people and the situations that lead us to negativity.

For business and government leaders who have responsibility for food: that they will strive with new effort to alleviate the hunger and needs of the poor, refugees, and the victims of war.

For all who are participating in the summer Olympics: that God will protect them from harm and help them to use their gift fully for God’s glory.

For better stewardship of earth's resources: that government and business leaders will recognize the impact of their practices upon the environment and work to promote good stewardship of the air, land, and water.

For the gift of peace: that God will end the violence in our cities and bring forth peace so that all can live in safety and use their talents for the good of one another.

Lord, giver of lasting life, satisfy our hunger through Christ, the bread of life, and quench our thirst with your gift of belief, that we may no longer work for food that perishes, but believe in the One whom you have sent. We ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen (ICEL; 1998).

Offertory Chant

Offertory Hymn (Taize’)

Jesus Christ, bread of life, those who come to you will not hunger.

Jesus Christ, risen Lord, those who trust in you will not thirst.

Communion Antiphon

Closing Hymn (Bernadette Farrell)

Bread for the world:
a world of hunger.
Wine for all peoples:
people who thirst.
May we who eat
be bread for others.
May we who drink
pour out our love.

Lord Jesus Christ,
you are the bread of life,
broken to reach
and heal the wounds
of human pain.
Where we divide your people,
you are waiting there
on bended knee
to wash our feet with endless care.

Lord Jesus Christ,
you are the wine of peace,
poured into hearts once broken
and where dryness sleeps.
Where we are tired and weary,
you are waiting there
to be the way which beckons us
beyond despair.

Lord Jesus Christ,
you call us to your feast,
at which the rich and pow'rful
have become the least.
Where we survive on others
in our human greed,
you walk among us
begging for your ev'ry need.

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