Tenth Sunday after Trinity
“I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”
Overview
In our gospel this morning (John 6:35, 41-51) Jesus and the crowd cannot understand each other: they cannot see beyond Jesus’ earthly status (poor, illegitimate) to see the divine within him.
Jesus calls us to a new way of seeing which will transform the way we see the world, one another and ourselves.
In our first reading (I Kings 19:4-8) Elijah cannot see a way forward: physically, emotionally and spiritually exhausted he just wants to die. What restores him is a time in the wilderness: a place where we can admit defeat, where we acknowledge that we no longer know who we are or where we are going. This is a place where we have the chance of catching a glimpse of God because our usual ways of seeing lives have failed us. Here we are fed and rested but, most of all, we are given a new vision of how the world could be and who we could become. This is the place that lies between who we were and who we are becoming and finds new ways of seeing and being.
Readings
FIRST READING
I Kings 19:4-8
But he himself went a day’s journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a solitary broom tree. He asked that he might die: “It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my ancestors.” Then he lay down under the broom tree and fell asleep. Suddenly an angel touched him and said to him, “Get up and eat.” He looked, and there at his head was a cake baked on hot stones, and a jar of water. He ate and drank, and lay down again. The angel of the Lord came a second time, touched him, and said, “Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.” He got up, and ate and drank; then he went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights to Horeb the mount of God.
GOSPEL
John 6:35, 41-51
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.
Then the Jews began to complain about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” They were saying, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” Jesus answered them, “Do not complain among yourselves. No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me; and I will raise that person up on the last day. It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father. Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
