Ephesians 4:1-7 (NRSV Updated Edition)
I, therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace: there is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all. But each of us was given grace according to the measure of Christ’s gift.
John 6:24-35 (NRSV Updated Edition)
So when the crowd saw that neither Jesus nor his disciples were there, they themselves got into the boats and went to Capernaum looking for Jesus.
When they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him, “Rabbi, when did you come here?” 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. 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.” Then they said to him, “What must we do to perform the works of God?” Jesus answered them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” 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? Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’ ” 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. 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.”
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.
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"There are many ways we speak of needing more than bread, most often by noting our need for a meaningful life. After all, eating and sleeping doesn’t add up to very much no matter how good the food is. Given that, it is instructive that in the desert journey and in the aftermath of Jesus’ feeding the multitude in the wilderness, the people seem to be interested in more food than in a sense of meaning to life. In John, in spite of the abundance of the feeding in the wilderness, the crowd demands to have this bread always. If we remain stuck at this level, various distortions follow.
[...]
"In John, when Jesus says that he himself is the bread, he is clearly taking them to a meaning that would bring home the truth that humanity does not live by bread alone. If they really come to him, they will have enough: they will never hunger again. Or will they? Jesus says that they have to believe in him. Raymund Brown says that faith means giving their lives over to the way of Jesus. Will we do that? What is the life Jesus gives us like?
"In Ephesians, Paul says that the life Jesus gives us consists of humility, gentleness, patience, and bearing with each other in love. We are to be one Body in Christ, the same body that we consume in the Eucharist. [...] That is, in Christ’s Body we all have enough because we are always feeding one another at all levels of our being as we build each other up in love. Sounds like life to me."
- Andrew Marr, Abbot of St. Gregory’s Abbey (Three Rivers, MI), from blog post titled "Bread that is Enough" (https://andrewmarrosb.blog/2015/07/29/bread-that-is-enough/)
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"Jesus is starting to take the people into the realm of understanding the sign, which is what we're really into today. We saw the sign last week - the sign was multiplying all that bread and fish, feeding people in a perfectly straightforward material sense. But Jesus says that's not the real sign, that's only part of it. You're not really getting it if that's what you got from what I was doing. He says, “Don't work for that, work for something else instead.”
"So they then said to him, “What must we do to perform the works of God?” In other words, there's quite a genuine hunger and thirst, if you like, for knowledge here, they ask him decent questions: “What must we do to perform the works of God?” So they want the right answer. Jesus answered them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” And that's like the mega answer in today's Gospel. We'll see how it ties in further on. He's saying that there is a work in this. And the work is not so much to do anything, rather it is to have something done to you, to allow yourself to be stretched by God convincing you through the One he has sent. It's going to be this shape of allowing yourself to be stretched by the One whom God has sent, that's the shape of God's work in you which is what is going to be emphasized now throughout. Because that's going to be the thing that's really difficult to understand.
[...]
"Notice something which I think is very important that Jesus is doing: he's trying to get their head away from celestial thinking. He's trying to bring down the understanding of God to the person in front of them. Do you want to understand the things of God? Do you want to understand how it is that God opens you up to eternal life? It's going to be horizontally. It's because you learn to believe in the One who [God] has sent. And everything that that One does - the whole of his life, culminating in his death and the distributing of himself - is what is going to feed you and nourish you for eternal life.
"But this is not a handout from heaven. This is the gift of life which opens you up to heaven. And it's God opening you up at this horizontal level. And that's quite a tough thing to do because, in one sense, he is bringing out something that is heavenly, but he's bringing it down to earth. He's trying to get them off tripping on celestial handouts, and saying, “No, the work of God is to believe in the One whom [God] has sent.” This is to be able to look at this human being who is in front of you, who is in fact God's Son, who speaks God's truth, who is going to live out what God's love is like. And your work is to believe in him, to allow yourself to be opened up by this Other, this human Other, at the horizontal level, who is the enactment in our midst of what God's love for us looks like.
"If you like, it's the 'de-celetialising' of the gift and the turning it into something that's much more concrete, much more present, and much more symbolically rich. How to get us thinking of Jesus as bread, how to allow us to imagine that all of this is to nourish us, that it's to take us beyond celestial handouts, if you like, and to turn us into bearers, signs, of this eternal life which is being brought about by Jesus."
- James Alison, from "Homily for Sunday 18 in Ordinary Time 2021" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Na_cfs3XDZU)
[Source of link to Andrew Marr blog post, and for further discussion and reflections on all this week's lectionary texts: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-b/proper13b/]
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